My friend Rob forwarded me Richard Rohr’s meditation, A Spiral of Violence: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil.
Rohr’s explains in much more articulate terms that I am capable one of my long held beliefs — that we focus all of our attention on the personal — the mistakes you and I make, and ignore their foundation, the institutional and cultural basis for for evil, violence, greed, etc.
For example we constantly talk about the individual acts of violence that seem to be happening more and more often, but ignore that at it’s core is the fact that our culture romanticizes War, condones violence in many cultural forms, ships weapons to our enemies on a daily basis, and participates in the taking of human life by way of capital punishment.
Rohr suggests that, we “are wasting time trying to make people feel bad about being greedy when, in fact, legitimized greed is the name of the game” — celebrated and admired throughout our culture.
It is worth a few individual meditations to consider if our finger pointing at individual violence and greed is where we should be focusing our attention.
Leave a Reply +