"You've given us everything except tomorrow!"
The Beats were not the first and the Hippies were not the second, but certainly it is increasingly common for young people (being young is not confined to age), to experience the uncomfortable, and too often tragic, sense of the proclamation "You've given us everything except tomorrow!"
For whatever reason, probably associated with the coronavirus and a worldwide collapsing of the economy, I pulled an old book off the shelf entitled The Clowns of God by Morris West. "Everything except tomorrow" is on page forty-two, exclaimed by a young woman who has a lover but dreads the potential of social catastrophe to destroy her life and dreams, really only as it has begun... Isn't this the angry / sad declaration that a very many people (young and old alike) feel today? We have leaders incapable of leading. And we have many forms of global catastrophe lurking just over our shoulders...
While I have never been a prophet of doom, and more so not of gloom, I do have a great fear for my children and all the children whom I know: leaders incapable of leading is certainly our most pressing challenge! Between "leaders" who spin yarns of fabricated truths and imagined glories, to "leaders" whose primary interest is in the never-ending pursuit of privilege and profit, what is the citizen of any country to do? How do we cultivate possibilities in the midst of this utterly vapid mindlessness?
Not a few rush head-long into a fundamentalism of one sort or another and willingly surrender their thinking minds to a system of belief simply to get out of their heads and out of the head-lights of the vehicle of tomorrow crashing towards them: salvation becomes their only hope (and a most useful weapon to demonize any / every convenient other who presents a challenge to their now politicized sensibilities and cult)... Lonely crowds of others will dull their minds with drugs, fantasy, fringe-haters (like Neo-Nazis), or a willful and cultivated ignorance... and violence, racism, sexism, and hate become an international sport...
On the other hand, there are still others like those who gathered around the Buddha or the Mystic-Poet of Nazareth, Jesus... like the American Transcendentalists (Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau from among others)... like the Suffragette Movement, like the Revolution of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, the Hippies, the Green Movement, Vandana Shiva, feminist theologians, radical partnership thinkers, Findhorn, Creation Spirituality groups, the Catholic Worker Movement, and, of course, many more who have proven, and still prove, that resistance is not futile!
Needing to bring this blog page to a rapid close, I need to move into the point of it all: the fundamental way in which all social change occurs... When we were preparing to open our "Dorothy Day House of Peace" for homeless women, men, and family units, we identified our core human needs / desires as: Safety, Health, Happiness, and Being Wanted. So, as an exercise, get a piece of paper and draw a large circle; write these Four Core Needs as the four directions; then, identify for yourself those things that would / do / or potentially will satisfy your ability for accessing the Core Need...
Next, dedicate some time to reflecting about what you have written down. Likely as not, you will write down what, years and years ago, would have been identified as your tribe... or as intentional community... more recently, as the partnership model of human relations... As it was for the Poet of Nazareth (read the Beatitudes and recognize the connections they propose), so it could be in the tomorrow we have not been promised...
Finally, and most importantly, it is essential to remember the necessity of self-transformation through a mystic surrender in the spiritual insight of St. Hildegard: God hugs you from the inside-out... or that of Simone Weil, "We were created by Love, for Love, to become Love"... which is the mystical way of reminding us of the sacrament of our daily moments: it is precisely by loving that we may learn and become Love... We are meant to do more than to survive...
The Beats were not the first and the Hippies were not the second, but certainly it is increasingly common for young people (being young is not confined to age), to experience the uncomfortable, and too often tragic, sense of the proclamation "You've given us everything except tomorrow!"
For whatever reason, probably associated with the coronavirus and a worldwide collapsing of the economy, I pulled an old book off the shelf entitled The Clowns of God by Morris West. "Everything except tomorrow" is on page forty-two, exclaimed by a young woman who has a lover but dreads the potential of social catastrophe to destroy her life and dreams, really only as it has begun... Isn't this the angry / sad declaration that a very many people (young and old alike) feel today? We have leaders incapable of leading. And we have many forms of global catastrophe lurking just over our shoulders...
While I have never been a prophet of doom, and more so not of gloom, I do have a great fear for my children and all the children whom I know: leaders incapable of leading is certainly our most pressing challenge! Between "leaders" who spin yarns of fabricated truths and imagined glories, to "leaders" whose primary interest is in the never-ending pursuit of privilege and profit, what is the citizen of any country to do? How do we cultivate possibilities in the midst of this utterly vapid mindlessness?
Not a few rush head-long into a fundamentalism of one sort or another and willingly surrender their thinking minds to a system of belief simply to get out of their heads and out of the head-lights of the vehicle of tomorrow crashing towards them: salvation becomes their only hope (and a most useful weapon to demonize any / every convenient other who presents a challenge to their now politicized sensibilities and cult)... Lonely crowds of others will dull their minds with drugs, fantasy, fringe-haters (like Neo-Nazis), or a willful and cultivated ignorance... and violence, racism, sexism, and hate become an international sport...
On the other hand, there are still others like those who gathered around the Buddha or the Mystic-Poet of Nazareth, Jesus... like the American Transcendentalists (Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau from among others)... like the Suffragette Movement, like the Revolution of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, the Hippies, the Green Movement, Vandana Shiva, feminist theologians, radical partnership thinkers, Findhorn, Creation Spirituality groups, the Catholic Worker Movement, and, of course, many more who have proven, and still prove, that resistance is not futile!
Needing to bring this blog page to a rapid close, I need to move into the point of it all: the fundamental way in which all social change occurs... When we were preparing to open our "Dorothy Day House of Peace" for homeless women, men, and family units, we identified our core human needs / desires as: Safety, Health, Happiness, and Being Wanted. So, as an exercise, get a piece of paper and draw a large circle; write these Four Core Needs as the four directions; then, identify for yourself those things that would / do / or potentially will satisfy your ability for accessing the Core Need...
Next, dedicate some time to reflecting about what you have written down. Likely as not, you will write down what, years and years ago, would have been identified as your tribe... or as intentional community... more recently, as the partnership model of human relations... As it was for the Poet of Nazareth (read the Beatitudes and recognize the connections they propose), so it could be in the tomorrow we have not been promised...
Finally, and most importantly, it is essential to remember the necessity of self-transformation through a mystic surrender in the spiritual insight of St. Hildegard: God hugs you from the inside-out... or that of Simone Weil, "We were created by Love, for Love, to become Love"... which is the mystical way of reminding us of the sacrament of our daily moments: it is precisely by loving that we may learn and become Love... We are meant to do more than to survive...
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