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- June 16
June 16
George Berkeley, Guru Arjan Dev, and Jo Cox
David Barnhart
June 16, 2025
Eggplant flowers, 2025. Own photo.
Today is the feast day, in the Episcopal Church, of George Berkeley, an Anglo-Irish theologian and philosopher, who lived from 1685-1753. His ideas on subjects like sense-perception and relative space and time prefigured those of 20th century physicists. The city and University in California are named after him.
In Sikhism, today also marks the remembrance of the martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev in 1606. He was the first Sikh leader to compile the works of previous Gurus into the holy scripture, the Adi Granth, also called the Guru Granth Sahib.
Today also marks the day, in 2016, when British MP and political activist Jo Cox was assassinated by a right-wing white supremacist. She had worked for Oxfam, traveled to places in the world that had been through intractable war, and been an outspoken advocate of maternal and child health, a vocal critic of Israeli policy toward Gaza, and an advocate of global intervention in the war in Syria.
Reflection:
George Berkely wrote:
“God is the ultimate reality; everything else is just an illusion.”
And according to the Guru Granth Sahib:
“The body is dust; the wind speaks through it. Understand, O wise one, who has died. Awareness, conflict and ego have died, but the One who sees does not die.”
Jo Cox, speaking about her native Yorkshire, said,
“Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”
I am not sure how Jo Cox, a secular humanist, would feel about being included in my list of saints, but I am choosing people who inspire me regardless of their religious background. As I have said before, I have far more in common with a Buddhist, Jew, Muslim, or atheist who are seeking peace and justice than I do with a Christian who is not seeking those things. Jo Cox was seeking peace and justice, and was murdered for her witness. Like other secular saints, her legacy and work continue.
Moreover, her activism was a threat to those who desire to see the world dominated by their race and religion. If we hear the gospel correctly, the thing that is destabilizing to oppressive systems is the yoking of the love of God with the love of our neighbor, and the insistence that you cannot genuinely do the first without the second. On the other hand, I see plenty of evidence from non-religious people that they can, in fact, love their neighbor without having any particular commitments to God.
To me, the words of Jesus, John, and James imply this: secular humanists who love their neighbor are 50% closer to Jesus than many Christians who do not love their neighbor—and therefore don’t love God, either.
Prayer: God, the human world has not yet realized the joy of loving either you or our neighbors as ourselves. Help us to claim that joy as our birthright. Everything else is an illusion. Amen.