The Lure of a Greater Becoming

Sometimes it feels these days as though the world has gone off its rocker.

When I was younger, I remember we had our personal issues, as everyone does. But there was always a sense that as Americans we lived in a country where the big fundamental things were somehow handled. We never felt we had to worry that the entire world as we knew it might be falling apart.

But that was then and this is now. I said to someone recently, “Who’d ever have thought we’d someday be nostalgic for the Seventies?”

Mark Gibson

Things have gotten scary in a way they never were before. People on airplanes choking the flight attendant. Democratically elected officials trying to squash democracy. People getting violent at school board meetings. Election monitoring, of all things, becoming a dangerous job.

America, it seems, is having a psychotic breakdown. An existential crisis. A coming-of-age, who-are-we-really kind of moment. And all of us are responsible for how we make it through this.

A friend of mine said to me today, “I want to write a book, but I don’t know whether I should call it ‘The Eleventh Hour’ or “Half Past Midnight.” I told him that was a great way to start the book, with an introduction that began with just that image. For which is it? Is it not both?

Another friend said to me recently, “I don’t think it’s the fall of Rome. I think it’s a time of Renaissance.” I told him, again, that I think it’s both.

For two things are happening simultaneously: the fall of one world, one way of being, and one way of ordering society. And another world is struggling to be born, with another way of being and another way of ordering society. We are moving from an economically based society to a humanitarian based society, from an unsustainable to a sustainable mode of existence, and from a world of fear to a world of love.

If you feel you’re having a hard time finding where to sit and where to stand within the world as it is now, know you’re not alone. People are feeling the understandable emotional turbulence of this historic phase transition. One entire epoch is giving way to another, and yes it will be a Renaissance - but not immediately.

There will be a renaissance because there is literally no survivable option. The call you feel within yourself to help create something new and holy and beautiful does not mean you’re crazy; it means you’re standing right within the zeitgeist. You’re called, as are millions of other people all over the world, to dream and articulate and give birth to a whole new world.

It’s a collective pregnancy, a collective labor, and a collective birth. Not neat and organized, but messy and chaotic. Not without fear, and not without suffering. But something amazing and extraordinary is on the other side of it.

For this we pray, for this we wait, and for this we live. Together we can turn things from a time of breakdown to a time of breakthrough. Who among us doesn’t feel the undertow of a collective despair, as well as the lure of a greater becoming? We have to consciously choose the latter, as though the lives of our grandchildren depend on it. Because it does. For their sake as well as ours, we must dare to be spectacular. Whatever you do, do it in devotion to generations a hundred years from now. I believe with all my heart that they will thank us if we do.