The Personal and the Social - it's all connected

It is time to move beyond the more personal issues and themes of friends and how we relate to the wider issues facing our world.  I say this and I see already the hole in what I am saying.  Everything is related.  How we relate at the personal level with friends and others is reflected in how we relate with the wider world and the people we don't know and the issues facing it. 

Funny that as I name the wider issues, I start to talk more impersonally.  Why?  For all issues and relationships whether on the one to one level or at the big picture level are personal for they affect and engage real people. 

I found this map giving the global overview of people displaced worldwide due to disasters during 2012.  There was a total of 32.4 million people displaced.  This was almost double the number displaced by disaster in 2011.  This is a great tragedy and yet while we are talking about natural disaster, so much of it is man made.  Why?

These disasters are 98% weather related, being impacted by the effects of climate change.  Those so often affected are the same ones - the poor in whatever country.  Poorer countries with little infrastructure are mostly affected, having less resources available to help those affected.  Then there are those many displaced by conflict - definitely man made. 

On the same Facebook page for Pax Romana, I also discovered a news article on Pope Francis who was speaking on the role of clergy in the Church.  He said:
"We learn poverty from the humble, the poor, the sick.  ...  We have no use for theoretical poverty." 

I see the connection between my two finds for the week.  On one side, needs at all levels and of all kinds are real in our world.  On the other side, the challenge is how we meet them. 

Yes, we face so many challenges when we start to face the issues and needs of our world at both the personal and social levels.  No one need is to be discounted and all are connected in some way through our human fragility and vulnerability. 

I feel the burden in trying to reach out to urban refugees in Bangkok.  Their needs are too much for me to meet and too much for all of us combined who reach out to them in Bangkok.   So my driving philosophy (or surviving philosophy) has become:
"We just do what can do.  It is not our responsibility to solve everybody's problems as we can't and it is not our role.  We are here to help. We are not the only builders of the Kingdom.  We do what we can and we rejoice in what we can do."

I voiced this to Bro Khushi, a Franciscan Brother here from Pakistan, on his bemoaning receiving yet another negative response in seeking help for these desperate people.  I spoke it so immediately and so passionately with him that it tells me that here is a truth for me in my lived reality that is worth sharing.