REVELATION-final1

DAY 39(Tuesday, 27 May 2014)75 DAYS OF HUNGER AND LONELINESSIt is DAY 39 of my hunger strike and something extraordinary is happening to my body; it isflourishing during this regime of absolute privation, so much so that I am bursting with energyand good health and a sense of inner happiness. Everything seems to be in perfect alignmenttoday – body, mind, spirit – and out of this come so many rewards: spiritual, physical andmental. Am I defying nature or is nature allowed to work its miracles now that I have abandonedso many earthly comforts? Whatever the answer, I am enjoying the rewards and am grateful forbeing able to experience this bliss and tranquility, this sense of liberation from materialconstraints, all the while being fully engaged and engorged in the world’s problems.I did my prayer early in the morning and on the way to St. Peter’s square I thought about theprecarious situation of religion, the dilemma all religions find themselves in due to theconflicting tug of material realities and immaterial ideals. People need an anchor in their lives, arefuge from the turbulence of life, a sanctuary from their problems, and want faith to beunchanging, immutable, a paradise island in the ocean of life. They want answers and certainty.To give them this sense of artificial stability, religious leaders have fashioned their faiths intosomething they can never be – a permanent, enduring, ageless place in a forever changinguniverse.Stability does not come from immutability but from adaptability in a forever changing universe.What was right and useful a thousand years ago is no longer valid or helpful today. And so inevery age there comes a time when we must reevaluate and rewrite the rules by which we live.And with every revision we build on the wisdom of previous generations and readjust ourcivilization to the requirements of the universe, to the ongoing evolution, to the rush of the timespacecontinuum in whose stream we flow.If you are a man on a beach and see coming towards you a tsunami you don’t stand still and hopefor God or the power of prayer to save you. What you do is run for dear life and for high groundand grab whoever and whatever you can with you. God helps those who help themselves, notthose who expect God to compensate for their stupidity, or laziness, or ignorance.We have come to a point in our history when we must help ourselves or be swept under by atsunami of unprecedented proportions; a tsunami of our own making because we have tried toarrest time by our artificial constructs; constructs or religion, of economics, of politics, of culturethat have become ill-suited and at odds with the relentless flow of time, whose masters we arenot and never will be, but that we must ride in the only direction it races, the future.As I close my eyes and lift my hands in prayer position on the hallowed grounds of St. Peter’ssquare, with the warmth of the stones below my bare feet, a breeze in my hair and the sun on my199