The CoNexus

The CoNexus Multifaith Media Center and the publications we distribute have several goals, but two of them stand out, counterbalancing each other like negative and positive charges.

One goal--the negative, but necessary energy--is to recognize the interconnectedness of the underlying causes and effects of a great variety of global issues. These issues include but are not limited to conflict between members of differing religions. Other conditions are equally critical: hunger and scarcity of water, environmental threats, conflict, exploitation, abuses of human rights--including freedom of religion-- and so on. Here we find failures of human understanding, imagination and responsibility. Most notable is the failure to live up to our ideals and potential.

Equally pertinent, but more hopeful, is the positive charge. It carries the interconnected energy of numerous religious and spiritual perceptions regarding human life and meaning; its exhilarating charge comes from the visions it sees--a global ethic grounded in the best spiritual insights from numerous traditions. This global ethic can present meaningful challenges and guidance to our "guiding institutions," as the Parliament of the World's Religions termed them. A detailed global ethic calls out to the evolving community of religions and it speaks to the numerous inspiring agents of change that are doing good work by helping to create a viable future. These visions contribute to what some have called "a culture of peace."

The interaction of the negative and positive is a nexus, a focal point where all the energies come together and are connected in strategic and energizing ways. I've named that point "the conexus." It's like a funnel, gathering the past and present, human failures and the challenges we face, our values and the responses we choose in our daily lives, our experience with each other and the community of the Earth, and the responses of Earth to human mindlessness--and pouring it all out into the uncertain future.

What comes out the other end of that funnel--the conexus, out of that dynamic interaction in the vortices of our lives, will shape our global future.

BRINGING IT HOME

When we map the connections from critical issues and situations of crisis back into our own homes and communities, they can cause us pain and frustration. Those who do that necessary analysis and speak about it, prophetically, are not our favorite sources of news or infotainment.

Many of us tend to assume that our society is basically generous and principled, that our values and our tribal or religious identifications are righteous. The evidence, however, suggests that there is a chasm between our personal beliefs and the impact of our collective actions on the larger world. For example, we continue to buy bananas and coffee, despite evidence that they are generally grown on plantations stolen from indigenous peoples, that their production dumps toxic chemicals on the earth and into the water table, that their laborers often work at unsustainable wages and have no land on which to grow their own basic foods. Even as our national, social and religious communities help to secure our prosperity and identities, these often come at the expense of others who stand outside those boundaries.

Numerous challenges are displacing traditional borders and assumptions. Do my thoughts and actions have destructive consequences for others? Who is my neighbor in a global community? Old questions have new contexts. The human desire to form community, once expressed in the tribe and validated by a religion, now faces the complexity of a global village. It is no simple matter to face the implications of becoming "a community of the earth," or of opening our hearts to "the community of religions."

Other commonly-held assumptions are also under assault. We can no longer pretend

that the creation and consumption of products and luxury is unqualified progress;

that "our good life" includes the freedom to be exploitive and the right to protect our short-term interests at the expense of long-term values--and the rights of others;

that "other" people, religions, corporations, and governments must change first;

We are learning that our standards of living have been built on the intersections of business, government power, consumer demand and our culture's primary values. These interchanges connect us to the world's problems, and bring those issues into our homes and religious communities.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

How do we respond to complex issues like these, that diverge from the world we thought we knew? The challenges seem to make unreasonable demands on us.

It's certainly tempting to re-warm the American Dream, to retreat to comfort, prosperity, entertainment and technological wonders, to try to beat the dangers back around the corner and out of sight.

But old ways of thinking and technological fixes can't change reality or save us from our selves. Although it can be painful, we can begin to cut loose from dying assumptions, from the social disease of consumption, from being over-whelmed by the issues. We can live in ways that demonstrate that we do respect each other and honor the Earth. Those of us who are living in relative luxury must find an alternative to the pattern of consumption that Thomas Berry calls our "supreme cultural pathology," because too much of humanity wants to follow us down our deadly highways. Both we and they must learn from spiritual traditions far wiser than those that inform contemporary cultures.

This liberation won't come cheap. We'll have to make commitments to specific values and concrete tasks. We'll need to nurture hope, practice prayer and self-understanding, act boldly and watch for signs of grace. As we deal with failure--our own and that of others--and are tempted by apathy, knowing that many others are on the same journey and our commitments to seek gradual transformations must carry us through.

THE CONEXUS: Ecology, Governance, Spirituality and Action

New concepts of governance, ecology, and spirituality and new approaches to being religious are converging around us along with the critical issues. They offer to illuminate our paths through the nexus of challenges and opportunities.

We also note that many people are already on this journey, and that there is an unprecedented increase in appropriate activism, worldwide:

Those who've worked on single-focus issues such as the environment are learning that most problems and their solutions are tied to other issues, and all issues are tied to our deepest values.

Religious leaders and lay people with spiritual commitments are connecting ecology, justice, peace and spirituality. They are also joining forces with members and leaders of other faiths to advocate together and to cooperate in projects local, regional and international.

Workers are learning how their job losses are related to exploitation of fellow workers elsewhere, and community advocates describe how enormous military budgets affect homelessness, local investments, health care and education.

Hungry people and their advocates realize that corporate greed and international trade policies also cause starvation. Members of religious and spiritual communities are taking the lead in providing relief for those in need and in advocating changes in policy, especially at governmental levels.

Freedom-loving people, especially those with spiritual commitments, are experiencing the power of non-violent resolution of problems and resistance to injustice.

TRUTH AND REVERENCE WILL CARRY US THROUGH

When we have seen the connections and want to begin to move through the nexus into a culture of peace in the new millennium, we can do as Gandhi proposed: Invite the truth-force to work in us. It's a process of action and reflection, a series of steps that moves us toward personal and collective truths--if we don't resist or short-change it. As we embark on this process of transformation, we must test not only our religious and spiritual communities for re-packaged versions of the status quo but also "global consciousness" and its step-sister the "new world order," to distinguish the highest spiritual values from fashion, wishful-thinking, and outright deception. The following insights may be used as a perceptual matrix for that inquiry:

All the world's affairs are rooted in ecology. Governance, commerce, food, population, work and leisure are all human components of the interconnected systems of Earth.

All of our choices are grounded in a spirituality. All of our values and actions reflect the meanings and relationships that we choose for our lives: our spirituality is manifest in our relationships with other life and the Earth, with the cosmos, with the creating One.

Most of our actions are inevitably making political choices within a global context: we're always voting with our time or energy or money, even when we're apathetic or simply following cultural patterns.

There is no separate or neutral ground for religions and spiritual traditions; they will either help or they will hinder the processes of transformation.

Transformations in our thinking must become public policy. Our efforts are needed to change the inertia of the institutions and powers that influence our realities.

Finally, reverence for the beauty, interconnectedness and mysteries of Earth-life provide the key perception and a strong foundation for new ways of living.

These qualities point us toward what we've been seeking all along--the true meaning of peace. St. Francis sang, "Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace." With a similar intention, we become co-creators, reshaping the connections that link us all into a new community of peace. As Thomas Merton said at the First Spiritual Summit in Calcutta, "My dear brothers and sisters: we are already one, but we imagine that we are not. What we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to become is what we already are."

On that sacred journey, each of us is the conexus.