365 Blessings to Heal Myself and the World
To say the world is going through some challenges is the understatement of the year. Never in history have we ever collectively faced such a challenge on a world level, despite yesterday’s discovery (November 9) of a hopefully efficient vaccine. We are going to have to totally revamp an economic model that has now displayed its huge weaknesses. And many other challenges face us, some of which we have not started doing anything radical about (the environment). So how can one write about trust in such hugely uncertain times?
A deeply inspired spiritual writer and thinker of the latter half of the 19th century, Mary Baker Eddy, once wrote that “Infinite Mind creates and governs all, from the mental molecule to infinity.” Her premise was that we should never trust the material appearances, and that despite everything these appearances are screaming, some amazing plan, some infinitely loving Providence was always pulling the strings for our good, be it individually or collectively. In my book The Gentle Art of Blessing, I tell the incredible story of this spiritual healer during the terrible genocide that shook Rwanda for three months in 1994, (during which 800’000 died in the most terrible massacres, with bands of killers entering houses and cutting people up with machetes.) His house was invaded in the middle of the night by a band of blood-thirsty, screaming killers and he managed to hold them at bay and completely pacify them with silent spiritual affirmations.
In 1987, I undertook a 14,000 km trip through over 100 villages in the course of which I interviewed over 1300 farmers (individually and in groups) to write a positive book on Africa (published in 1989 with the title Listening to Africa), using the largest network of grass roots groups that then existed on the continent and of which I was one of the founders. I had promised to visit the head of one of these farmers groups in an extremely remote area of Mali in West Africa. My friend had told me that to get to his tiny village, I had to take the Bamako-Dakar train, and ask the engine driver to stop at a given location where a straw roof over a rough bench constituted the « station ». I was to send him a telegram (no faxes at the time) 10 days in advance to warn him of my arrival and send it to his postal box he emptied once a week in the nearest town 20 miles away. During the whole trip I was hoping the train would stop at the right place. It did. My friend was there.
But he had never received my cable!
I call that the work of an all-loving Providence – or this infinite Mind. Had he not been there what could I have done? The only thing would have been walk along the tracks, in an extremely hot temperature, with no food or water, hoping the hyenas would not eat me or that I would not collapse of exhaustion before arriving there (I carried a very heavy rucksack) .
I call trust the ultimate spiritual attitude. Because either the creation of the universe is a random accident of some most bizarrely functioning reality, or it is the creation of some incredibly loving Being… The latter choice gives one’s life more meaning.
And it enables one to function, always, with total trust, be it collectively or individually.
Pierre Pradervand
