Our World or God’s World?
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Living is not a private affair of the individual. Living is what man does with God’s time, What man does with God’s world.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, fr, I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology
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“Barbarians don’t have to burn books.” The tiger is at the library. Dear Borges, believe me I don’t have the satisfaction of complaining. But who could these complaints about the fate of books — from the reading itself — be better directed to than you? All I’m going to say is we miss him. I miss him. His decisive influence continues. The time we are now entering, this 21st century, will test the spirit in new ways. But, I assure you, some of us won’t be leaving the Grand Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero. “
— Susan Sontag
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Human beings have two options: being in contact with the Source, or being in a state of disconnection from it. Being disconnected from the Source is not the loss of luxury, of something extra — this loss lies at the very heart of human suffering because this Source constitutes your most real nature, the true centre of who you are. Without it, life is deadened in all its aspects and becomes meaningless. We don’t simply lose a sense of peace or contentment, or the intimacy of feeling at home with ourselves, but we also lose the source of all of our real capacities that we need to deal with and live our lives fully and correctly. So this is not a small loss or simply a philosophical one — it is a very practical and immediate one.
— A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity
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We believe we have dominion over “God’s world,” that God trusted us enough to put it into our hands. Our Bible confirms it, so that puts to rest any doubt we might have that we’re exceeding our actual responsibilities on the planet. Various scholars have tried to pinpoint when in our culture we lost contact with what is called “Source.” Our separation from nature is our tragedy, our history.
Once that happened though, we began to use nature to promote power. Reverence for life in all its forms — including our inner worlds — no longer guided us. We became capable of anything. We became dangerous to the web of life because we imagined ourselves separate from…
