The Long View

The Mystery within...

My hopefulness for America’s future needed some bolstering so I was happy to come across some Teilhard de Chardin quotes.  He’s the French born priest (1881 – 1955) who was active in the fields of paleontology, philosophy, theology, cosmology, and evolutionary theory and interested in the synthesis of theology and science.  He is a master of the need for the long view.      

Teilhard wrote the following in October 1945, “It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world:  as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty.”

So I ask, will the destructiveness of America’s self interest now be highlighted to shine a light on the creativity needed for a future that embraces the health and well being of all others and our planet? I can only hope it will be.

There are other cultures that do a better job of providing for the health and well being of its citizens and our common home.  Some countries have enviable health care, family care, and better education, and not surprisingly a correlation to drastically lower incarceration rates than America.  The following quote from Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD’s book “The Body Keeps the Score” should give us all pause:  “Could this approach to public health have something to do with the fact that the incarceration rate in Norway is 71/100,000 in the Netherlands 81/100,000 and the US 781/100,000, while the crime rate in those countries is much lower than in ours, and the cost of medical care about half?  …The United States spends $84 billion per year to incarcerate people at approximately $44,000 per prisoner; the northern European countries a fraction of that amount.  Instead, they invest in helping parents to raise their children in safe and predictable surroundings.  Their academic test scores and crime rates seem to reflect the success of those investments.”  For me it begs the question:  Is the height of America’s stock market the only measure of success for some and our legislators?  I hope not.

More Teilhard: 

“The whole life lies in the verb seeing.”

“We are one, after all you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.”

“The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.”

“What if we really saw how we recreate one another through love, more often?”