|
The Fellowship of Life |
| | |
"Hello, and a very warm welcome to this year's Christmas Newsletter.
We thought we'd start by sharing with you a story that we heard
recently. It's a story that was brought back by some of the survivors of
the Nazi concentration camps. It goes like this: Somewhere in the bowels
of Auschwitz or Dachau sat a perfectly ordinary German man, drafted into
Hitler's army from a local village, honoured to serve the Fatherland in
some small way. It was his job to count, precisely and daily, the number
of people being fed to the ovens. His aim was to make the gruesome work
as efficient as possible, to see if trends or patterns emerged which
would show means by which productivity could be increased. And so, with
an eye for detail and a commitment to accuracy, day after day he made
careful entries in a book. When the numbers not only added up but also
assured him that on average the daily score was rising, he went home
feeling satisfied that he had done a good job. Life for him was about
the detail, the task immediately at hand. It never occurred to this good husband and father that he was
counting the 20th century's greatest massacre. He was dedicated to
simple accuracy, not great truths: to neat entries, not moral
conclusions. And for millions of people today life has been reduced to the task
immediately at hand, with the larger issues that sometimes break through
to our consciousness pushed to the back of our mind again, neglected and
ignored. Thus our lives, and the world, remain the same, unquestioningly
accepted. If something challenges our narrowly defined self-interest it
is an unwelcome intruder. People don't stop to think, don't want to
think, that their little lamb was specially bred and killed just for
them, and now lies on the shelf cut into bits, wrapped in plastic to be
thrown carelessly into a supermarket trolley and eaten unthinkingly that
evening." "Selfishness, materialism, greed and cruelty are dragging everything
in their wake towards our planetary system's collapse. We are also
destroying ourselves. Yet if we choose compassionate social action we
can release creation from the mesh. We can survive. But only if we work
with the divine in order to co-create the most joyous, harmonious,
peaceful and loving world possible - in fact, the original ideal of
dwelling in harmony with nature and peaceably beside the animals. We are either on the side of God's creation or we are not. It's a choice each human being makes in their heart. It's a choice that makes all the difference in the world." Go on to 2002 - FoL Newsletter
excerpts by Clare and Tom Harral |
Homepage/About Us
Your comments are welcome |
|
This site is hosted and maintained by The Mary T. and Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation Thank you for wisiting all-creatures.org |
Since 
|