Not wanting to sound panicky in this season of celebrations, the stark reality is everywhere we turn, we see the immediacy of foreboding events. No one saw the ongoing pandemic coming nor did anyone realize the extent of the damage wrought by typhoon Odette, an occurrence that would be in our minds for a long time.
And, as of this writing, aid and other forms of assistance continue to pour on many parts of Negros Oriental, especially the northernmost part and some in the south, ravaged by the recent typhoon. Even without typhoons, families in the flat lands are mopping up the debris after yet another unseasonal flood, in spite of their best personal efforts to stem the tide of global warming.
To top it all, there are many relatives and friends, and even neighbors, we have not seen or met anymore of late because of strict health protocols. So, how long would all these last?
We see the possibility of catastrophic climate change, the threat of worldwide economic meltdown and the disappearance of our financial securities; the constant and increasing danger of floods, droughts, the breakdown of trust in many of our institutions, including some long-standing ones. Can humankind survive and deal with this level of breakdown?
However, come to think of it, is it possible to turn a crisis into an opportunity? A crisis is obvious and is readily seen and even measured. But, where is the opportunity? What if opportunity really is the flip side of danger in every crisis?
Let’s look at a few of the possible opportunities that may be concealed beneath these crises:
The opportunity to pool all our human intellectual resources to reverse the effects of global warming and rediscover ourselves as responsible living beings in a living planetary system.
The opportunity to embrace the fact that we are all interdependent and that the needs of any of us are the responsibility of all of us.
The opportunity to confront the greed and exploitation inherent in our current financial systems, to sit down together, and work out a revisioning of how we conduct our economies.
The opportunity to face questions about what faith really means, how we will express it, and whether it really needs complex and corruptible organizations to make it work.
So, what do we do about these, or at least those that we can still manage to control or abort?
This is a question that will keep presenting itself as we move on in our journey through and beyond the chaos of change and transition. In this season of hope and joy (underscoring on hope that springs eternal, as they say), do we hope that our faith will rescue us from the breakdown and repair the damage? Or, do we look forward to something new, like in the coming new year, with hope and childlike innocence? Can we tell these to individuals who have been ravaged by disaster upon disaster this year and even at the start of the pandemic?
But, let’s enjoy a bit of light relief. Let’s go back to the nursery and recall a rhyme we all once knew: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
Humpty has been particularly accident-prone recently. He has fallen off the wall of seeming stability. He has fallen off the wall of many established institutions. He has even fallen off the economy itself. And, yes, it’s true that neither the king’s horses nor the king’s men – not the financiers, politicians, lawyers, or even the religious – have had much success in putting the pieces together again and restoring the system to its old state.
The truth is that once you have broken an egg, all you can do is make an omelette – unless the egg hasn’t just broken, but has hatched.
This is actually the story of our lives, of everyone’s lives all over the world. It is the story of how something new may be hatching out of our own eggshells. The secret is to trust that this may be so and then engage with the task of helping birth the new out of the shackles of the old.
A happy, blessed, and meaningful new year to all our readers! – NWI
