On the 28th August 1963 Martin Luther King delivered a famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. ‘I have a dream today. I have a dream that one-day every valley shall be exalted; every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. 1933 years earlier a carpenter from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth was outlining his dream. The dream of Jesus was that life on earth would be a reflection of life in Heaven. When we look at our world today we might be forgiven for thinking that it is backwards that we are travelling. Corruption at the highest levels, selfishness, greed, violence, divided families, fear, homelessness, etc, dominates the mass media. St. Paul speaks about those people who turn others into Gods. Yet we sometimes turn material things into a God. How many people in the world today give very little thought to God? The number of people going to mass continues to dwindle. We cannot change the world, but we can do something about the little patch of land that we live in. In 1910 a young explorer was travelling to French Alps, a wasteland, a barren stretch of land desolate and abandoned. In the distance he saw what looked like the stomp of a tree. On approaching, he saw the stooped figure of a little old man with a sack of acorns on his back and in his hand an iron staff. With the staff he made a hole, dropped in an acorn and filled the hole. He was planting oak trees. He told the Explorer that he had planted one hundred thousand in the past three years. ‘If I get one in ten, I’ll be happy’ he said, adding that his wife and only son had died and that as long as the Lord spared him he would carry on planting trees to bring back life to a land that was dying. Fifty years later the Explorer returned to a sight wondrous to behold. The acorns of 1910 have become an oak forest. There were beech trees along the slopes, as far as the eyes could see. Birds were singing in the trees, wild life frolicked in the shade, and streams flowed with water in groves that had been bone dry. At the entrance to the forest was a linden tree, the symbol of rebirth. As he gazed in wonder he thought of the old unlettered peasant who had worked alone in utter solitude to turn a desert into the land of Canaan and had completed a task worthy of God. How wonderful it would be if we could so live our lives that through us the light of Christ should shine out in the family, out from the family into the street, into the neighbourhood, out into the world.