I never thought I might write that title.
However, here we are. And there is the highest threat level of nuclear war in the past 60 years. Or so I hear. I have no way of qualifying that statement.
This is rather shocking and depressing to me. I feel a sense of worry and even fear, yet even that is tempered by the fact that I can do nothing about it. The thought of nuclear war is not numbing to me, rather it is more of a helplessness. Perhaps you feel it as well.
However, all this goes to say that I know of some teachings that help us.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
Love your enemies and bless those that persecute you.
I believe that faith is uniquely designed to help us to wake up to the reality of everything around us already being spiritual. To wake up and recognize the objective, ontological, metaphysical wonder and glory of what it means to be human by sheer fact of being born.
We need faith because it helps us to wake up to all of these realities.
Otherwise we will fall into doing friendship, business, science, politics and conflict in a way that is abusive, toxic, and oppressive.
And so, with the current global political climate, I come back to faith. Not necessarily as a form of comfort (although it is that as well), but as a form of hope that this current climate can still be course corrected if the religious leaders can point toward compassion, empathy and the loving of one’s neighbor. Perhaps some of us find those qualities to be trite, but when they are lost on the local level, they are then easily forgotten on the global level.
Lord, have mercy.
