Open Highways, Big Skies & Islands

I remember when I had no faith. It was a lonely time. Cruising through life, with its wide open highways and big skies, as the only person in the car is a little scary. If we're honest most of us don't know what to do if we break down on one of those wide open highways or if a massive storm blows in across those big skies.

When I was young I figured it didn't matter. No breakdown could not be fixed, no storm could not be weathered. I was naive enough to believe that this was my way of thinking, instead of the way I had been programmed to think as part of the world in which I was growing up in.  As I got older and met people from other cultures I began to realize that Western Society - though special in a lot of ways - is very weak when it comes to building a sense of community, of shared values and of common efforts.

I have now come to realize that the "go it alone", the "my way or the highway", the "be your own man and others be damned" mentality that we still have in this great country of ours can be a dangerous thing indeed. It's an individualistic concept pumped into us at an early age. We are told that the best way to win the "wars of life" is to count on ourselves alone. Ironic isn't it that this is the very opposite approach used by the military, who fight real wars, with real lives at stake. No. From the first day of boot camp they erase all that silly "me, me, me" stuff and hammer away at loyalty to things outside of self (unit, country, God). Why? Because the military knows that for every Washington there are a hundred thousand Custer's, and most of us will make one last stand after another before we die in the vain hope that things will change if people will just listen to us.

Some of us get past that when we get older, some of us not. A lucky few will figure this out way early in life. The truth of the matter is we were not created to go it alone. We did not create ourselves, we do not create each day and even our own endings our mostly out of our control.  I firmly believe that the evil in this world that takes deepest root is that little whisper which convinces us to stay within ourselves, to not share our dreams , or our hurts, or our burdens. The quote "No man is an island entire of itself" is a famous one, and for good reason, and that John Donne would say later in that very same same poem "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee" is no coincidence.