World Peace

So, happily enough, Mike continues on his adventure in cancer recovery in a good way. He says he never imagined he would feel this good only 5 1/2 weeks after his bone marrow transplant. We are grateful to all of you for your support, love, and prayers. Thank you.

So, on January 23 in my post entitled “Charmingly Goofy,” I suggested that we all pray for world peace, and that if everyone did it daily, it would surely come about. I also said that Mike and I have been praying for world peace ever since he was in the hospital, but that I wasn’t sure how we got started. Well, now I know. Mike had started reading while he was in the hospital a book by Marcus Borg, a liberal theologian in the Episcopal church.  The name of the book is Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of Mark, Morehouse Publishing, 2009. It is one of the books given to Mike by Brenda T. after her husband and Mike’s dear friend Warren T. died almost 2 years ago (The Kaddish, April 1, 2018). Mike started to read it but his eyes were burning after a few days from Brother Chemo, so he had to stop at that time. He just finished it this morning, and now we remember where the idea of world peace came from. Dr. Borg says that in his view the Kingdom of God referred to life here on earth. I will quote a passage from his book (pp 28-29).

“The kingdom of God is about the transformation of life in this world–of individual lives and of the world itself. It is ‘the dream of God’ for the earth, to echo the title of a recent book. (Verna J. Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return, New York: Seabury Classics, 2006) Grounded in the Jewish Bible, God’s dream–God’s will, God’s passion–is a transformed world. The two main features of God’s dream are justice and peace. Justice means distributive justice–everybody should have enough of God’s earth, not as the result of charity but as the product of justice, namely, the way the world is put together. The other primary feature is peace–a world in which to echo Isaiah and Micah, the instruments of war become implements of agriculture: the nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and nation shall not make war against nation anymore. (Isa 2:4, Mic 4:1-4).”

Making peace requires the letting go of resentments, of wrongs, real or imagined, suffered by individuals, families, tribes, and nations. These are not problems experienced by cats, so I have to rely on Mike about this. He says people won’t give up their resentments until they are convinced that the cost of holding on to them outweighs the price of letting them go. It’s a lot like giving up an addiction. As long as the addict thinks he derives more power than pain from his/her drug or behavior of choice, he/she is not ready to stop. And the cost can’t be material, it has to be spiritual, at the core of one’s being. Logically, then, in order to achieve world peace everyone would have to “hit bottom” at the same time, and be ready to be transformed into a new personal space. This seems highly unlikely, and could only happen in my view as the result of the power of prayer. I see no harm in trying. We encourage you to join us.

Author: Black Magic

Black Magic is a handsome, charming, and self-absorbed cat who lives with Mike and Judy Gordon in Marietta, Georgia. He is about 7 years old, and he will remind you at every opportunity that his grandfather was Black Jack, that famous cat who wrote his own autobiography. Black Magic has a great many opinions, and despite his natural feline arrogance, he seems to be genuinely spiritual. But the reader can decide for him/herself. View all posts by Black Magic