I recently saw the movie, Oppenheimer, and it frightened me. So I share this reflection with you and invite you to see the movie and give it some reflection as well.
Sometimes I realize just how intricately interwoven our lives are.
No stupidity or failure or cowardice can ever sever us from that living web of people with whom we live. For that is what we are because that is how God created us. We live always in community, you might say, and only from that interwoven life can we act, can we dare anything, and can we let every encounter be a homecoming to our true nature.
This is comforting to me because it assures me that we do not have to be particularly noble or saint-like in order to wake up to the power of our connection with other beings. In our time, that simple awakening is the gift the global and domestic crises hold for us. For all its horror and delusion, the threat of nuclear war, like the toxins that our factories spew into our world, is also the manifestation of an awesome spiritual truth — the truth about the hell we create for ourselves when we cease to learn how to love. Saints, mystics, and prophets throughout the ages saw that law; now all of us can see it and none can escape its consequences. So we are caught now in a narrow place where we realize that Lao-tzu, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and our own hearts were right all along — and we are as scared and frantic as a cornered rat — and just as dangerous. But if we let it, that narrow cul-de-sac can turn into a birth canal, pressing and pushing us through the darkness of pain, until we are delivered into…what? Love seems too weak a word. It is, as Paul said to the Romans, “the glory to be revealed in us” Romans 8:18. It stirs in me now.
For us to regard the threats of climate catastrophe, nuclear war, the dying seas, the redefining of human sexuality, the consequences of grotesque polarity of political views and opinions, or the poisoned air of any of the many monstrous injustices suggests that we never took seriously the injunction to love. Perhaps we all thought that the Buddha and Jesus were kidding or that their teachings were meant only for saints. But now comes the daunting revelation, that we are all called to be saints — not good necessarily, or pious, or devout — but saints in the sense of just caring for and loving one another. I wonder what terrors this knowledge must hold that we fight it so much and flee from it in such pain. Can our present capacity to threaten to extinguish all life tell us this? Can it force us to face the terrors of love? Can it be the occasion of our birth? In that possibility we take heart. Even in confusion and fear, with all our weariness and petty faults, we can let that awareness work in and through our lives. It cannot be a cause of wonder that shortly before His death on a Cross, Jesus gave us a brand new command, one that summarizes every other of His commands: “34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” John 13:34.
Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.
From the Bible:
“Let all that you do be done in love” 1 Corinthians 16:14.
“Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins”
1 Peter 4:8.
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” John 13:34-35.
“Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses” Proverbs 10:12.
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