Isn’t it so often the case that great tragedies awaken all that is wondrous and beautiful about human beings?
Watching the record size crowds gather in Paris to honor the cartoonists and others who died on behalf of freedom of the press and all that it represents to a living, conscious democracy, I knew I was watching a day that history would long remember. Such days are made from events that are out of proportion, disruptive to our ordinary lives. The events that unfold on days that make history negotiate what comes next for humanity. The ordinary collides with the extraordinary.
Such a collision can be one of enormous tragedy, like a massacre of innocent people. Immediately we each sense deep in our intuitive DNA that yet again, another peel of the onion of our former world, the pre-terrorist world, has been taken away. And we know that soon there will be nothing left to hold on to of the world we knew before terrorism became an epidemic. We don’t want to utter this truth because we don’t want to it be the truth – but it is. Yet history is on the side of life.
A dark tragedy awakens the resilience of the human soul and inspires it to rise up and become its most defiant self. Boredom, complacency, too much of too much is what puts the soul to sleep. The human soul deplores too much of too much. It does not want to have it all and more of all that. The soul is a response vessel, a long distance instrument of sight, a delicate sensing device. Let the soul witness injustice, cruelty, or be threatened with bondage and you will feel its power rise up in you like a fire capable of melting your brain with fury. You will shake with the need to respond to the suffering of another human being. You will feel that need vibrating down your skin and pulsating into your heart.
These sensations can not be reduced to emotional reactions to tragic events; hardly. They indicate your soul is listening, receiving, and responding to your “inner net”, your inner spiritual wiring and to the collective soul that binds each of us to one another. We can intuitively feel each other call when we know that an historic moment has just occurred. It is a cosmic-sized feeling. We are all needed to participate in creating the consequences of this moment, as we will all live those consequences.
I offer this prayer in reflection of this moment: Take me deeply into the quiet grace of this moment. Let me breathe into my connection with humanity and all life. I cannot imagine that connection. I cannot feel it. I cannot see it. But all life is one and I pray for the grace of healing and love the melt through all that creates the desire to destroy life. And I remind myself that with God, all things are possible.
Amen
