What made the news yesterday and today, what trended twenty minutes ago, tells of disarray and despair and destruction—of suffering and mindlessness heaped upon each other. That is part of the story of our time. But it is not the whole story of our time. There is also the generative possibility of our time—of compassion and healing and collective awakening. This too is happening all around us, but my fellow journalists do not shine the bright light on it. Those of us who see it must participate in and nourish it.
In the last few centuries, we began to consign spiritual life to a compartment labeled "private." We placed more and more of our collective faith in the large, loud, external pursuits of politics and economics. One appeal of these disciplines—to which we attached descriptors like "serious" and "hard"—was their certainty that irrational human tendencies could be controlled by rational forms.
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