{"id":276431,"date":"2024-10-07T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=276431"},"modified":"2024-10-05T05:59:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-05T04:59:28","slug":"the-fragments-of-the-world-seek-each-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/the-fragments-of-the-world-seek-each-other\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fragments of the World Seek Each Other"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>2 Oct 2024 <\/em>– \u201cDriven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, from his book The Phenomenon of Man<\/a><\/em>, may well be worth meditating on every day. The forces of . . . love? That is to say, the forces of connection, the need to be part of an evolving whole.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is my mission in life: to help free these words from the academic cage that contains them. My God, this isn\u2019t just \u201cphilosophy.\u201d These words are geopolitical \u2014 even though the core concept here . . . love . . . has been linguistically belittled the moment it steps beyond the personal. At best, it\u2019s an abstraction: \u201clove of country,\u201d i.e., patriotism. At worst, it\u2019s a cynical snort.<\/p>\n

How can anyone talk about love when the war in the Middle East \u2014 just one of oh so many across the planet going on right now, shattering lives, shattering communities, killing children \u2014 is about to widen?<\/p>\n

\u201cIsrael\u2019s rampage in Lebanon,\u201d writes Khury Petersen-Smith<\/a>, \u201chas killed more than a thousand people in two weeks, wounded thousands more (including many maimed for life), and displaced hundreds of thousands.\u201d<\/p>\n

And all this, of course, is in the wake of a year of Israel\u2019s genocidal war on Gaza, with the pathetic complicity of the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe. Attempted negotiations have gotten nowhere. As Benjamin Netanyahu continues to teach the world: Once you start killing, you can\u2019t stop \u2014 until you \u201cfinish the job.\u201d The only way to justify mass murder is with more of the same.<\/p>\n

And beyond these wars around the planet, we have the greatest global unifier of all, sometimes referred to, oh so respectfully, as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), but usually just called nuclear proliferation. As Norman Solomon<\/a> notes: \u201cIn 2023, the nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share.\u201d<\/p>\n

Should anger over some issue or other lead to a nuclear \u201cexchange,\u201d which then expands into total MAD, we\u2019ll wind up not just with incomprehensible death and wreckage from the bombs but: \u201cnuclear winter.\u201d And, Solomon writes, \u201cthe nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could call it, he notes: \u201cMore than 1,000 Holocausts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The situation is suicidally insane, but all it seems to amount to is a geopolitical shrug. We\u2019re still a planet carved into nations, and every nation has borders; every nation has \u201cinterests.\u201d And while reason prevails to a certain extent as world leaders deal with these interests, we remain overwhelmed with the belief that we have \u201cenemies.\u201d Enemies are different from us and they\u2019re out to get us. Be afraid. Be very afraid! And let that fear unite you ever more deeply into oneness with others who have the same enemy.<\/p>\n

And, as the United States has demonstrated oh so clearly over the last century, the greater you are as a nation, the more enemies you have. When I was young, our primary enemies were the communists, because of whom we had to go to war with North Korea, then with Vietnam \u2014 destroy the countries, kill a few million people, then quietly leave (having accomplished nothing related to our interests).<\/p>\n

When Communism collapsed, our enemies became the terrorists, and they\u2019re still our enemies despite 20 years of war against them in Afghanistan, despite our destruction of Iraq, despite our proxy war with them in the Middle East, despite . . . despite . . . whatever we do.<\/p>\n

As horrifically stupid and pointless and destructive as these wars are, global militarism evokes no public cynicism. On the contrary, it remains the god we worship \u2014 primarily financially<\/a>, of course. Worldwide, some 2.4 trillion U.S. dollars are given to this god, with the U.S. itself accounting for nearly half the total: almost a trillion dollars. We have no choice! At least not as long as nationalism is the limit of our vision.<\/p>\n

This certainty feels virtually impenetrable \u2014 at least here in the U.S., which absorbs only a small amount of the impact militarism wreaks on humanity. We don\u2019t hear bombers or drones flying over our homes every day. Our cities are not bombed. When\u2019s the last time you\u2019ve had to dig a child out of the bombed rubble?<\/p>\n

In our insulation and safety, war oh so easily remains an abstraction \u2014 and an inevitability . . . for others to endure. End of thought process.<\/p>\n

So I reach out desperately to Teilhard, to Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, to all the other spiritual leaders of humanity, who tell us that life is profoundly complex, not linear. It\u2019s not a matter of winning or losing, but connecting with all of humanity, with all of life \u2014 even with our oppressors. It\u2019s about expanding our awareness, expanding the whole. In the many columns I\u2019ve written over the years about Restorative Justice<\/a> \u2014 about healing rather than punishment \u2014 I\u2019ve used the phrase \u201cpower with, not power over.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is what love is. Only minimally has it penetrated our politics. And our politics do not acknowledge that all of us matter, that the world is sacred. Oh! Cut to the soul! We\u2019re stuck with the language of the moment. This language forces its certainties upon us. It minimizes the unknown. In our present linguistic awareness, love is personal; it\u2019s certainly not geopolitical. At that level, it\u2019s a joke.<\/p>\n

So I bring Teilhard back in to help us move beyond this: \u201cSome day,\u201d he has written<\/a>, \u201cafter mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/em>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Oct 2024 – \u201cDriven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.\u201d These words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, from his book The Phenomenon of Man, may well be worth meditating on every day. The forces of . . . love?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":122360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[120,2371,2553,380],"class_list":["post-276431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-conflict","tag-hatred","tag-love","tag-solutions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276432,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276431\/revisions\/276432"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}