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A few weeks ago I clipped on a safety helmet, climbed a series of ladders and eventually emerged on the roof of our parish church.

In front of me lay a gleaming array of solar panels, gorging on the sunlight.

Deploying the traditional Anglican fundraising strategy - grants, gifts and homemade cake sales - church members plan to just stop gas.

A heat pump and solar panels have shrunk the carbon footprint of the old building and some days it generates the energy equal to that used by 25 people.

It’s a miniature moment in a quiet revolution.

A report this week found that in the first six months of 2024 solar and wind overtook fossil fuels in generating electricity in the European Union.

While one analyst called this an ‘historic shift’, the story was not widely covered - it’s been a week of what seemed like a troubling new headline every day.

When I was a newspaper journalist August was the so-called slow news month, but today news is fast, rolling and 24/7.

And sometimes there’s too much of it to take in.

A C15th Christian mystic, Ignatius of Loyola, came up with a good way of processing a day - he suggested people explore their feelings of both desolation… and then of consolation.

That’s what the poet Wendell Berry does in his poem The Peace of Wild Things.

Berry says that when he feels desolate at world events … when he ‘wakes in the night at the least sound’ …

… he heads into nature for consolation, to find a heron on a lake under the stars.

For a time, he writes, ‘I rest in the grace of the world and am free.’

But there can also be consolation in the news itself, in an alternative news cycle which is so incremental and subtle that we may not observe it taking place.

I think of my mother who was one of 12 children and lost one brother to polio. Just 35 years ago this killer disease infected 350,000 people annually.

Last year there were only 524 recorded cases.

I look for consolation in the hidden cycle of slow news, which has a greater circumference than the cycle of fast news.

I look to the words of Martin Luther King, who had many reasons to feel desolate but still believed, as he put it, that, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long… and it bends towards justice.’

I look for consolation in the quiet, unreported lives of people diligently working on a better world. Even in the hidden solar panels on a church roof.

‘For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.’

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