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Taking the high road
How reconciliation can happen on a personal and political level
We start a new year, and ask ourselves: what will it bring? A new pandemic? More inflation? Or new steps to overcome polarization? The war in Ukraine is still going on, 314 days as of January 1. In other parts of the world, people are suffering from violence, instability or civil war. Will we ever learn? Reconciliation requires active minds and hearts that are ready to forgive, and to learn from the past: we can reconcile with our personal past and with history, as we do on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Let us also disarm ourselves. “If one disarms oneself, if one dispossesses oneself, if one opens oneself to the love that makes all things new, then that love erases the bad past and makes for us a new time where everything is possible,” wrote the late Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras I (1886–1972). His words are as relevant today as ever.
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Kierkegaard viewed life as a dialectical progression in which we pass through different stages, but he also uses the term “existence-spheres.” The first is the esthetic; secondly, there is the ethical; and finally you have the religious dimension.