Recreating One Another

The Mystery within...

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

On Being columnist, Courtney Martin, poignantly shared her angst over president elect Donald Trump in her column titled “Where I’mTurning to be Comforted and Challenged.”  I empathized with her frank admission of fear and feelings of inadequacy in how to be and respond to this looming presidency.  Courtney’s need for solace was important for me to read as my fear for our country escalates.  Mr. Trump has now announced as long as Wisconsin’s senator and Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, agrees with everything he says and does, Ryan is okay, but if he doesn’t, then he is not okay.

I looked back at some of my past blogs that addressed fear and excerpted the following:

Philip Chard:  “…existential disorientation calls for visiting one’s existential home, which is the natural world.” 

From God Never Hurries:  Instinctively, I was aching for naturalness.  Every season brought me new and deeper insights that helped me navigate through dark times and brought deep learning.

Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor:  “God does some of God’s best work with people who are seriously lost.”

Gavin De Becker wrote in his book the “Gift of Fear”:  “Nature’s greatest accomplishment, the human brain, is never more efficient or invested than when its host is at risk.  Then intuition is catapulted to another level entirely, a height at which it can accurately be called graceful, even miraculous.” 

De Becker also states real fear is not paralyzing but rather energizing and refers to it as coiled up energy.  Perhaps courage is another word for that energy.

From God Never Hurries:  Forgiveness is most needed where things are least safe; and you need to be in a safe place to work on forgiveness.  

Forgiveness results in emotional control.  It transforms who we are.  Freedom and a more real life view are its fruits.  Forgiveness is giving up resentment and coming to view perpetrators with compassion.

...old fear surfaced.  And now I clearly see I still have shadow work to do with forgiveness.

The opportunities to recreate one another appear endless.

What if we each saw our suffering as a way to recreate and be recreated more often?

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?”