RECIPE FOR
REMAKING
A WORLD

Ingredients: ugliness, unfairness, suffering, poverty, terror, rage, sadness, etc. Most of which is no one’s fault, the cause being diffuse, shared, distributed, so that blame cannot be focally assigned. A majority of us are touched by these circumstances, and feel that there is nothing we can do, no one to get angry with.

1. Shift the bias by looking intentionally at the ugliness (fill in your ingredient of choice) Give it a second look. Pay no attention to your first reaction.

2. Perceiving the beauty in and behind the ugliness will come along with your interest in that ingredient. Is there not a authenticity, a rugged facticity in the pattern under consideration?

3. Attractive qualities can be found in unexpected places. Even in people. Looking with sympathy and openness is a style of looking, an art-form. A person or a circumstance that at first blush strikes us as uninteresting or worse, threatening—yields elements of appeal, something to work with. We have to stay with it.

4. Working with what we have at hand to work with, moving ahead, is the whole point. Don’t wait for a miracle, or a messiah to remake the world. That is our job with generosity and ingenuity.

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But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

— Jesus Christ