Social Justice & Advocacy Column: Called to be Saints
For us to regard the threat of climate catastrophe, nuclear war, the dying seas, or the poisoned air as a monstrous injustice suggests that we never took seriously the injunction to love. Perhaps we all thought that Gautama [the Buddha] and Jesus were kidding or that their teachings were meant only for saints. But now comes the daunting revelation, that we are all called to be saints—not good necessarily, or pious, or devout—but saints in the sense of just caring for one another. One wonders what terrors this knowledge must hold that we fight it so and flee from it in such pain. Can our present capacity to extinguish all life tell us this? Can it force us to face the terrors of love? Can it be the occasion of our birth?
In that possibility we take heart. Even in confusion and fear, with all our weariness and petty faults, we can let that awareness work in and through our lives.
Joanna Macy
