Faith And Collective Trauma 5

We are spiritual beings. First and foremost. This doesn't negate or diminish the physical. We are made up of mortal flesh that has to be nourished and sustained and eventually we are all going to die and decay and return to the elements from which we are made. Not much to look forward to, I guess. But let's think for a moment about what really makes us as human bodies. We are matter, or material, yes. But what makes matter, matter? I remember having this conversation with a chemistry major back in my salad days and we concluded over the obvious: matter is merely highly organized energy. The atoms that make up the molecules that are our basic substance, where do those atoms come from? What holds them together? They are energy. And what is energy, or where does energy come from? And now your head is going to hurt for the rest of the day, Gentle Reader! Some believe that the human soul, or identity, is a fiction or a social construct. But when you consider the uniqueness of each organism's DNA, then there must be something that sets each of us apart from others. The differences are going to be minor, so very minor, and yes, we are human before we are beings. Or is it the other way around? This is what happens when, like me, you have a tendency of beginning to think rather too early in the morning. My guess is that each one of us is a kind of divine spark and this is what makes us living beings. Interesting that they still haven't figured out how to create life in the laboratory. I don't think that they ever will. But this is where belief comes in and science has quite the hyperallegic reaction to matters of faith. In the meantime we have ethics. There are in our human nature longstanding and disturbing selfish tendencies. Yesterday while watching a nature video in Spanish about southern Spain I couldn't help but note how much like us were the vultures flocking around a decaying carcass and fighting among themselves for the best place at the table. Of course, hunger, the drive to survive is a major motivator and this is true of all species, including our own. But can't we be better than that? Sharing within human communities and kinship and familial groups is a no-brainer. That is how the tribe survives. Outside of the family, the community, when touching on outsiders, people who don't look or sound or dress like us, then problems begin, given how we still tend to exclude the outsider. We have progressed from nomadic tribes and family groups over the past one hundred thousand years, to nations. Now we are being faced with xenophobia and populism. In a lot of countries where racial and cultural homogeneity are the norm: Hungary, Poland, Russia, Italy, to name a few, there are governments voted into power whose raison d'etre would appear to be to keep their countries as white, as Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Italian, to name a few, and as Catholic, Catholic, Orthodox, Catholic, to name a few as possible. Liberal, multicultural and inclusive Canada is becoming more and more a global anomaly. And a huge global necessity. Regardless of what I might think of how illegitimate a construct Canada is, given how we basically stole this country from the First Nations and have rebranded it as our own colonialist paradise, we still have something really important to offer on the world stage. And once our First Nations take their rightful place, as the legitimate leaders of this country, then Canada will be less tainted by hypocrisy and we will be armed with the moral authority to lead the world. That is, if we can still maintain our love and respect for diversity. The divine spark is made of many different colours and they shine, oh, so bright in the surrounding darkness!