Recently a reader wrote that she felt troubled hearing about contemplation when there are so many people facing crisis including kids who don’t have food…for whom school was their place of safety and where they received hot meals. I think of women stuck home with their abusers. I think of all the people facing eviction, unable to pay bills because our society never believed their lives to be valuable. I think about the farm workers….
She asked: “How do we incorporate this tension?”
She is right of course. A moment of apocalypse like we are living through brings plenty of tension with it. Contemplation needs to lead to action; yet action needs to flow from a deep place of love, goodness and Source.
A crisis like the pandemic becomes a watershed for all the “tensions” we as a society may have refused to face over the years and centuries. The “sins of our fathers” (and mothers) can pile up—and spill over.
Take slavery and genocide and racism as examples along with ecocide and our neglect and abuse of Mother Earth.
Observe how the rugged individualism mythos that characterizes so much of our value systems can easily take precedence over a sense of the common good. Continue reading “Meditations with Matthew Fox: The Tension between Inner and Outer Work”
Pas De Merde 