The wisdom of non-discrimination on a Sunday

Lately I've been thinking a lot about human beings and our left-or-right, black-and-white ways of thinking. We like to divide things into opposing categories rather than try to see everything as one part of a much greater whole. Unfortunately this is where so much of our world's suffering arises.

But if the human race is to survive the challenges it is facing on so many different fronts -- ecological, social, financial, intellectual, spiritual, political, etc., we need to look beyond our own prejudices and our tendency to exclude those whose outlooks and opinions are different than ours. When we have the wisdom of non-discrimination, according to Thay, we don't suffer. Whether we tend towards the right or the left, we need to remember that the suffering or happiness we feel or cause isn't ours alone. Both sides are affected, and both sides can help the other to heal.

With this in mind in the week ahead, let's practice inclusiveness rather than discrimination. Talk to a stranger and learn about his or her challenges. Look at opinions different than our own. Smile at someone who needs a smile of their own. Hold open a door. Offer a helping hand. Show genuine concern for someone different than us by trying to understand their point of view. There are so many ways to reach across the chasms that divide people.

It's just a matter of reaching.

Laudato Si Sunday Reflection #24... Practical relativism as a "dog's breakfast"

Consider yourself warned -- in this week's paragraphs of Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis and his encyclical writing team bring out a dog's breakfast (British slang meaning a confused mess or mixture) of issues that our world isn't handling particularly well due to the fact that many of us give priority to personal interest rather than the common good.

I'm focusing on paragraphs 120-123 of Laudato Si, which can be found by clicking here and scrolling down. Only four paragraphs today because a fifth would take us into a different topic which we'll cover next week.

As the seventh chorus of Laudato Si reminds us in paragraph 120, everything is interrelated and all of God's creation -- from the human embryo to his mother to the oilsands worker to the wildlife that lives near the tailings pond -- all are important and really, how can we assign them particular value, especially when we are not God and we can't see the Big Picture? But when human beings try to play God and make decisions about who should thrive and who should die; when practical relativism says, "it is inconvenient, therefore it must go"; when we devalue life in any form, we end up with a dog's breakfast "whereby different attitudes can feed on one another, leading to environmental degradation and social decay" (paragraph 122).

Let's backtrack a moment to practical relativism. Basically, it has to do with seeing everything in life in terms of how it serves my personal interest. It's interesting to me that practical relativism really took hold during the age of the 'me generation' which is comprised of people my age and older. We came of age in a time when there was peace and prosperity in the Western World, and many of us developed a sense that we had worked hard for our wealth and security, forgetting that there were others like us in poorer and more dangerous parts of the world who were working just as hard or even harder, but were unable to reach our standards of living because of many factors beyond their control (some of those factors created by our high standard of living). Some of us have lost sight of the fact that everything we have is blessing and gift from God, and now think that because we can afford it, we are entitled to a life of luxury and convenience and the world revolves around us and our desires.

But it doesn't, and it shouldn't. All God's creatures should be as fortunate as we are, and we shouldn't rest on our prosperity until they are.

In paragraph 123 we read that "The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects, imposing forced labour on them or enslaving them to pay their debts." And it leads to the dog's breakfast which we see in our newspapers almost daily (some of which is named by Pope Francis and friends in the continuation of paragraph 123):

abortion
sexual exploitation of children
abandonment of the elderly
human trafficking
organized crime
the drug trade
commerce in blood diamonds and endangered species
buying of organs of the poor for resale or experimentation
elimination of unwanted children
(and this list hardly begins to account for the hardships faced by other species... like loss of habitat, pollution of soil, water, and air, climate change, etc.)

And all of it, all of it, springs from our inability to really appreciate the value of life in its many forms. If I have a bone to pick with Pope Francis and friends, it is that is that they fail to acknowledge that we humans might need to employ some form of reliable birth control to limit our numbers for the sake of all earth's species, all God's creatures, but I completely agree when they note that

[relativism's] "use and throw away" logic generates so much waste, because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary. We should not think that political efforts of the force of law will be sufficient to prevent actions which affect the environment because, when the culture itself is corrupt and objective truth and universally valid principles are no longer upheld, then laws can only be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be avoided (paragraph 123).

After reading these paragraphs earlier in the week, I found myself moodling (musing and doodling) about our tendency to think that we know all the answers and our tendency to make judgements based on what works for us instead of what's best for everyone. Unfortunately, this extends into all corners of our lives. Example: the guy who tailgated me this morning -- I judged him for being a pushy driver and thought some nasty thoughts about what should happen to him, but for all I know, he was on his way to his mother's house because she was having a medical episode and needed his help.

We humans tend to pass judgment on many occurrences in our lives, but I suspect that God calls us to be open to possibilities that are far beyond us, and to trust God's wisdom more than our own egocentric applications of practical relativism. So this week's challenge is to be more aware of the internal critic that decides what is good and bad according to our own lived experience rather than God's commandments to love, and be open to seeing with God's eyes instead.

Then, perhaps, we can find God's merciful and loving ways to deal with the dog's breakfasts that plague our own lives, the lives of our brothers and sisters facing the kinds of human struggles in the list above, and the life of our beautiful Mother Earth.

*******

A prayer for our earth

All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe

and in the smallest of your creatures.

You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.

Pour out upon us the power of your love,

that we may protect life and beauty.

Fill us with peace, that we may live

as brothers and sisters, harming no one.

O God of the poor,

help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth,

so precious in your eyes.

Bring healing to our lives,

that we may protect the world and not prey on it,

that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.

Touch the hearts

of those who look only for gain

at the expense of the poor and the earth.

Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,

to be filled with awe and contemplation,

to recognize that we are profoundly united

with every creature

as we journey towards your infinite light.

We thank you for being with us each day.

Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle

for justice, love and peace.

+AMEN.

(A prayer for our earth and all quotations from Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home © Libreria Editrice Vaticana)

Next up: #25... Toward a work/life balance

Mr. Obama got it right

I have never posted two moodlings in one day -- until now. I can't help myself today because Barack Obama made an amazing and inspiring speech last night, one that is still resonating in the chambers of my soul.

I'm generally not one to pay heed to American politics because the rhetoric below the 49th parallel carries far too much anger and vitriol for me to stomach for more than a few minutes. But the shootings at the meeting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona and U.S. public reaction to it has caught my attention. As horrible as it is that something so terrible happened, I listened to President Obama's memorial speech with a sense of hope for our neighbours to the south.

Mr. Obama got so much right last night. He said many things, but this jumped out at me:

...what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other... As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility, rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame. Let's use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and to remind ourselves of how our hopes and dreams are bound together. 

He went on to speak about how tragedy shakes us out of our routines and forces us to look inward, to reflect on our past, present and future. He pointed out that times of loss are a good place to take stock of how we live our lives and nurture our relationships, and he offered what I'd call an excellent "examination of conscience" for such times:

Do we show enough kindness, generosity and compassion to those around us?
Are we doing right by our families, our communities?
Do we have our priorities in order?
In the short lives we have to live, do we recognize that the important things are not wealth, status, power or fame, but how well we have loved?
Do our actions align with our values?
Are we always striving to be better people, and to widen our circle of concern?

The above is a brief and woefully inadequate paraphrase of a very powerful 30-minute speech that can be seen at
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/01/12/us/1248069557385/obama-calls-for-civility-in-politics.html

It is too easy on almost any occasion to judge the attitudes and actions of others who are not like us, but as the President explained so well, that's not what's needed in our world. Judgment ostracizes and divides people, but compassion unites them. Judgement wouldn't do a thing for the two homeless guys who came in to warm up on a -33C (-27F) Edmonton morning, but offering them some warm mitts and sharing a few laughs built a connection between us. Mr. Obama's speech holds true in any difficult situation you care to name.

Thank you, Mr. President, for the reminder. I hope a lot of people are listening, because it's well worth hearing!

Christmas compassion all year round

This morning at work, I got a glimpse of the ugly side of humanity.

To make the long story short, one of my co-workers has had his mom here with him from Kenya for the past six months. She has been looking after her little grandson while both of his parents work. She was to return to Kenya at the beginning of this month, but became so sick that she was unable to fly home. Her travel insurance expired... and she was diagnosed with colon cancer. On Monday, The Edmonton Journal ran a story about the situation and mentioned some trust funds being established to pay for my friend's mom's surgery. Here's the link:

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Lapsed+health+policy+spells+trouble+family/4002382/story.html

The ugly side of humanity mentioned earlier arrived in the mail in the form of a letter to The Edmonton Journal, copied to our community leader, in which the sender railed against The Journal and our L'Arche community for bringing attention to a family in dire need. It was a letter full of rancor, sarcasm and vitriol. It's hard to understand why anyone would write such a thing. When I looked at it, all I could see was that the writer is something of a Scrooge who has yet to be converted by the Spirit of Christmas. He obviously doesn't know that people are happier when they live out of compassion rather than judgment and negativity.

Neither the community leader nor I could imagine that any response we made to the letter-writer would satisfy him. He's picking a fight with non-violent people. We shredded the letter. The plan now, more like a New Year's Resolution, is to pray conversion for the man who wrote it, to ask God to lead him to compassion and happiness, and to think compassionate thoughts and "do compassion" myself, all year round.

It's the gentlest way I can think of to counter the ugly side of humanity.