How to Live in this World?

I keep asking myself,
I keep feeling like the question is,
how can we live in this world?
how can I live in this world?

I keep wondering,
how is it possible,
to live in a world
that is tearing apart at the seams,
that is bursting forth in violence
and anger and ... goodness too,
that is collapsing in apathy and despair ... but still loving sometimes;
and these dichotomies and dialectics and paradoxes
are playing themselves out emotionally, economically, religiously
all through the world:
how do you live in this world?

How do you live in the world,
any part of the world,
even the privileged part,
the closed-off part,

while Palestinians, South Sudanese,
Yemeni, Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians
are fighting for freedom
in the face of incalcitrant regimes,
while Ethiopians, Somalians and Kenyans
are starving in East Africa
while the U.S. military's budget for 2010 was over $600 billion:
how do you live in this world?

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) said it right,
I think he said it prophetically:

"We are living in the greatest revolution in history - a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race: not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it something we are free to avoid.
This revolution is a profound spiritual crisis of the whole world, manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence, conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destructiveness, progress and regression, obsessive attachments to images, idols, slogans, programs that only dull the general anguish for a moment until it bursts out everywhere in a still more acute and terrifying form. We do not know if we are building a fabulously wonderful world or destroying all that we have ever had, all that we have achieved! All the inner force of man is boiling and bursting out, the good together with the evil, the good poisoned by evil and fighting it, the evil pretending to be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes, justified and rationalised by the purest and most innocent intentions."

- Conjectures of a Guilty By-Stander (1966).

 How do I live in this world?

I keep asking myself.
I keep asking myself knowing
that
somehow
getting by, making do,
playing house, shutting off,
will not work
and should not work.

I think,
I'm feeling stronger than ever,
that I cannot live
in resignation and pretending,
sheltered,
turning in (incurvatus in se),
consuming until I grow fat enough not to care
or remember
what's going on out there.
I cannot live like this.

So I'll make an exodus,
a fearful exodus,
step-by-step,
not bravely
but hopefully faithfully
out of the world of numbing satiation
and into the world of involvement
where the pain and the joy
the good and the bad
the decay and the extravagance
are felt acutely
all at once
right there with those people
in those places
that I'd forgotten
and shut-out
for far too long.

In reality,
I made this exodus,
have been making exoduses
again and again
for quite some time.
This dissatisfaction,
and anger,
and hunger
has been perculating
and boiling over
for the last few months
or years.

This exodus
is part of my tradition
inherent in my faith
central to my affirmations
about God and life
and meaning.
Exodus
comes with the territory
of faith,
Christian faith,
Biblical faith.


So as I make an exodus,
from one world to another
in hope of finding how to live
in this world that we share,
I will reflect on
and become a part of
that Biblical Christian tradition
the story of God's life in this world,
where exoduses are permitted, required,
ordained, encouraged.

Practically this means a move to Europe,
and I hope also Palestine,
which has been many years in the making.
Spiritually this means navigating through belief
and unbelief
and everything else
as it all plays out.
Personally this will involve lots of reading
and writing
and praying
which can be recorded here.

So on this blog I'll keep asking,
"how do I live in this world?"