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If you monitor news
channels all day long, as we do at
spirituality.com, you can see why some
people might believe that evil is on the
rise and good is failing. With graphic,
high-speed global coverage of events—much
of it bordering on the sensational—it
would seem that just about all that is
happening are wars, disasters, crime,
arguments and endless varieties of mayhem.
Some people feel that beholding so much
negativity can jeopardize their spiritual
growth by polluting their consciousness.
So they avoid the news altogether. Others
feel that the risks are worth taking
because the news gives them so many
opportunities to help humanity through
their spirituality. In fact, it is their
very spirituality that protects them from
being overwhelmed by the news.
Things don’t get to be “news” until
they’re out of the ordinary
It helps to realize that
things don’t get to be “news” until
they’re out of the ordinary. For
the overwhelming majority of people on the
planet, the ordinary is pretty bland by
comparison. And that doesn’t mean it’s bad
or boring, it’s just that for the most
part people tend to get along, do good
work, care about each other, build good
legacies, and so on. That’s something to
be grateful for.
Grateful but not content, not isolated.
The inherently local nature of one’s
personal life can provide a justification
for ignoring the needs of the wider world
on the premise that what you don’t know
won’t hurt you. Even if that were
true—which it usually isn’t—there can be
other consequences of such deliberate and
unnatural personal isolationism. Not only
are the needy not being helped by you, but
there is a network of helping hands and
hearts that feels the burden of your
absence.
The story was just one of many
streaming across the screen
Yes, it takes extra effort to
care about people who are different from
or geographically removed from us. For
example, when the shuttle Columbia mission
ended in tragedy the United States and
many parts of the world paused in shock
and compassion. But a few days later, when
130+ people in South Korea perished in an
arson attack in a subway, the story was
just one of many streaming across the
screen between commercials on CNN. The
news media’s priorities notwithstanding,
all loss of life is big news for the
spiritually minded and merits prayerful
response. Instead of hand wringing or
gawking, the spiritually-motivated
response is compassion and truth telling.
Breaking out of parochialism and moving
toward a more inclusive compassion is the
natural dynamic of spirituality, and is a
mark of spiritual growth. The news is not
a depressing imposition, but a call to
care, an opportunity to spread through
prayer a healthy dose of spiritually-based
good throughout the land
Can that expansion be fenced in?
The beautiful and empowering
fact about such a response is that it is
native to us—native to the whole spiritual
universe, in fact. The divinity that
creates and maintains all things does it
as a spontaneous act of Love. If the
nature of the Creator is impressed on the
creation, then the purest forms of love
are unselfish, outgoing. Can that
expansion be fenced in? If it mirrors the
spiritual fact of divine Love’s
all-inclusive embrace of its creation, it
cannot.
Also, because divine Love has no limit,
is neither conditional nor selective, it
doesn’t prioritize creation but beholds
each one of us “as the apple of the eye,”
as the Psalmist puts it. A spiritual
attentiveness to the news is a way to
emulate this divine attribute. Prayer for
one’s neighbors is inherently prayer for
oneself, because it acknowledges and
welcomes that the same spiritual facts,
the same enduring goodness, apply to all.
That’s why selfless prayer is so good
for the self. And it’s what makes keeping
up with what’s going on worth the risk.
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