A Litany to Our World’s Destruction

By Claire B. Crawford, Ph.D., Columnist

The world feels heavy, burdened by its own contradictions that threaten to fracture it. Some days, the sky appears bruised; my body trembles, and my vision blurs at headlines that fill my heart with grief. In such moments, I struggle to decide whether to speak, to pray, or to tremble.

I think of the Earth itself. The Earth is heating up, and you hear her exhale for respite and relief. The Earth joins us in a collective sigh as we search for our breath. The Earth feels us struggling to breathe. There is grief in watching our planet attempt to correct the harm caused by human error—a rupture between creation and responsibility.

I think of the children navigating a deteriorating world. They witness our fear, participate in emergency drills replacing literacy class at school, endure hunger at home, and are exposed to violence at every turn. They are taught to become numb to the world before experiencing its wonder. Innocence and imagination are disrupted by gunfire, fires, and floods. These children will inherit the world’s anxieties without adequate resources to address them. Their lives are exchanged for policy, with convenience serving as the shield.

I think of conspiracy masquerading as the people’s choice, democracy. Our body politic is wounded by our hopelessness, silence, and tolerance for violence. I lie awake hoping that harm won’t come too close, but it feels unavoidable. The public square is a hostile breeding ground for division and dissonance; truth and facts are disputed in favor of opinion. Our capacity as a community is eroding; our civic commitments to protect each other, as our freedoms are tied together, are no longer realized. Institutions profit, and we, the people, are simply pawns in the game of protecting the top 1%.

I think of the slow tension of injustice and peace, numbing us into surrendering ourselves to violence as normal. Our minds are caught up in thirty-second feeds that trap our thoughts. The burden of deception is wearing on our spirits. Our sense of outrage numbed by the violence we watch in loops, the demand to live in a politics of care eroding.

The world is cracking. How do we mourn the world and not let its crisis become a mirror into our daily lives? We lament to reorient ourselves towards our collective responsibility. We lament to survive, to breathe, and to love each other for just another day. Possibility is held in our hands, our words, our power to change with each other. Another world is possible, the words I recite when I need a reminder. The words are an invitation to build, to tend to my wounds, to love, and to act now as part of that world I know is possible.

One truth I do know: we have survived destruction before.  We have created life in the cracks of the world’s destruction. We carry a blueprint for resiliency in our collective memory.

In this season of falling apart, my prayer is:

Teach us to grieve without letting it harden our hearts. Teach us to name what is broken without it changing our capacity to dream. Teach us to live beyond the destruction and lean into our call to build a world for all. May every mumble and every ache be towards the world that needs to be.