Something's coming.
“… somewhere in the last 50 years we have crossed a mysterious limit set by Providence and have entered a new era. We have, in some sense, passed a point of no return, and it is both useless and tragic to continue to live as if we were still in the nineteenth century. Whatever we may think of the new era, whether we imagine it as the millennium, the noosphere, or as the beginning of the end, there has been a violent disruption of society and a radical overthrow of that modern world which goes back to Charlemagne.”
(p. viii, Introduction by Thomas Merton, from THE PRISON MEDITATION OF FATHER DELP, Herder and Herder New York, 1963.) http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2006/12/prison-meditation-of-father-delp.html
A creative resolution, a creative tension.
The issue of interhuman tension is secondary to earth-human tensions. If humans will not become functional members of the earth community, how can humans establish functional relationships among themselves? It is not exactly the question of whether the nations can survive each other, nor is it even the question of whether intelligent beings can survive the natural forces of the planet; it is whether the planet can survive the intelligence that it has itself brought forth.
My proposal is that the cosmology of peace is presently the basic issue. The human must be seen in its cosmological role just as the cosmos needs to be seen in its human manifestation. This cosmological context has never been more clear than it is now, when everything depends on a creative resolution of our present antagonisms. I refer to a creative resolution of antagonisms rather than to peace in deference to the violent aspects of the cosmological process. Phenomenal existence itself seems to be a violent mode of being. Also, there is a general feeling of fullness bordering on decay that is easily associated with peace. Neither violence nor peace in this sense is in accord with the creative transformations through which the more splendid achievements of the universe have taken place. As the distinguished anthropologist A.L. Kroeber once indicated: The ideal situation for any individual or any culture is not exactly “bovine placidity.” It is, rather, “the highest state of tension that the organism can bear creatively.”
(-- from final chapter, "The Cosmology of Peace" in "The Dream of the Earth" by Thomas Berry, c.1988)
That middle, that middle place, that middle way, that place the gospel refers to when it cites Jesus as saying "The kingdom of heaven (the kingdom of God) is between you." (Cf. John1:26, Luke 17:21) -- it is there that peace is found, not off and away and not oblivious to the push and pull of this and that in the ubiquitous and perennial vying for dominance and bettering. Step, rather, into the between, the center, the middle, the heart of what is being revealed in our midst.
The
Pax Gaia is earth and all beings with and through earth coming into proper and true relationality.
Step out.
Step in.
Step between.
Dance herein, therein, and therefore encircle the center of existence.
Listen!
Something's near!
Revealing, itself.
