Many prophets are telling us about the unsustainability of the way we live. Take, for instance, our insatiable appetite for wealth. The planet could sustain this for a while just as the human body can put up with a certain amount of pain and disability. But there comes a time when a person can endure no more and they lose consciousness and die. So too the planet is on a path to where it can sustain plunder no longer.
‘Cometh the hour …’ There does not seem to be any one man – or woman – who is going to save us from this peril. But what perhaps might be happening is that there is a global change in the way people think. The human family is moving forward in awareness of our interdependence. This week saw a disaster in a Bangladesh clothing factory where hundreds of people lost their lives when the building collapsed. Immediately the factory owners were blamed for putting profits before safety.
But the media also traced pressures back to the retailers in Europe who want cheap clothes. The BBC interviewed shoppers in Oxford St, London, and asked if they would be willing to pay more for their clothes so that safer factories could be built for the workers in a faraway Asian country. But Britain is in recession and money is short because bankers acted irresponsibly. … And so the chain of blame widens and the widows of Dacca mourn.
But awareness is growing. People draw from their churches and religions what is helpful and discard what is not. What they search for is an understanding of life, the world and society. Enlightenment, awakening, awareness and similar words describe a sense of growing consciousness that things do not have to be the way they are. We have the capacity to rise above our compulsions. We do not have to live the way we do. We are not like trains on a track, condemned forever to go the way that is laid down for us by others or ourselves. We can change our way of thinking.
Jesus proclaimed the need for this change at the outset of his public life. But he met fierce and violent opposition. In the final crisis he gathered his close friends together and gave them his farewell message. “Now has the Son of Man been glorified.” It was a strange thing for someone to say just before his execution but it carries the promise of victory. The Latin word used for glorified is clarificatus which gives us some idea what the word ‘glory’ might mean.
To be clear is to be awake, aware – in a word – enlightened. And this awareness is all about others; considering them, being awake to their desires which are much the same as mine. They too want respect, security and love. So that, rather than wealth, is our priority.
Post published in: Faith