The following has been published as the 'Spiritual Life' column in today's Ilford Recorder:
Why do people feel so sad in the twenty-first century? Why do people feel so bad in the very age when, more than any other age, we have succeeded in satisfying our needs and making over the world for our own use? Why is it that a person riding on the tube from Redbridge to Central London, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving partner and family, good job, and enjoys unprecedented cultural and recreational facilities, often feels bad without knowing why?
Why is it that the only news we will buy or watch is bad news? Why is the good life which people have achieved in the West in the twenty-first century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders can divert us from the sadness of an ordinary morning? Why is it that the satisfying of our needs results in waste, pollution, and inequities which contain the seeds of our own destruction?
Why do we continue across the world with an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self destruction unparalleled in history? Why are we so much better at destroying buildings and then rebuilding them than in keeping them from being destroyed in the first place? Why are we a species that wages war against our own species? Why do we constantly need someone else on which to pin the blame?
Why does so much great art and so many great lifestyles come from circumstances of oppression? Why is it that altruism and self-sacrifice exist in a world that, we are told, evolved through the survival of the fittest? Why does scientific research indicate that those committed to a religious faith enjoy greater levels of well being, show greater levels of trust, and are more likely to volunteer than those without? Why is it that science can answer questions of how things occur but not questions of why things occur? Why has secularism not destroyed religion?
(Adapted from questions posed originally by Walker Percy and Philip Yancey)
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Marvin Gaye - What's Going On? / What's Happening, Brother?
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