Being a whole person in a broken world

Contributor

The spiritual atmosphere can be pure and impure, life nourishing or stifling. The physical atmosphere can also be pure or polluted, life nourishing or stifling. In this context pure air means the abundance of man’s physical living conditions, the pureness and the absence of harm in the whole ecological system, ensuring man’s living space. It also means the balance, which has to exist between the food- and energy resources of our planet for the daily needs of its 7 billion inhabitants. There is a highly tense struggle going on for clean air, habitable earth in ecological as well as economic aspects. Our thesis: it is significant in which spiritual medium this battle takes place. The mere spiritual medium can contribute towards the solution of the problems, which the more and more polluted physical and economic climate brings about. But a polluted spiritual medium, created by man who wants to gauge things according to his own rules where his behavior is decided by narcissistic hunger for power and profit, by the rigors of his awareness of being mortal, can only worsen the ecological and economic disasters. What, now, are our most pressing troubles? The first part of my lecture will briefly list them on the basis of research results of highly qualified experts and international organizations, who are most knowledgeable in this field. In the 2nd part we will look for an answer to the question. What does the purity of the spiritual medium mean and to what extent does the living hope of the gospel contribute to this purity, the hope, which is visible even in situations without any prospects and which can wait: seeing one’s neighbor in the light of the risen Christ, expecting the reality of a new heaven and a new earth – and not doom. And what man expects will also decide with what and how he will fill the time of waiting. A theological-believing consideration of the energy crisis may not be able to overcome it, but it can deal with the ailing individual who is called to deal with the energy crisis. By the way, the communities, which are organized on that basis, have the ability to render aid to those who were left alone with their troubles thus increasing their chances of surviving.

Visky Sándor Béla: Being a whole person in a broken world. In: Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Theologia Reformata Transylvanica 55.1 (2010), 44--53