Another new column opens today—dealing with a set of skills that the UN says all contemporary people, especially the young, need to pick up: LIFE SKILLS.
To lead a meaningful life, and to bring up our young properly, learning to read and write or getting a college degree is far from enough. There is something much, much more important: to learn the art of living. “Life Skills” will deal with that. Welcome aboard, Glenn! Enjoy the trip, readers!
This month’s cover story is not easy to deal with—in a magazine, or in real life. Can human beings overcome the mutual prejudices we all inherit with our mother’s milk, get beyond our “frog in the well” thinking and loyalties, and truly seek to build a human world where we see and treat each other as human beings—and not primarily as Tamils and Nagas, Dalits and Shias, Reddys and Syrian Catholics, Kashmiris and Adivasis?
Is it possible? Can’t faith—with all the special helps we receive in novitiates, seminaries, retreat centres and pilgrimages—enable us to move from a narrow, group-centred vision to the kind of universal love that Jesus showed and taught? If this does not take place, how far is our claimed God-centredness real, and our impact beneficial?
We need to start by looking at facts without sugar-coating, see what lies behind the sad and at times bitter divisions, and seek ways of becoming genuine human beings and sincere disciples. To help us do this, I invited a former student of mine who did a very thorough doctoral dissertation on the issue of multiculturalism in religious life. He has summarized a vast and detailed study into a small, chewable portion. Take a bite, and see for yourself. Thanks for sharing your expertise, Paulraj. May it help all of us to include more and more human beings in heart, thought and action, when we speak of “we.”
For each of us walks through the world—this vast garden where we meet so many other children of God—with a loving vision unclouded by bigotry, or with eyes jaundiced by fear, bias, greed and bigotry. Good to check how we walk through the world. The way I see, judge, condemn, heal, include or exclude others, reveals first of all the kind of person I am, and what I want to do with this short journey we call life.
May the heart be open, the eyes shining with innocence, and the journey exhilarating! May we be marked by the guileless glow, the childlike laughter and the love beyond boundaries that distinguish the truly great.
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