Days and seasons move on unperturbed — impermeable against the onslaught of modernity, which tries to seduce everything in its path with speed, with convenience and with the omnipresence of networks. Invisible networks both inside and outside cables, communicating with stations out in space and subjecting our lives to the instantaneousness of the century. An instantaneousness that makes slaves of our children and at a loss the generation that struggles to decode the dynamic of this faceless form of communication.

We stand powerless and watch as our children pass us right at the starting line when it comes to the challenges of modern technology. Our own dexterity with the knack for mending everything that breaks or falls apart within our living world — from the smallest screw to the finest piece of mending — turns out to add no value within the narrow scope of those who regard instantaneousness as the only precondition for meaningful survival. Google's logistics has already stored the right contact number for that.

Functional and physical contact with the material, and the influence it has on our resilience — physical and spiritual — is a lesson in the value of balance, without which neither nature nor the human being can survive. In the end, no disaster is so exceptional or so outlandish if we can link its cause to its effect. Our blood maintains the same balance in the form of a pH that can be measured. The body will mine its own calcium out of your bones just to obey this delicate balance, the one that stands between life and death. The spiritual bloodstream mines consequences that serve as warnings, in order to prevent the repetition of errors. Every reaction of a community that follows on an action gathers, collectively, into a larger impact. Sometimes a righteous person ends up in the path of such a consequence and suffers for no reason other than the decision, at that moment, to be in the wrong place.

We long for change — a visible difference that turns the weather, politics and the economy around. Shifts on that level, however, require the changing of paradigms, not the toppling of systems. The latter is a natural result, as proof of the former — a change of heart. The world outside us is not a reflection of what we do, but of who we are. The miracle must not happen outside us, but inside us. Every time we manage to act against our own nature, we perform a miracle. Just as the water, against its own nature, stopped flowing flat but stood up on end so that the Israelites could cross the Red Sea dry-footed. God sent His Son not to make good people of us, but His children.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer