This week, I am using a fancy title. It comes from my participating this past week in a webinar, on Laudato Si and ecological economics. Fancy title but it is dealing with nitty gritty, hot issues, facing our planet and humanity. The presenter of the webinar told us that his take-away word, for us, would be heat. By this, he was saying that the bottom line is that it is all about how hot our planet is. Then, on Friday, I saw the news - UN officially declares famine in Gaza. Do we understand how hot it is really getting on our planet?
A hot issue demands attention, and demands it now. Do we get that? There is so much needless, unwanted and inhuman suffering in our world that calls for urgent action, but where is our sense of urgency? The Gaza famine and other such tragedies facing humanity demand we step out now of our sense of indifference, comfort and isolationism (ICI).
Our world is so chaotic, so full of death and destruction, that we may feel overcome by it, losing our sense of control. I identify with that. A sign of this is I often turn off the news, thinking - this is just gut wrenching, but what can I do? However, if we stay in that ICI cocoon, we only become complicit in the evil attacking our world and the reality becomes worse. Such is the nature of evil.
The truth is we live in a harsh reality. We can neither deny that nor escape from it. It is in this context, we live our shared humanity, striving to be decent human beings, living good lives. The challenge in faith is to stand up now, step out of our comfortable lives and live out the gospel, practising that love we so easily proclaim by word of mouth.
This week, I have a fancy title. Big deal! Beyond that, it is a full-on, 'hands on', hard saying. Get out of our ICI cocoon, live in reality, act in the midst of the harshness of life and love until the end. Thus we embrace life and God, and his ways.
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