“In Him or Her”

H,

We live in perilous times. There is a great deal of hopelessness in and around us. It is easy to go cold and close up to everything but your own ideas, your own well-being and your own interpretation of every event. It is always said that in times of great upheaval the group construct gives way to self-preservation. We simply stop looking out for each other. We think of self and then of the things and people that make up our concept of self: family, lovers, friends, tribe and so on. They say this is human. It is.

Yet, these times call for us to be more than human. We have never really bought the tale about the innate goodness of man with only his own heart as a reference point. We believe there is more to it than that, we believe in a God who stands at the center of the moral universe, urging us by mere presence to accept or reject the great premise of the light over dark. It is the feeling we cannot shake even in our agnosticism or atheism. The reference point is always to believe or not believe. Our moral outrage is in relation to this being that is either everything or nothing at all.

 We decided long ago that He or She (we have to go beyond gender to really get at this; there is no gender in God, like there is no race or tribe or anything that separates wholeness or being) is everything and there we lay our flopping tent and windy hopes. Our faith defines how we look at the world and how we access our own progress in it. We have felt like failures when we did not live up to it and like gods when we thought we did.

In this present climate, with the blood spilt across our nation on earth, it is easy to see why the heart falls flat. We do not have an answer. We do not understand. There is a terror that seems stronger than the false demi-god we have constructed called a government. Our idol is showing it cannot speak and will not address the darkest sides of all our natures.

It is easy to say: what good will prayer do? It is common to say: we have to put faith aside and forge a different path for our countrymen? And perhaps there is some real honesty there. Our ‘spiritual’ leaders are in their own corners waiting to answer the question of violence with the answer of more violence. They have lost the way and now talk to surrogate lives with passion but no wisdom and no real solution but anger and pride. Truth is now dramatic and the solution is now in division rather than the great bonds of brotherhood that should tie all of humanity together.

There is something in us that lets loose these dogs of war. Something human and frail and worthy to be put up on a cross to end and begin again. We are fractured, broken, prejudiced, angry and full of bloodlust. We might never get to spill any actually blood but the zero sum game we play in our daily living and dying shows how far we are from the real end of all darkness.

What is the solution? Where do we land when we are told not to pray but to act? We have spent our whole lives imagining a new way of seeing the world. We have spent our whole friendship sharing thoughts about being a force of good in our nation, on our own peculiar patch of earth, on our own streets, to our neighbor in front us and our neighbor across the seas and other false lines. Where did this come from? Him, of course.  Who taught us to hope above despair and to love in spite of rising water? Her, certainly.

In Her (or Him) we live and move and have our full being. We are the children of the light. We do not need less prayer but more. We do not need less love but more. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and the body makes war or peace or love. It always starts with our willingness to pray and listen and understand and then act. In Him.