Arnold Toynbee wrote: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be our hope that love is going to have the last word.” I choose love. I believe love will win out, that it will have the last word, because Love is at the Heart of Things.
In the present darkness (and it is darkness) we must not despair. Despair is a form of faith and tends to produce what it sees. Despair produces more despair. It erodes hope. The choice of, or acquiescence to, the darkness robs us of the option to choose love. Fatalism of any kind saps our will.
Some have become weary. They have accepted what is now. They ignore the ever-growing darkness. Their initial outrage has diminished. They now say, “Why bother?” They have given up. They are accepting the abnormal as normal. They no longer see any way out and simply give in to the “what is”. They cannot see any longer what can be, what ought to be, what is meant to be!
How we see makes all the difference. Hope is a form of faith and tends to produce what it sees. Let us hope that Toynbee and so many others have had it right. Let us hope that the ultimate force is love and let us live in that hope.
My greatest concern is that we could and that we are, in very fact, losing sight of what Love at the Heart of Things is all about. We are confusing, conflating and distorting that Love and trying to make it fit into what is. We are accepting the very wiles of the demonic as the “right thing,” whether it be the preemption of truth, fictionalized facts, boasts of expertise, the denigration of all opposition, polarizing by fear tactics, or the dehumanization of people. We are treading on dangerous ground with this “ridiculous national vanity.”
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