CIVIL REVOLUTION: WORLDVIEW

We all have worldviews – the framework by which we receive information and experience and then interpret and act upon them. “We look for meaning and purpose in every event, activity, and relationship in our lives. We never stop trying to figure life out. What is the point? What does it all mean? The answers we give ourselves, the meanings we give to our thoughts, circumstances, relationships, and actions, move us in specific directions.”*  But these worldviews are not static. The more we interact with other people, cultures, and ideas, our worldviews evolve, change, and adapt. Most of the time, these variations in how we decipher the world are subtle; to see them with clarity, we would need something akin to a time-lapse photography of our thought processes. As the historian James Andrew Froude wrote, “The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by under a singular and peculiar trial.”** 

Other times, our worldviews undergo sudden, violent change – like a volcanic eruption shifting the tectonic plates of our very beings. This happened to me at age nineteen when I became a Christian. This paper rests upon that foundation – the truths taught from Genesis to Revelation. As Father Greg Boyle so aptly stated, “...it would not be possible for me to present these stories apart from God, Jesus, compassion, kinship, redemption, mercy, and our common call to delight in one another. If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.”*** 

God’s Word, the Bible, is meant to inform and transform, to be relevant to how life is lived, especially pertaining to our relationships with fellow humans. Yet, whoever has known me for any length of time over these forty-three years of following Jesus can attest to the need for that time-lapse photography to see the growth, the change, and the transformation in how I relate to others – but, trust me, it is there. You, however, do not need to be a Christian in order to benefit from the principles contained throughout these pages, though that is obviously my hope and prayer for all who take and read. Seriously, who doesn’t want to live in a world where one’s neighbors are loving towards each other, where lack of civility and civil unrest is at a bare minimum rather than normative, a place where no lives matter less than others?

Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills in this way: “We’ve just forgotten that we belong to each other.” Kinship [a blood relationship] is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen. With kinship as the goal, other essential things fall into place; without it, no justice, no peace. I suspect that were kinship our goal, we would no longer be promoting justice—we would be celebrating it.

Video: What is Kinship?  

Music: My Family

* Timothy S. Lane, How People Change, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2008

**James Andrew Froude in Spiritual Leadership, J. Oswald Sanders, Chicago, IL: Moody, 2007, 134

*** Father Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, Detroit, MI: Free Press, 2011, Kindle – location 81 (italics added)

****Father Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, Detroit, MI: Free Press, 2011, Kindle – location 2351



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