my eutopia...

One of my daughter's final projects for school this year is to dream up and articulate a "eutopian society".  Her questions and our discussions have had me pondering this notion of eutopia.  Not an easy concept.

Today I was reading a book by none other than Bishop Desmond Tutu.  The chapter I was reading is called "God's Dream".  This is my eutopia...

"I have a dream," God says.  "Please help me to realize it.  It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts, when there will be more laughter, joy, and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing.  I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that my children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, my family."

Bishop Tutu goes on to say:
'In God's family, there are no outsiders.  All are insiders.  Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and tutsi, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian - all belong.'

And also...
'The wonderful thing about family is that you are not expected to agree about everything under the sun.  Show me a man and wife who have never disagreed and I will show you some accomplished fibbers. But those disagreements, pray God, do not usually destroy the unity of the family.  And so it should be with God's family.  We are not expected at all times to be unanimous or to have a consensus on every conceivable subject.  What is needed is to respect one another's points of view and not to impute unworthy motives to one another or to seek to impugn the integrity of the other.  Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another and cherish one another and seek the greater good of the other.
Another characteristic of the family is its willingness to share.  The early church went so far as to have its members selling their property, each refusing to claim as his exclusive properyt what had belonged to him before. They had all things in common.  When the one part suffered, the whole suffered with it, and when one part prospered, then the whole prospered wtih it.  There was a mutuality in the relationship in which all gave and all received.  In a happy family you don't receive in proportion to your input.  You receive in relation to your needs, the ones who make the least material contribution often being the ones who are most cared for - the young and the aged.'

And finally...
'Members of a family have a gentle and caring compassion for one another.  How I pray that we will open our eyes and see the real, true identity of each one of us, that this one is not a white or black, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim or Jew but a brother, a sister, and treat each other as such.  If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up in one another's, that we can be free only together, that we can survive only together, that we can be human only together, then a glorious world would come into being where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family, God's family.  In truth a transfiguration would take place.  God's dream would become a reality.'

I believe in God's dream.  I believe it is possible.  I believe it is beginning to happen already.