THE REPAIR OF THE EARTH [Sat, 8-29-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—THE REPAIR OF THE EARTH [Sat, 8-29-25]

 

For as long as I can remember, I felt that I was responsible for the life of anyone I met, making sure they were safe and happy and… well, alive.

Strangely, even after I had acquired a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge about such things, I was remarkably unaware of that motivation, probably because of my profession. I mean, preachers are supposed to take care of everyone, aren’t they, all the way into eternity?

If I thought about it consciously, I charged my obsession with creating a life for everyone to my call from God and to my ordination vows.

No, I think my feeling of responsibility for others, my charge, if you will, preceded my call to preach. So where did that obligation to create life for everyone I met, where did it come from?

One of the frustrating things about old age is that every time you gain a significant insight about yourself, the origin is shrouded in mystery, almost always before your conscious awareness. But I think there is an answer in the Kabbalah.

Kabbalah is the mystical expression of Judaism, mystical meaning direct contact with the holy. In the Kabbalah, this feeling of obligation to others is referred to as Tikun Olam, the repair of the world.

It’s not surprising to me that my original and continuing impulse is Tikun Olam, which in the Kabbalah is the restoration of life to wholeness, the re-creation of life as it is meant to be, in Love. I have always been aware of the presence of God, not in a touchy-feely way, not in a surrounded by light way, not in a hearing voices way, but simply as awareness, like someone beside me, and just a little behind, just out of my peripheral vision, is looking with me through the window at the world. [Yes, I talked about this in the column for 2-24-25]

I think we are all born with Tikkun Olam, just as we are all born with its opposite, Original Sin. John Wesley called it Prevenient [preventing] Grace. Popularly, we refer to it simply as “conscience.”

Original Sin is the concern for self, over all others, the desire to satisfy our own needs and wants without regard to others. It has many sub-categories: greed, lust, rapacity, gluttony, etc. Preventing Grace and conscience are good words to express the force within that opposes Original Sin, but I like Tikkun Olam because it is translated as “the repair of the earth.”

Tikkun Olam isn’t just doing good, like prevenient grace and conscience urge us to do. It is the repair of what is already broken.

Repair is such a visual, hands-on word. It’s what a carpenter does…oh, wasn’t Jesus a carpenter…

John Robert McFarland

Just a reminder that I now call this column Beyond Winter because I’m so old, I’m not even in the winter years anymore.