Make me a channel of your peace…where there is hatred let me sow love… –prayer of St. Francis
Sometimes it seems we are living in the old Wild West. Everybody is carrying weapons. It feels as if violence exists everywhere.
Part of the reason is that we get news from all over the world, now. Once news was mostly local with a smattering of regional, national, and international news. TV now brings us, indeed floods us, with instantaneous news produced and directed for maximum emotional impact.
Still, how could a young man sit in a Bible study for an hour with a peaceful group of spiritual seekers, then coolly pull out a handgun and kill nine people. A quote I saw had him saying that they were such nice people he almost hated to do it.
All because they were born with a different color skin than his.
Yes, there is evil in the world. I had a deeply spiritual conversation with a friend a couple of weeks ago who denied the existence of evil. But, it exists. Where else would someone learn to hate?
I had hoped that the civil rights work of the 60s would have yielded much more progress. I went to graduate school in the south in the early 70s. My Southern classmates all thought that with the new generation racial relations would be improved.
Overall, we treat people of other races, religions, and nationalities much better than we used to.
When it comes to healing the hearts of humans, though, sometimes it looks as if we’ve made no progress from the earliest times written in the Bible.
But we have. Despite all the fear-mongers and incessant media attention we are much safer in much of the world than we used to be. There are substantial places where peace needs to come.
Mostly we need to work and pray to heal people’s hearts.
Tags: actions, attitude, compassion, emotions, forgiveness, Peace
Faith Venture 
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