The personal and collective illness that dominates our time is fear … fear that blocks the health-giving, life-giving opposite, love. Perfect love casts out all fear, said Jesus, and he was most certainly right. It is that, love, to which we should aspire, as it is the remedy for the consequences of its opposite.
The fear that dominates our collective psyche today manifests itself in protectionism, hostility, a rush to arm ourselves to the teeth, 24/7 media streams that attack while numbing the moral sense, a pervading dread that there is not enough to go around and a rush to take all before it disappears.
These symptoms of fear squeeze out the spiritual health of the soul and society. Others are defined as threats who drain finite resources. Imagined forces line up in vast conspiracies. The attempt to destroy opponents drains away all energy that might otherwise be channeled toward creating the good.
All this comes as the consequence of deep fear: the activated reptilian brain living in a perpetual state of flight or flight as we medicate and entertain ourselves to death. Look around. The rot is moving toward the center.
What is first required is a basic recognition of our illness. And then, after recognition, we may turn back toward the source of health and wholeness, which is faith, hope and love. Those qualities will re-shape the inner person and our community of communities. The answer is spiritual at its core, a reliance on the native spiritual energy whose latent potential is able to set us all free.
We need it now more than ever. Perfect love casts out all fear.
vitalwholeness 