Effort must be made for harmony among peoples

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on February 14, 2018.

A Sufi proverb states: “Most of the conflicts and tensions are due to language. Don’t pay so much attention to the words. In love’s country, language doesn’t have its place. It is mute.”

If there is a singular thought anyone can take forward with them in these troubling times, it is that. Beyond the overheated rhetoric, the politics of division and the cultural battlelines, there is a silent place where all humanity meets. A place where we can look into the face of another a world away and realize a shared profundity and a common personhood between us.

On Valentine’s Day we tend to boil every definition of love down to that which is shared between romantic partners, but love is much grander than that. It has the power to transform the world, and, even more importantly, to change peoples’ hearts. Words themselves can be martialed toward that grand effort, but it is our actions in the face of ignorance, hatred and horror which break down the walls of the heart: Not a flesh and blood engine located centre-left in our chest, but the symbolic heart, the spirit which gives fire to life, and all beauty contained within this world.

Sometimes that fire burns so hot it can be painful to him or her who experiences that interior transformation. Sometimes that fire burns hot enough to alter the reality of everyone around it. Sometimes that fire burns brightly enough to set a transformative flame deep in the bones of the world.

We exist at a time in world history plunged in economic chaos, political strife and cultural division. If nothing else, the Colten Boushie case teaches us that. Acknowledgment of that chaos, strife and division is the first step, but it cannot be the last. Reconciliation will not happen in a day, and harmony among peoples is an even further age away, but the effort must be made. The long and perilous journey must be continued and the torch of hope carried forward; no matter what.

When we say we love, we cannot say we love only one, or a few. That is not true love. Love must be free and unfettered, a bright ember floating through the world, lighting every place where it settles.