The Global Conversation

Tag: Pope

  • First the Pope…then Pat Robertson

    In light of some recent unexpected statements made by some highly influential people in our world, I have been exploring more deeply the underpinnings of why we believe what we believe, and what it takes to create significant change in long and tightly held belief systems.   What is the aftereffect globally when someone who has the massive outreach of the Pope or the controversial but well-known televangelist Pat Robertson publicly speaks outside of the box which holds their traditional points of view?

    In an article published by The Huffington Post, “The 83-year-old televangelist [Pat Robertson] sat down on Sunday for the ‘Bring It Online’ advice portion of his Christian Broadcasting Network show, ‘The 700 Club.’ A viewer named David wrote in asking how he should refer to two transgender females who work in his office and have legally changed their genders. Instead of criticizing the trans individuals, Robertson approached the situation in a seemingly level-headed manner.”

    “‘I think there are men who are in a woman’s body,’ he said. ‘It’s very rare. But it’s true — or women that are in men’s bodies — and that they want a sex change. That is a very permanent thing, believe me, when you have certain body parts amputated and when you have shot up with various kinds of hormones. It’s a radical procedure. I don’t think there’s any sin associated with that. I don’t condemn somebody for doing that.’”

    “He went on to say he would ‘question the validity’ of someone who just says, ‘Well I’m really a woman’ because you ‘don’t count somebody as female unless they really are, or male unless they really are.’”

    “When his co-host said the viewer doesn’t know the intentions or medical history of his co-workers, Robertson rebutted, ‘It’s not for you to decide or to judge.’”

    Yes, Mr. Robertson’s unpredictable statements are still interwoven between layers of intolerance and judgment, but couple his message with the most-recent comments by Pope Francis which have been making spectacular headlines around the world where he told reporters “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” I am just wondering what might be happening here.

    When the people who have been placed collectively at the forefront of large groups of people — whose numbers easily reach into the millions — change their points of view about long-held beliefs, or when they express new thoughts about old ideas, how does this impact the belief systems of the people who associate themselves closely with those groups?  What is the ripple effect?  Do large numbers of people “change their minds” because someone now told them to, whether that be for “better” or “worse”?  How do we know when someone is a messenger versus a manipulator?

    Of course, we know that truth, real truth, is a knowing that emanates from deep, deep within.  So why is it, then, that so many of us experience our lives as a journey of seeking and finding, gathering our truth from places that exist external to us, perhaps even in the words of someone else’s truth, ignoring the accuracy of our own internal compass and pushing painfully past the true nature of our feelings?

    Imagine a world where each and every one of us stood in the light of our own truth, where we didn’t say “yes” when we meant “no”; where we didn’t say “no” when we really truly wanted to say “yes.”

    Perhaps in that kind of world we wouldn’t have parents giving birth to children on Saturday, July 20, and waiting until Wednesday, July 24, to name their newborn child, a precious new life, so they can find out what Prince William and Kate Middleton named their child first and follow suit accordingly.

    Maybe in that kind of world it would be highly unlikely that some of the highest-rated television programs would continue to be “reality” shows which depict the “reality” someone else is choosing for us instead of the one we have the ability to create ourselves.  Perhaps we would simply not desire to watch television at all…unless we do.

    Maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t be shooting people in our own neighborhoods because they look different than we do.  Do you think it is possible that within the space and light of our own truth we would not ever feel moved to hurt or oppress another because we would understand at a very deep level that the “truths” we have been told, the stories we have made up about each other or been handed down, the ones which cause us to hurt each other in the first place, are simply not true?

    And perhaps in that kind of a world people in positions of power and influence, such as Pope Francis and, yes, even Pat Robertson, will continue to break free from the bonds of history, tradition, and sameness to demonstrate that change, significant and lasting change, is not only a remote possibility, but it is something which is actually taking place right here, right now.

    I’m just wondering how the tide of change will roll onto the shore of Humanity in the wake of some of these surprisingly refreshing and recently made comments.   If we are going to live in a world where we continue to adopt someone else’s truth as our own, maybe we should be paying close attention right now to the new “truths” that are yearning to be heard and the new “story” that is desiring to be written.

    (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation. She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • The Italian Tsunami: we are loving it!

    The wind of change is blowing on Italy. Following the Pope’s step down, on February 24, 2013, the Italian political elections took place with astonishing results.

    The M5S or “5 star movement,” guided by the standing comedian Beppe Grillo, has unexpectedly become the first political force in the Italian Parliament, with 25.55% of the votes.

    It is extraordinary that one person, a comedian, who has for more than 20 years brought to the attention of his audience the most incredible facts that were affecting people in Italy as well as in the rest of the world, is now leading the most powerful political movement in Italy. Millions of people have started to support the 5 Star Movement, guided by common sense and the desire to change, independently of any ideology or political affiliation. Internet, with all its social networks, and the very effective use of streaming TV, have been the simple, democratic and revolutionary tools used by them.

    These are citizens who, out of generosity, have chosen to use some of their time and resources to give their contribution to the rest of the people in their country. In the last 5 years or so, Beppe Grillo and his Movement have provided independent and transparent information, which is much needed, given the fact that all of the media, including newspapers and TVs, are owned and manipulated by a few individuals and interest groups.

    By creating a spontaneous movement for change, Grillo has inspired people to participate in the reconstruction of the country, by taking responsibility and giving a new sense of democracy and citizenship based on transparency and communication. At the moment, Beppe Grillo and the M5S are the most followed streaming TV on YouTube. They, like Obama in the U.S., are requesting that internet be made freely available to every citizen in Italy, as this is the main instrument of knowledge and information, and free right to information should be a birthright for everybody, like the right to have a house and a job, and a minimum income if temporarily out of job.

    Unfortunately, all of these fundamental rights are not guaranteed for the majority of people in Italy. The Italian social and economic situation is very dramatic. Many families are struggling to get to the end of the month and small businesses are closing down every minute mostly because of heavy taxation, which has reached 70%. But rather than complaining and just playing the victim, M5S have taken action to start changing this situation, with small but significant steps.

    For example, M5S representatives who have been elected in the regional parliament of Sicily have voluntarily cut their own salaries by 70%, creating a fund to sustain the small and medium-sized local businesses. The candidates who have been elected to the National Parliament less than 2 weeks ago will do the same, and there are 163 of them!

    One of the main points of the M5S electoral program is to guarantee a minimum salary for everyone. People should not be left alone in this difficult moment, and because there is no money left in the government funds, the M5S is proposing to cut the pensions of those people who get up to 90 thousand euros a month. A little sacrifice is asked of those who have more. By fixing a ceiling of 4000 euros a month for pensions in the next 5 years, the remaining money can be given to those who need it most.

    By reducing and cutting the costs of the Italian huge and useless bureaucracy, much needed funds can be made available to those who really need it. Rather than cutting education and health funds, a rationalisation of the current expenditure would create, according to the M5S, enough funds to alleviate the dismal poverty of those who have less. These are just few examples of the many proposals M5S is making to tackle the Italian economic crisis.

    According to Beppe Grillo, if everyone will do his/her part in the next 5 years, change will occur faster and with the least effort. He is inviting the population to take responsibility and participate in any possible way, a bit like Obama did in his presidential speech in January 2009. One of the slogans of the M5S is: we are the State and everyone counts as One.

    Everyone would agree that this is the true meaning of Politics and the State. Politics does not have to be complicated, in fact, it is very simple, only if there is the willingness to address and resolve the real problems of the majority of the population. It is another thing when the politicians are trying to defend the interests of a minority of the population: that’s when they start to write laws and rules that are impossible to follow, to create a jargon that is impossible to understand, and a cast that is difficult to remove. But this is no longer acceptable: humanity has grown up, change is already happening, and we are loving it!!

    marielle guillermo2(Mariella holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Modena Italy. She also is a Reiki Master and founded a Meditation Centre in her hometown in Matera, Italy. She is currently living in Brighton with her two children and her partner Guillermo. Guillermo has worked successfully in the IT & Electronics field covering from developing to marketing roles in Argentina Italy and Switzerland. He graduated from the Silva Life Method in 1994 and has been interested in healing and spirituality since then. He currently works in Brighton as a carer for people with learning disabilities.)

    (If you would like to contribute an article you have authored to the Guest Column, please submit it to our Managing Editor, Lisa McCormack, for possible publication in this space. Not all submissions can be published, due to the number of submissions and sometimes because of other content considerations, but all are encouraged. Send submissions to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com. Please label the topic: “Guest Column.”)

  • Are we bigger than our bodies?

    Pope Benedict XVI said, no, we are not in his annual Christmas message to the world, one of his most important speeches of the year, where he once again proclaimed that same-sex marriage is destroying “the essence of humanity.”

    “People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being,” he said at the Vatican. “They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”

    He further went on to say, “When freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God.”

    Could it be, as Pope Benedict suggests, that life truly is a shallow existence of “what you get is what you get”?

    What would the Pope tell a child born a hermaphrodite, a condition in which someone is born with both female and male sex organs – a body given to him by God, by the way? Too bad? You deserve no one? Or perhaps the contrary: “Lucky you, you can have a relationship with whoever you want”?

    And what about the Pope himself who has been “defined” by God as a male, given a penis, and yet chooses not to fall in line with that “identity” and chooses not to express romantic love to a female and chooses not to enter into intimate relationships? According to his own definition, is he not “denying” his own “nature” that God intended for him to share in intimacy with a woman and to reproduce? Is he not participating in his own freedom and creativity in an effort to self-define who he is and what he believes about why he is here?

    Aren’t we ALL doing that very same thing?

    Why are we being told to feel bound to our physicality when it comes to S-E-X, but celebrated when we demonstrate our capacity for greatness beyond our bodies in other ways?

    My friend, Mark, whose body is partially paralyzed and riddled with unrelenting pain – again, the body given to him by God — climbed 108 floors of the Sears Tower in Chicago…and plans to do it again this year. I imagine it would be quite difficult to find anyone who would say Mark has “stripped himself of his dignity” by creating a new definition of himself that expanded far beyond his physicality.

    But again, I get it. We are talking about the unspeakable, the shameful, the only-talked-about-in-a-whisper topic of S-E-X.

    However, the Pope’s declaration of “Gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, is a threat to world peace” appears to be falling upon deaf ears as the Constitutional Court in largely Roman Catholic Spain upheld the law legalizing gay marriage last month, the British government announced it will introduce a bill next year legalizing gay marriage, and in France, President Francois Hollande has said he would enact his “Marriage for Everyone” plan within a year of taking office last May.

    These are the visionaries, the writers of our New Cultural Story, the mold-shatterers and rule-breakers who do not believe in a God that makes mistakes. They are not buying into the twisted idea that God would create something so extraordinary and then make it wrong.

    What these New Cultural Story global authors do believe in is Love. They do not believe same-sex marriage is destroying the essence of humanity, but rather that it IS the essence of humanity. They believe that love transcends everything and is denied to no one, that Love that has no rules and is certainly not reserved for only a select few to be experienced in a select way, and that the biggest continuing threat to world peace is not found, as Pope Benedict suggested, within the loving union of a same-sex partnership, but rather in a belief system that embraces and promotes a vengeful and judgmental God.

    (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation. She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team atwww.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)