Children
of God
“We
are not these bodies; we are neither our accomplishments nor our possessions—we
are all one with the Source, which is God.”
Anita
Moorjani
When I
was a kid growing up in a mill town in western North Carolina, I was poor; not
abjectly poor, but not comfortably rich. Anyone from a mill town will tell you
there is an almost physical barrier erected from birth between the well-to-do
and those who are not. In the town where I grew up (as in most Southern towns)
it was between the owners of the mills, the bankers who served them, the
professional class of doctors and lawyers, and all the rest of the townspeople.
Down on the very bottom were the mill workers, who were like batteries in a
machine—which is to say, essential but replaceable. It seemed to me as a child
that there was a great deal of snobbery and exclusion to those of us who lived
on the wrong side of that barrier. But there was a whole other level of poverty
and exclusion in town; the black people who lived even deeper in the weeds than
the poor whites. They weren’t even a factor unless their labor was needed.
We are
accustomed to the human world being divided up in this hierarchical, patriarchal
way—top down. And now the Pandora Papers are showing us that hasn’t changed—the
rich are, indeed, getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and there’s still
a banking system and a legal system that supports and protects them. As Ecclesiastes
1:9 tells us, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done
again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
But
here’s the deal, what if none of that matters. What if we humans have gotten so
far off track that we believe climbing that ladder is the reason we’re here and
that we must do our part to move up to the next rung. We may even believe that at
the top of the social ladder we will find bliss—that nirvana rests just on the other
side of that invisible barrier. We may spend our entire existence here on the
blue planet trying to scrabble our way up “so that our kids can have a better
life.”
Brene Brown
does a very good job of telling us what we look back on so nostalgically and
call “normal.” She says: “Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than
it normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction,
disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return,
my friends.”
She
believes, and so do I, that we have an opportunity to do it differently. Now,
while we are in the liminal state between what was and what is to be, while
we are recovering from the shock of 700,000 dead and millions sick, right here
in America, the land of opportunity, we can decide to make a revolutionary
change. We can decide right now to build a society that really is the American
dream—where even a child growing up on the wrong side of the barrier in a mill
town can feel they are a valuable part of the whole. We are all children of God—all
the rest is just window dressing.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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