As I write this reflection, it is July 4 and I just watched the tragic news concerning yet another mass shooting in a Chicago suburb. Yes, common sense gun laws must clearly be part of the solution, but if we stop there we are being dangerously naïve. Gun violence is nested within a larger reality of violence. Scan the internet, listen to our political discourse, pay attention to the entertainment industry: the collective consciousness of our culture is permeated with the contagion of brutality. It can feel as if we as a country are losing our collective soul and heading down a path of communal destruction.
We must be rational in our approach to solving the problem of violence, but we must also rediscover that God is the ground of everything rational, moral, and good. When our thinking and decision making is not rooted in a transcendental reality which is love, it becomes a tool in the hands of our baser instincts and the will-to-power. Valentin Tomberg tells us, “The apparatus of thinking becomes thereby a compliant tool for the instructions one gives it or which are given it from the outside. The depth of thought disappears.”
Indeed, we must find our way back to faith in God. I do not mean a left or right-wing God, but God as the highest imaginable good and the source of all that is true, beautiful, and noble. Faith is not a flight into fancy, a dry intellectual belief, or a set of edicts from on high. Faith is the imprint of God’s goodness upon our minds and hearts, a force that moves us in the direction of positive evolution and inspired thinking.
Just as the creation of the world was an act of love, we will only make creative headway in solving the problem of violence to the degree that we are motivated by love. Love requires us to stop despising and ignoring those who hold views differing from our own. I know I must sound naïve. However, I have this intuition that everything we do makes a difference one way or another. Call me a fool, but I believe every heartfelt prayer, every honest word spoken in love, and every act of loving kindness positively seeds the collective consciousness of humanity. I also know that there are saints and sages from the unseen realm that pray with us and work with us to bring about the marriage of heaven and earth. When we operate from our divine essence, from love, we are more powerful than we can possibly imagine.
Beloved One,
We ask your mercy
And guidance.
We ask that we remain
Rational, open, and loving,
So that we may work together
To ease the suffering
Of gun violence.
