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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Rev Lucy Winkett

Good morning.

Today is the birthday of Louis Braille, who, in his father’s leather working shop, when he was three, became permanently blind in an accident. Born in 1809, he invented a language based on touch that enabled people who were visually impaired to read. Louis Braille himself died without knowing that his new language would have such an amazing effect, but after his death, it was adopted around the world, and enables visually impaired people the same access to books as sighted people. In 1918, it was the United Nations who highlighted this day, his birth day, as a day to commemorate and celebrate this achievement. For many, sighted or not, reading is a lifeline and a window onto other worlds. We read to know we are not alone, others’ thoughts and feelings become accessible to us, and different societies, different ways of living, unimagined aspirations and better futures become part of our own imagination and inner world.

The invention of Braille and its use today wasn’t just to help people with visual impairments communicate, it was an invitation to read, and by reading, enter into these other worlds that had been there for sighted people since the invention of the printing press. One detail that moves me about the story of Louis Braille. It was an accident with a sharp awl in his father’s saddle-making shop that blinded him. Later, he used that same sharp instrument to make holes and dots in paper, liberating others by the same tool that had harmed him.

O God who is the eternal Word, we thank you for the gift of words we can read, stories we can tell, books we can learn from. We thank you for the gift of imagination and for authors everywhere, that for all your people, words can become life giving and life long.

Amen.