Manna from Heaven

Bill Douglas

When my son died, the walls of the dark hospital so late in the night began to squeeze in, as the entire world pressed in on my heart.  In that moment I realized that the way we "run away from our lives" is all illusion.  At that moment no television program, or sports event, or tasty food, or new car, or shiny product, could do anything to save me from the reality of life, even though the advertisers promised that they could save me from anything, from everything, and give my life "true" meaning.

At this moment, I realized that the whole world is in our heart, and what is in our heart eventually creates the world around us, and there is no escape from that quintessential reality.  The pressure of that experience re-formed my heart, like coal pressured into a diamond.  From that dark night my broken heart opened to refract a new light of awareness, an expansive way of seeing my place in the world.

After that moment I knew that I could not be unaffected by what occurs around me.  This is why it so saddens my heart to see my nation giving up it's soul for "safety."  Because the reality is there is no safety.  There never was, and never will be.  Most of the world knows and accepts this reality, but we in the United States, seem to be incapable of realizing that ultimately, we are at the mercy of the hand of God.  There is purpose even in fear and tragedy.  To run from it at all costs, is to run from the grace of God. 

Golden calves tempt us to believe we can escape, that we can become absolutely "safe.".  But, no matter how many bombs we build, or fences we construct to keep people out, or to keep people in will make us safe.  No matter how many citizens we recruit to spy on one another, and no matter how many of God's creatures we torture in laboratories to find miracle cures, will EVER find the absolute safety to make us invulnerable.  HOWEVER, in our obsessive quest to fulfill the dream of absolute safety, I fear we are realizing an Orwellian nightmare that is cold and heartless, and not the kind of society, world, we want our children to live in.

Carl Jung wrote, "There can be no true joy, without being willing to experience appropriate pain."

After 9-11, Canadian TV interviewed Americans, asking them what they thought if innocent Afghanis were killed by our bombing, and the overwhelming majority replied, "too bad, somebody has to pay."  Rather than feeling our pain, and grieving, we rather lashed out.  Lashing out is a way to avoid feeling despair and pain.  We continue this avoidance, as our government is now asking postal workers, and cable, water, and gas workers to spy on their fellow Americans.  We are imprisoning people without charging them for crimes, and we are unleashing bombs on people who have done us no wrong, and our government is calling fellow countrymen and women "traitors" for expressing dissent to this insane behavior.  In the case of Iraq we are about to unleash hell on those poor people, and why?  So, that we don't have to fear the possibility that one day they may do something to harm us.  Using this logic we could expand to control the world, as our fear obsession continues to grow.  The Europeans do not support our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, because they remember a pre-emptive invasion of "Poland," and they realize you cannot go around attacking, just so that you don't have to worry anymore. 

The world has known fear, danger, and suffering, but America has experienced an immaculate grace for some years until 9-11.  This could have inspired us to use that grace to lead the world in caring for our people, our environment, and our world.  However, this grace has been wasted.  We now supply the overwhelming majority of weapons to an agonized world, we consume half of the world's resources while we are only 4% of the population, and spew 25% of the CO2 causing global warming.  We employ barbaric farming methods that cause untold agony for the livestock we've been given domain over.  We imprison more of our children than any nation on earth, except Russia, and now corporations building prisons are seeing their stock go up by imprisoning more and more.  Today prisons and weapons are the choice investments.  Golden calves meant to protect us from the will of God.  We have become a snake eating it's own tail, our obsessive quest for safety leading us to consume our host planet like a cancer, and to chew up our young in the monster factories called prisons.

Yet, our solutions are here and often simple, like manna from heaven.  6% of US land equipped with wind turbines could supply far more than our electrical needs demand, organic agriculture and proper diet could alleviate many health problems, a war-like expenditure on pre-school and education (proven to lessen the likelihood of children ending up in prison) would end our obsessive need for more prisons, and create hopeful children in their place contributing back into society.  By moving to an environmental based economy we could export our cutting edge green technologies to an energy hungry world employing our people, making us rich, and able to stop wasting vast resources in military ventures to protect foreign oil supplies.

Manna from heaven.  But, our hearts are locked around fear and conquest, prisons, and defense.  Our hearts cannot open to the greater truth.  Until we can endure the pain of seeing how off track we have become, we cannot open to God's grace.  God waits patiently for our open hearts.  It took the pain of death of my son for me to see.  I wonder what amount of global anguish and suffering will it take for our nation to re-find its humility before God, to regain it's vision?

When it does, our science can turn it's eyes toward working in harmony with the natural world God has given us (rather than fearing and distorting it through genetic engineering), and our social scientists can work toward solutions that nurture hope in our children and society (rather than more effective ways to imprison them).  Our medical scientists can help people maximize the natural healing abilities they have within (exploring to maximize the benefits of natural health techniques created over centuries of research in China), and our farmers can once again become the good stewards God implored us to be (raising livestock not pumped full of drugs, or raised in terror), creating a world of limitless possibility where all life can be nurtured and through that we can foster generations of Einstein's to dream bigger dreams, and the world we are headed for becomes so bright our eyes of today are unable to stand it's magnificent brilliance.  But, if we try really hard! We may catch a glimpse of it, flickering across the open canvas of that lighted part of our mind, that place where we connect with the divine.  The solutions are with us, they are often simple, and they are always waiting for us to open our hearts to them.  God's hands are extended.

Within the wind and sun and waves there are many times more energy than we could ever need.  Within the forests and plains and deserts there lie medicines that may hold the promise of alleviating great human suffering.  Within the beasts of our world lies an opportunity for us to understand alien cultures, and to work with them to provide a world of compassion, where livestock's not treated like a meaningless lifeless widget, but a sacred gift from God, and we see ourselves as part of the web of life God wove upon this planet.  So, much promise and hope on this beautiful blue orb we call earth.  So much beauty.  The vision of what is possible rends my heart.

Bill Douglas, author of "The Amateur Parent - A Book on Life, Death, War & Peace, and Everything Else in the Universe," and presenter in the DVD/Video, "T'ai Chi & Qigong: The Prescription for the Future." Both available on amazon.com.