“TO strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”. Until recently, I had always misunderstood the final line of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses.
Ulysses, the mythical King of Ithaca, is of course affirming in the hearts of his soldiers that they are bound by “one equal temper” of resilience – unyielding to an enemy across the seas and as yet unknown – but I had understood it to mean that after the conquest, there would be nothing to gain.
I have attended many British church services where the congregation has been asked to pray for Uyghurs in China, Sikhs in India, Muslims in Burma and yet the most persecuted of them all – our Christian brothers and sisters – frequently go unmentioned, I think on the presumption that because we are in church, they are already well accounted for.