Per Psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933–1984), who was significantly influenced by the Holocaust:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. -- from Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation," September 14, 2019
Milgram describes precisely why I believe a transcendent Higher Power, God to me, is a personal need in the life of each of us. That being true, I also believe, as James Finley has written, the absolute love of God protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things.
Until we stop looking to God to protect us, change us, change situations we ourselves have created through ignorance or malice or misguided love, we will be unable to accept the love of God. We will know it, the love of God, only from our eyebrows up.
It is our unfailing inner efforts to know and to show the love of that transcendent Higher Power, God, that imbues us with our fundamental standards of morality, the ability if you will to see [our] wrong and try to right it.
Equally important is the ability to accept our human condition which will ever be en garde for self. Of course, by "to accept" I mean to get over ourself. And don't think for a minute that doesn't take a boatload of cooperating with a transcendent Higher Power, God.
Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment