Three friends were walking together when they came to a village by a stream. Quickly they saw that the whole village was sick and dying, even the animals and the fish in the stream. One friend with medical skills quickly began to take care of the sick people. Soon after, the second friend began building a filter to purify the poisoned water.
The next morning, these two looked up from their work to see their other friend walking away up the stream with several villagers. “Where are you going?” they called out. “We need your help!” “I know,” he replied. “That is why we are walking upstream to find and fix the source of this sickness.”
A Parable
The evidence grows clear that our world is suffering a great sickness. More and more people lack the basic essentials of life: decent, affordable housing; food, water and energy security. Rising homelessness displays the bleeding edge of epidemics in loneliness, depression, substance addiction and injustice. At the same time, our global environment is signaling that the very life support systems on which we all depend are being taxed beyond what they can sustain.
Things must change.
Our Suffering World
While much good and vital work is being done to address each of these challenges, the truth is that more treatment of symptoms can only take us so far. We need upstream solutions that will address our suffering at its source.
To put it simply, we need the deep, loving, intergenerational communities centered in God’s life that have always nourished human life at its best. In such communities people naturally learn to care for themselves, others, and the world around them. Strong community stops our sickness at its source.
But how can we reclaim such community in our time? Though we may want deep community, most of us are generations away from experience with this kind of interdependent, intergenerational lifestyle. We will need new vision, new skills, new commitments: we’ll need to learn a better way to live.
