BUILD NEW PATHS OF HOPE

Marcela Gereda – Guatemala Chapter

Recently, a collective “trip” began in various parts of the world—an inner journey to the center of us. Perhaps it is a descent to Xibalbá (Mayan underworld), to go through our own hells to get out of there victorious, knowing that the answers we have been looking for are within us. 

Various sociologists, philosophers and anthropologists who have studied today’s society describe it as “the society of the Ego”. As a society, we cross ourselves and we swear to love our neighbor as ourselves, but in cultural practice we allow individual interest to prevail over collective interest. We take this “save yourself who can” to its ultimate consequences. 

Advertising and the media not only invite the individual experience, but they posit putting the individual interest before the collective as a value. Then the culture of placing the “I” in first, second, and third place becomes socially acceptable.

Criminologist Anthony Platt has observed that crimes in the streets of Latin America are not only the result of extreme poverty. They are also the fruit of individualistic ethics.

Faced with the disease that rules the world today, things seem to be different. We need contact, hugging, meeting the infinity of the Other. That Other which we are also. 

We were going down the wrong path building a runaway individualistic world. Today, in different voices, we are proposing to retake the community sense of life, because without the collective we do not exist. The coronavirus reminds us of the benefits of putting collective well-being above the immediate satisfaction of this culture of the Self First. 

At the ecological level, the need to reduce greenhouse gases has been coming—a forced low-carbon economy. For the first time in many years and in the face of imminent danger from the spread of the virus, governments are valuing science more than economics, life over production. 

What is the meaning of the city without the soul of people? What is the meaning of the water in the fountain if there is no one to listen to its fall? What is the meaning of the world if we do not fill it with love? The coronavirus reminds us that the meaning of our existence is collective and not separate from that of the rest of the species.  

May this inner journey remind us that although social life is on hiatus, spring continues. That makes us build a path of fireflies. In this collective internal journey, may we all sow light, may we return to the sense of community, to remembering that we need each other. May the most beautiful part of this internal collective journey be yet to come. 

Let this virus be the virus of transformation and human consciousness. May it be love that moves us and may we recognize God in me, in you, in all on earth, and in all that is alive. 

*Translated from Marcela Gereda’s article which appeared in No Tan Lejos del Horizonte’s COVID-19 issue.

NOTE: This article was published in the September/October 2020 issue of Not So Far Afield.