I forgive the world its agonies:

Its beheadings and drone attacks, public bombings and domestic slaughters, grinding chronic diseases and soul-destroying addictions.

I forgive the world its unfairness and cruelties: its widespread poverty and pockets of accumulated wealth, sexual predation and gender discrimination, child slavery and abuse.

I forgive the world its paradoxical march of progress: its technologies that make life better and worse, its psychologies that explain and obscure, its medicines that cure and create dependencies.

I forgive the world its fleeting beauties: the progress of youth into death, the slow crumbling of mountains and the melting of ice caps, the serenity of great landscapes violated by earthquakes, volcanoes and encroaching pollution.

I forgive the world all its stark contrasts: its great compassion and withering selfishness, its passions and depressions, its surpassing wisdom and mind-numbing stupidity.

Most of all, I forgive my splintered visions of a world that surpasses my comprehension.

May I let the world be without my condemnation, but not without my care—may I learn to see more wholly or failing that, at least more helpfully.

May I somehow remember to look with love upon all things and, in that changed vision, see a world transformed.

 ~

Relephant read:

Heal Ourselves, Heal Our World.

Author: D. Patrick Miller

Editor: Ashleigh Hitchcock

Photo: flickr, flickr