Friends,

Mary Klein has a gift for going to the essence of a concern and expressing it simply and powerfully. I encourage Friends to read her essay in the January/February 2019 issue of Western Friend.

Dear Friends: Almost anything can serve as a weapon, even life-giving water. All living creatures on earth have evolved (are evolving) fortifications against attack. Cellular life is fortified by membranes, and human societies are fortified by lines in the sand. Nutrients and attractive ideas gain access through those fortifications. Poisons and slander are rebuffed.

Inside our fortifications, ideally, scarcity and excess are minimized as we “give us this day our daily bread;” but in actuality, scarcity and excess are the pumping pistons of empire, trampling our planet today.

Scarcity and excess are enforced, in large part, by weapons. However, we can never rid the world of weapons entirely. So we confront instead the problem of good and evil, choices between right order and malignant excess, choices between visions of perfection for all life on earth and self-deceptive, self-indulgent quests for personal power.

Blessings,
Mike