NP a hopeful view

[Doug Millison]

http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0205/article/020
511.html

[...] So this is how the struggle appears today: corporate globalization
versus reactionary spirituality. As Bush puts it, if you are not on the
side of globalized capital, you are on the side of the terrorists. Well, we
say "no" to this false choice. Instead, in my book Spirit Matters and in
Tikkun magazine, and now also in the creation of The Tikkun Community, we
advance a third path, a new alternative, what we call an Emancipatory
Spirituality. It is a spirituality which affirms rational thinking and
science, affirms the need for individual rights and for a private realm
protected from invasion by the state or by society. It affirms the need for
democracy, equality, and individual liberty. But it also calls for a New
Bottom Line in American society to transcend the ethos of materialism and
selfishness and create a world based on caring and compassion, generosity,
and open-heartedness.

That New Bottom Line can best be understood by a central demand of The
Tikkun Community: the demand for a new definition of productivity,
efficiency, and rationality, so that institutions, social practices,
legislation, and ways of life are judged rational, productive, and
efficient not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but
also to the extent that they maximize love and caring; increase our
ecological, spiritual, and ethical sensibilities; help us see others as
valuable because they are embodiments of the sacred; and encourage us to
respond to the universe with awe, wonder, and radical amazement. Use that
criterion, and you will see that most of the institutions of our society
are irrational, unproductive, and inefficient-from our schools to our
corporations to our media.

The good news is this: we are not the only group going in this direction.
Here is the news of the State of the Spirit: Spirit is moving in this
direction. The spiritual crisis that I described is a worldwide crisis, and
increasingly more and more people are finding that when the system
"delivers the material goods," it doesn't satisfy. The old system of
materialism and selfishness has not yet crumbled, and it may have another
fifty or even a hundred years of power left. But developing within the
existing system is a new ethos, a new spirituality, a mystical society, a
set of human beings who wish to return to the mystery of Being, human
beings who are increasingly aware of the impermanence of material
accomplishments, human beings who no longer believe that they can escape
the transitoriness of life and the certainty of death by building
skyscrapers or putting plaques on hospitals and university classroom
buildings, or by getting momentary fame by writing a well-known book or
movie. Human beings are developing who see through the falseness and the
hypocrisy of the materialist culture of contemporary capitalism, who no
longer believe that a huge income and a house in the suburbs will provide
their lives with meaning. So they are turning to Spirit. They are turning
in all kinds of ways. Some of those ways are flakey, some are reactionary,
and some are destructive. But there are other and deeper forms of spiritual
life emerging, and with this movement, the prefiguring of a new kind of
society.

In this process of spiritual awakening we have many allies. We have allies
like The Call for Renewal Community in the evangelical world, the socially
engaged Buddhists inspired by the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hahn, and the
Catholic social justice communities like those mobilized by Dorothy Day and
Catholics for Free Choice. We have allies among the Quakers, the
Mennonites, and the members of the United Church of Christ. We have allies
in the Unitarian, the Methodist, and the Episcopal churches, as well as in
the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal movements of Judaism. [...]