Happy Sunday.
The times they are a-changin’ …
2013.  Pope Benedict resigned, first time a Pope has resigned in over 1000 years they say. A new Pope was selected this week, Pope Francis I,  named for Saint Francis of Assisi, the saint of nature and the poor.  His first examples of wanting to live a simple life were promising along with the thought that the Cardinals had selected a man outside of the bureaucracy of the Vatican.
I am sitting this Sunday night waiting for Oprah’s Next Chapter to come on with her interview with John of God.  Is there really happening?  Television is going to show a mystical healer and channeler?  How far we have come in a short time.  In the nineties I wasn’t a regular viewer of the Oprah Show but I caught an episode about the time she began finishing the show with segments for the Spirit.  I thought how good it was to hear about nice things happening to people.   Just today Oprah was replaying her interview of last summer with Caroline Myss and they were recalling an episode they were filming in the 1990s and their conversation was about spirituality.  They knew the audience was detached so they stopped the filming to explain spirituality to people and how it was not about religion.  These days everyone seems to know about spirituality, consciousness, living in the NOW, enlightenment, and many of the other descriptions for awareness of your eternal self.
Recently at lunch we were discussing how my brother had been on a spiritual path in the 90s, studying shamanism and connecting with spirit by being out in nature.  He said we, his family, told him we were afraid he was becoming a uni-bomber.  I said to him that he was so ahead of us, who knew anything about such things as spiritual practices, tribal faith or meditation back then.
I think the first time meditation came into my recognition was watching the moving “What’s Love Got to do with it”, Tina Turner’s story.  The movie showed that as she healed from her domestic abuse she became a Buddhist and meditated before a statue of Buddha.  At the time I could not imagine any reason why someone would choose to adopt a foreign religion.  I was not practicing my own Catholicism at the time but weren’t those eastern religions archaic, all about war and sex, Jesus had brought us past all that, hadn’t he?
Oh how we have grown.  Look at all the ideas that are part of our cultural consciousness now.   Understanding of Buddha as a great spirit and teacher like Jesus.  Realizing the tribal cultures were more sustainable, caring, and fair to their people; they weren’t the savages prior generations called them.
We are waking up.  So many more people are caring for the way we treat the earth.  The internet and social media is just in its infancy of bringing a voice to the masses.  Public opinion and majority considerations are now being collected by petitions started by individuals to make government aware of real views and not just those assumed by politicians or swayed by lobbyists.  Aid and activism are now being directed to places where majority votes think is is most needed.
Thus far these new methods have been utilized by the young and more liberal sects of society.  Hopefully these methods can continue to support compassion and a loving society and not shift into just another media method to promote fear and control of power.
I will continue to see the good, to hope, and to pray for a “return to LOVE”.