Let us love one another - Faith & Spirituality - supporting revolutionary change

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe, people are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and, out of the womb of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born The shirtless and barefoot people of the earth are rising up as never before.

"The people who sat in the darkness have seen a great light."

We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries.

This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Communism is a judgment on our failure to make democracy real and to follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes, hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.

With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and, thereby, speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill shall be made low, the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means, in the final analysis, that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to humanity as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is, in reality, a call for an all embracing and unconditional love for all people. This often misunderstood and misinterpreted concept has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of humanity.

When I speak of love, I am speaking of that force, which all great religions have seen as be supreme unifying principle of life.

Love is the key that unlocks he door that leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John:

"Let us love one another; For love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth of God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love ... If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us."

Excerpted from Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community

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