Today's challenge....

There are times in our lives when we are confronted by ideas that don't seem to belong where we live.  I believe, in those moments, we are called to listen even more carefully and seek the word of God in the voice of the other.  For some, the following may be one of those moments.  For others, it is where they live. 

The Time to Embrace

What we need to develop in our time is a spirituality of embrace, the sanctification of feeling. We have been told that the greatest of these is love, but we do not really believe it. Not on the rational level. We have been told to be willing to repeatedly turn the other cheek but we do not risk it. Not on the social level. And yet, until we have the grace to regurgitate at the sight of brutality anywhere, what hope can we possibly have for the success of divinity's great experiment––the mind of God in the human heart.

Santayana writes: "The young person who has not wept is a savage and the old person who will not laugh is a fool." The spirituality of embrace depends on our willingness to put down the trappings of false intellectualism, of rationalism, of patriarchy so that both men and women alike can draw on their emotions without shame and be directed by their noblest feelings without fear.

Human community and globalism hang in the balance. The values we bring to decision making in the modern world are no longer a matter of purely private or personal importance. We cannot pretend to humanity and continue to deprive ourselves of half our way of perceiving at the highest levels of function. 

To embrace the other, to take the stranger into our lives, to trust that the other is motivated by the same cares and loves as we are, redesigns the human race. It is the ability to allow human feeling to become a reputable foundation for decision-making at the highest levels that engenders the necessary antidote to a depraved rationalism. For too long have we allowed a false masculinity to guide the judgments of the church and justify the character of the corporate world and engorge a suicidal militarism and direct the policies of governments and reduce humanity to the rationalization of objectivity and deny the people of the world the validity of the feminine, of the feelings, in both women and men.

Reason has become the human sin; independence and individualism our pathology. Facts we have aplenty. It is feelings we lack.

The time to embrace is now, before autonomy destroys community and leaves us less human at the end of our evolutionary process than when we began. Adoration of the rational has not worked. Only embrace can save us now.
                  ––from For Everything A Season, by Joan Chittister (Orbis)