God's New Year's wish

Dear Lord, as we celebrate the Feast of Your Epiphany, we desperately search for signs of your presence amidst the pervading gloom. As a member of the human race, I humbly report to You tidbits from various media of how we, humanity, fared the preceding year:

Global recession and worsening poverty: We are bracing ourselves for the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

• Stockmarkets worldwide have lost $14 trillion worth of shares in 2008, the worst on record.

• The mighty US economy has been brought to its knees: in March, Bear Stearns was taken over by rival JP Morgan and Chase; in July Indymac, one of the biggest mortgage lenders, folded-up; in September, the US government rescued behemoth mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; a week later Lehman Brothers collapsed and Merrill Lynch was absorbed by another bank.

• Inflation in Zimbabwe has hit 11,200,000 percent, so that a loaf of bread there costs 1.6 trillion Zimbabwe dollars.

• 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 per day. “The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income” (www.globalissues.org)

• 2.6 billion people in developing countries lack basic sanitation.

• More than 1.8 million children die each year due to diarrhea.

Civil unrest and war: Since the emergence of homo sapiens 195,000 years ago, we have gone to the moon and mapped the human genome, but we still have not learned to co-exist in peace. The world still resounds with gunshots, bombs and missiles. 

• Ideological and cultural differences continue to take a heavy toll in Israel-Palestinian territories, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Mexico.

• Lesser known conflicts are causing death and destruction in Kayin and Burma, PKK and Turkey, Jammu and Kashmir in India, Russia and Chechnya, the Maghreb insurgency in Mauritania and Morocco.

• Sadly, while wars between peoples have multiple inter-weaving causes, religious intolerance plays a pivotal role in the conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims in Afghanistan; Serbian Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, Muslims, Indigenous and Christians in Côte d’Ivoire, Christians and Muslims in Cyprus, Macedonia, Ambon in Indonesia, Kurdistan, East Timor and here in the Philippines; Protestants and Catholics in Ireland; Christians, Animists and Muslims in Nigeria and Uganda; Buddhists and Communists in Tibet.

Environmental destruction and global warming: While it took You, Lord, more than 13 billion years to create the human species since the birth of the cosmos, it has taken us less than the past hundred years to develop the capacity to annihilate the entire world. 

• Each day, we are destroying 375 square kilometers of forestland.

• We have already devastated 80% of the earth’s original forests.

• 75% of the oceans’ fish stocks have been over-exploited.

• We have already ravaged 27% of the world’s coral reefs and 70% would have been destroyed within 40 years.

• Within the next 30 years, possibly 20% of all species that took millions of years to evolve will become extinct.

• With the multiple ways we are destroying the eco-balance of the world, is it any wonder that it hailed in Kenya last Sept. 3 and snowed in Las Vegas on Dec. 16.

• Oh, and let’s not forget: according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the US, Russia, China, France, Israel, UK, India, Pakistan and North Korea have an estimated 20,168 nuclear warheads enough to annihilate all life forms in the earth several times over.

Desperately, Humanity

Dear Humanity, your State-of-the-World report culled from various websites has caused me a terrible migraine. I cannot solve all your problems for you. I have shared with you alone My precious attributes, such as rationality and freedom, for you to nurture the world I have created for you. 

Nonetheless, allow Me to share this anecdote: when a forest is flooded, animals of all shapes and sizes scramble to an elevated area. And there predator and prey huddle in anxiety, but tolerant of each other. Predator and prey co-exist because of their survivor’s instinct. 

Perhaps all of you can learn a thing or two from My lower creatures. Perhaps you can learn to co-exist not out of instinct, but of free choice. Solidarity is what I pray for all of you. Hopefully the anxiety caused by the global economic recession and global warming will compel you to work together to reverse the damages you have caused Mother Earth and one another. Perhaps your cultural and religious differences are not to be homogenized, but tolerated, respected and celebrated. Perhaps as Isaiah prophesied the lion and the lamb will one day lay side by side. So perhaps, as Paul proclaimed rich and poor, powerful and weak, man and woman, Christian and Muslim will be no more. 

I pray your State-of-the-World report next year will give me less of a migraine. Rest assured of my blessings upon all!

Lovingly, God