Posted February 12, 2015 by Marg Herder
It’s the 12th, and that’s the day I post on the Emerging Voices blog on Patheos. I’m talking about a spiritual experience I had several years ago. It seems like we are told over and over how important we are, how important our achievements, possessions, and opinions are. Today I talk about how little we are, and how we must learn that if we are to surrender to Her.
It happened during a difficult time. My life had been dismantled; the pieces were strewn all over the place. I was spending a lot of time alone, trying to figure out what had happened and how to begin to reassemble myself.
On this night, I was in my room watching the movie Hotel Rwanda.
The movie aptly illustrates humanity’s potential for depravity by telling a story from the Rwandan genocide of the mid 1990s. On this night, I sat on my bed and stared at the TV, becoming more and more overwhelmed by the obscene way human beings treat each other.
I became aware how scared, how cruel, how utterly detached from Spirit’s compassion human beings can be. I became aware that shades of genocide play out every single day in much less sweeping terms, as well. A woman stoned, a trans* person beaten to death, a black man shot down in the streets.
And I started crying for the fearful difference between what we could be as a species and what we actually are…