It's Sunday

What world do we want to live in?

Stained glass window, OBUC, Victoria BC

I haven’t gone to church in awhile, though I can tell from my mood that I need to. I went for a walk instead this morning, with a moderately right-wing friend. She said that the problem with the Democratic leaders is that they keep getting sucked into refuting trolling from Trumpers, and increasing the amount of noise and fury in the public debate. What they should be doing, she said, is ignoring the noise from the trolls and saying simply, this is what we stand for.

I thought about that.

One of the most powerful sermons I ever heard was twenty years ago, from a minister who said that God wants you to be happy, and healthy, and safe, and prosperous, and to know that you’re loved.

And God wants exactly the same thing for the person next to you. And for the person down the hall, and the one down the street, and the one across the world. God wants that for ALL of us.

I’ve never forgotten that sermon,. I don’t know why it hit me so hard. I suppose I had never thought about it quite that way before. I guess I assumed that God didn’t want people I disagreed with - Pierre Poilievre, say - to be quite as happy as God wanted me to be. They could be happy once they’d repented of their sins. But the minister was right. God wants that for everyone equally.

So, what does that mean in the human world? I think it means that God wants us to live in a world that makes it as easy as possible for everyone to be happy, and healthy, and safe, and prosperous, and to know that we are loved.

Bad things will always happen, and eventually, we all die. But we should be doing our best to make a world where our own behaviour, and our own society, and everything we have control over, are all efforts to create and support that world; or at the very least, don’t make it harder to come to be.

That’s the world I want to live in. That’s what we need to stand for. May we do so, and may we never forget that.

Happy Sunday.