Pax et Bonum

Fr dear Fr: Recently it seems that the only luminous voice that stands out for peace in a world going mad, mad, mad is the Dalai Llama of Peru if not the Dalai Lama of Tibet, how to explain this as a christian parish?

Peace, as the philosopher of Africa reminds us, is not just the absence of war, but a constant willing of the mind to erase the causes and fonts of conflict and the ever present spirit of forgiveness for life’s hurts as willed and exorted to by the Christ-messiah while he was alive on earth. It is not therefore just the absence of something, of some force in the world, it is the constant will to cooperate with the forces of life in the universe. So teaches the philosopher from Carthage in Africa. And isn’t it somewhat sad that the only person that stands out in the modern world for peace and for emotional reconciliation in social media, is His Holiness, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, leaving aside the other Buddhist-Catholic Synthesis one at Macchu Pinchu in Peru. Yes, the Dalai Lama of Tibet reminds all his sons and daughters in a new world, with it must be said a slight word of warning, that in the age of social media, these great programmes of the internet have a strong and at times over-riding tendency to over-emotionalise every debate and to divide each audience simply into “them and us”, into the goodies and the baddies in a highly simplistic quasi-visible, as if this were a simple exercise to identify, rather than a difficult and complex one, since the line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human very human heart. Emotional debates, emotional responses, sudden responses, and the peace of the world overnight is suddenly threatened. If Sir Ian had not invented this scenario in his book “Tomorrow Never Dies”, it would have been invented by all the denizens of anarchy over there in Hong Kong Harbour itself. So the social media programmes and algorithms have a tendency to inflate emotions, jockey for acceptance, pioneer outrage and generally foment division and conflict - a recipe in this Artificial Intelligence world for international disaster and war, until we all get down to bridling the internet more adroitly and exercising our prudences over these social media forums we all belong to. Peace - a rare gift, and one which must be seized with both hands. It cannot be left to danger in thin air without our interventions.