When the common good is the focus, preaching is not about imposing guilt and shame on individuals, but about giving vision and encouragement to society.
—Richard Rohr
Eight eighty-year-old friends gather around a table. Each from a unique background. That background, like a teabag, has not been steeped in freshly heated waters, but in the waters of the culture in which they grew up. That culture has long embraced success, privilege, money, power, greed, violence, and unfortunately…war.
Steeped like tea bags in the paradigms of the world into which they were born, their attitudes cross the boundaries of political alignment— some are "progressive“ some MAGAs. They all assert that there has always been war and there will always be war, despite their self-representation as of the “Judeo-Christian” persuasion.
In my 8 decades I have seen events previously thought impossible or improbable that proved to be quite achievable.
Among them are the advent of life saving vaccines; the transplanting of hearts and other organs; the cloning of creatures. Most of us in the West have incorporated artificial elements into our body— things like lenses, hearing aids, heart valves, stents, pacemakers, metal composite joints, medicine pumps, and more.
In other technology areas, humans travelled to Earth’s moon and successfully returned; submarines need not come up for air; artificial intelligence talks to us and answers our questions; we now have electric self-driving cars; smart phones allow us more computing power than the onboard computers carried in the moon probes; and we can audio/visually communicate in real time across the planet; science has lifted the veil and peered into the inner world of atomic particles.
Today we enjoy early warning of harmful natural phenomena such as storms, earthquakes, tidal waves and can take action to enhance our chances of surviving them. We can even predict that our bad habits are making the globe warmer and Mother Earth may not support life if the trend continues.
All that it took for all these innovations to become part of our environment was imagination, vision, and a desire to conceive a better tomorrow.
Steep your tea bag in the fresh, clear waters of possibility.
Conceive and joyfully embrace a war-free planet. We can do this!
My goal is to attempt to be of maximum service to a god of my understanding and to other people.
'Tout est possible.' Everything is possible. Thank you for sharing!