Replying to LO24344 --
Dear Organlearners,
Greetings to you all looking at the light coming from a star!
In my reply to Andrew's very symbolic contribution, I wrote the following
on leaders:-
>We may stare ourselves blind at the explications of an individual
>leader of the present age. We must open our eyes to the
>implicate order of an extraordinary wave packet of leaders, each
>coming from a different age, but together forming a "strange LO"
>which spans many ages in a dispensation. It is this implicate
>order of leaders rather than any individual among them which will
>catalyze the dispensation into its pupa stage. But when the many
>popular leaders rather than few authentic leaders of any one age
>pack together, please do not expect the same thing from this pack
>of predators. And please do not expect any one the few authetic
>leaders, belonging to the same age as the pack of popular leaders,
>to keep them at bay. It will only distress the authentic leaders
>immensely.
I mentioned Jan Smuts several times as an example in this reply.
Penny Grimbeeck, curator of the Smuts Museum, send me this morning a
quotation from a letter of Smuts to Margaret Gillett upon returning from
the San Francisco Conference after WWII. The main intention of the pack
of popular leaders was to divide the spoils and not to reach out with
caring love to the vanquished.
Jan Smuts was not only an outstanding military leader in the British-Boer
War (1899-1902) and WWI, but also a leader in the aftermath of these wars
by helping people compassionately to put their lives together, get healed
and work, from virtually nothing left over, for a better future.
Let us see what this voice from the past had to say on his own distress:-
But affairs and politics choke my life and almost choke my
soul in these end-of-the-age times. Whatever is going to
happen to the world?...How can you think of abstract questions
when this storm is raging in the world? I did my best at San
Francisco, but building a peace structure for such a world is
worse than building on sand.
`I and my Father are one' keeps ringing in my mind as you
read it in John xvii. Is there any way out except this union of
the human and the divine? Is the world not saved by the divine
at the heart of it, and can our economic-scientific society be
saved without a new deeper religious outlook? Is it the Man
of Galilee or another like him born of our distressful conditions
who will point the way out of this darkness in which we are
milling round? I myself cannot see our way through our social
tangle, and somehow no Hand seems stretched out to us at
present. Will holism do without the holistic Personality?
The sentence which struck me most is "Is there any way out except this
union of the human and the divine?"
How much more history do we need to make before we can conclude with
conviction that the only way out is the union of the human and the divine?
A chemical metaphor came to my mind. When a "solvent"
dissolves a "solute", they form a union called a "solution".
However, not anything dissolves anything. A powerful principle
operates here which can be formulated as
LIKE DISSOLVES LIKE
For example, water (H2O) will dissolve salt (NaCl) whereas
benzene (C6H6) will dissolve paraffin (C20H42). But water will
never dissolve paraffin and benzene will never dissolve salt.
Should we seek this "union of the human and the divine", can we really
expect unlikes to unite?
Christianity confess that God has done His part in striving for likeness
when His Son became a human. But Christianity is merely one of many
religions today. Furthermore, it is also seriously questioned for all
which were done in the name of Christianity. Thus many people will reason
that God has not done His part through Jesus in achieving greater
likeness.
But let us now focus on humankind and whether it has done its part in
achieving greater likeness. What is the divine in us? What is the answer
to this question and can we live the answer? Can we evolve in divine
living?
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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