It is Well

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.  

I was reminded this morning of this quote from Julian of Norwich, the 14^th century anchorite and mystic as I was reflecting on what to write in this edition.  Is progress inevitable?  Is the world actually getting better?  Or are is the world actually heading in the opposite direction?  I have heard arguments on both sides of that position by people who seem to know what they are talking about. 

Did Dame Julian get it wrong?  There seems to be many signs that the world is going to hell in the proverbial hand basket.  Populist governments are rising up and the king - Western Democracy - seems to have feet of clay.  It is hard to see how all shall be well and especially that all manner of things shall be well.

Writing this I am reminded of another quote by Martin Luther King, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”   It certainly seems to be a very long arc indeed these days with the far end well beyond the horizon.  However, there is hope and (hopefully) truth in that.  People (and I include myself in this much of the time) seem to have a very limited horizon in their view of what is happening in their lives and their worlds.  We are guilty of tunnel vision whether it is in our personal lives or our vision of the world which is filtered to a great extent through social media whatever the silos that we usually turn to; currently the extremes seem to be Fox News on one end and CNN on the other, 

Counter to the rise of populism in the United States and Russia and even closer to home in Ontario, we have the reality that the world has been vastly improved for many people.  Poverty has been greatly reduced world wide, likewise infant mortality and hunger.  Much of that has come through scientific breakthroughs.  Countering this is the denial of the science of global warming.  In all this we have to have faith; faith that God’s time is not our time.  We can only glimpse a very small part of the bigger picture on where that arc of history, moral or otherwise, will take us.  If we are fortunate we will get a true glimpse of what that arc is pointing to. 

For those of us who have a belief that God not only spoke the Word that brought about the beginning of this universe but is still at work in this world, we can have faith that it is love that was the creative force which is all that binds the atoms together and is moving to fulfill God’s will for God’s creation.

I began with a medieval mystic and will end with a modern mystic, Richard Rohr, “Love, the attraction of all things toward all things, is a universal language and underlying energy that keeps showing itself despite our best efforts to resist it.”  Our part in this is to move beyond the prison of our self centeredness and to reach out in ways that seem to be small and insignificant but will cooperate with the divine plan which we can only see through a glass darkly. 

Blessings on your journey