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Good morning. Cambridge Dictionary has announced this week that their word of the year is ‘Manifest’. Although this is an old word used by Chaucer and Shakespeare meaning clear or obvious, this year it has developed a new meaning, ‘to dream or will something into existence’. It has been popularised by the singer Dua Lipa and the gymnast Simone Biles who believe it has helped their careers by giving them something to aim at and the will to achieve it. This has encouraged others and it was searched for 130,000 times on the Cambridge Dictionary website.

This raises interesting questions about the difference between magic and positive thinking and where religion might fit into all this. Magic operates on the assumption that if you just say the right words something will come about. Most of us no longer believe in this. But many people do believe in the power of positive thinking to use the title of a famous book by Norman Vincent Peale. The new meaning of manifest, to dream or will something into existence, clearly has something in common with that. Certainly positive thinking is better than a lot of negative thoughts. Yet sometimes it is important we should actually face those negative thoughts rather than always putting on a brave face.

Then there is another aspect of manifest present when the American President Andrew Jackson talked about ‘manifest destiny’ to suggest it was ordained that American settlers should spread westward. This suggests that the future is shaped not just by our will power but that there is a deeper purpose which we can help or hinder. As Hamlet put it, ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will’. That’s certainly the Biblical view as reflected in the Church’s readings at this time of year. The fall of the great empires of those centuries, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman were understood as a prelude to the great coming of a Divine Kingdom of Justice. That’s all rather heady stuff, but we all reflect from time to time about the shape and pattern of our own lives. What if I had done this job instead of that? What if I had made a different decision at that turning point? Yet we are who we are, formed and shaped by innumerable factors of which we will never be fully aware. From a religious point of view the dream is not something we have to will into existence but a disclosure we have to try to discern and be responsive to. There is a mystery here, not in the sense of a puzzle to be solved, but a depth to be explored within ourselves.