Friday, June 7, 2013

No Longer Mad At Monsanto?

http://revolutionfromhome.com/2013/06/why-im-no-longer-mad-at-monsanto/
It's no secret that there are many, many things in the world to get angry about.  And anger can be a powerful force if it mobilizes us for constructive change - if it stirs us up to fight "for" rather than "against". 

There's a famous passage in the sixth chapter of the letter to Ephesians where St Paul writes: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." And he goes on to urge his readers to take up "the whole armor of God", and to detail that in terms that have been memorized by generations of Sunday-school students.

But for me the phrase which stands out is the first one: We're not fighting against other human beings!  Recently I read a stellar post by Beth Berry which really brought this into focus for me. She writes
But the harder I fought against the system, the more obvious it became that the one I was really battling was myself, that the more energy I put into judging them, hating them and resisting reality, the weaker I became as an individual, and that the more disempowered I felt, the less change I was actually capable of creating.

You should read the whole article here.

1 comment:

John Roe said...

Here's a post from Byron that articulates a specifically Christian hope that "only love is strong enough": http://nothing-new-under-the-sun.blogspot.com/2008/01/jesus-and-climate-change-xv.html