What if we consider America’s gun problem as a spiritual disease?

What if we were to regard all problems as, essentially, disturbances of our spirit, and that of the collective spirit?

What if, as mystic Rumi says, "Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots."

Is it possible that there is a greater, deeper societal disturbance that our children have intuited? After all, as we know, children learn not from what we say, but what we do.

Might young, impressionable, vulnerable, more pure souls, our children, have picked up on a profound violence in the air that they, in turn, internalize and respond to?

If America were one home, one family, might it be easier to ask: How are these children being raised that they behave this way? What damage has been inflicted upon their psyche, what examples have they been shown?

We hear a lot about mental illness, lately, another malady not without spiritual roots--and I am reminded of Nietzsche's half-joking remark: 'In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.'

Again, how is our collective insanity, as adults, affecting our children? We might turn to Martin Luther King Jr. wise words: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

We may ask ourselves, in this context, what injustice are we guilty of as a society, at home, abroad and in the world-at-large, that war has manifested itself in our streets, and erupted at schools? How are we breeding death, incubating spiritual dis-ease?

There is no lasting peace that can be built upon injustice, our conscience will not permit it, nor will existence. To quote MLK once again, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

How, then, might we try to recover our collective peace, what spiritual truths must we try to remember and practice?

Mother Theresa offers this answer: "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."

"Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired."

(Images: Pixabay)

For an extended meditation on this, please, read Our Wounds Are Peepholes ... To See the World Wound — A Plea for Healing & Global Citizenship