Stability in a changing world: some tsunami anniversary thoughts
 

BY FAITH Ratnayake

ONE of life's basic needs is for stability; and like charity, it should begin at home. If our homes are places where characters are formed with humanity, compassion, tolerance and discipline, then we have perfect stability within our families.

But if personal characters have been damaged, stemming from parents who themselves come from distorted, dysfunctional homes and who exert this influence on their children, then we lack the basic tools to cope with family problems.

In an age where we face delinquent culture everywhere, we need help in returning to basics to realise our normal rightful duty to family and society.

Society as we know it today, is highly competitive and money-driven, deformed by corrupt politics and value-systems that deride honourable ethical and religious teachings. Audio-visual agencies spread suggestions and ideas to influence vulnerable people.

Fears of breaking moral laws are mocked and broken down. We have seen the numbers of youngsters, men, and women with their babies and young children, in remand jail, in prisons and reformatories. The cost in human and monetary terms is tremendous and horrifying for this small nation.

This predatory culture subverts our efforts to give our young people consistent, morally wholesome values, and the young tend to treat such efforts with cynical amusement. The end result is poverty of our personal life and nature.

Personal discipline and stability must be instilled within the family and early school. This will help us achieve better homes and wiser families.

As children move from home to school, they need to be taught fundamentals of right and happy relationships in family and marriage, long before they reach marriageable age.

Human sympathy and empathy are important criteria in recognising and dealing with emotional problems, before a child becomes a 'problem'. Each child has the right to receive individual care and guidance from birth to maturity, and the starting point is home stability.

Many people live in difficult or enclosed conditions, without normal contact with the outside world.

There are young mothers with little or no family support, elderly and infirm people confined to their homes, those in care homes and orphanages, those confined to prison or correctional institutions - or those simply too afraid of today's violent world to venture outside their own homes. And then there are the homeless.

These situations destabilise people, if they do not have awareness. A basic human right is education. Proper education and maturity give us the essential ability and steadiness to work out a commitment to living within these situations.

We need to commit ourselves to a loving relationship with the people in community with us, however difficult they are, or however difficult we find it to relate with them. If we change our attitudes, we can influence others for the better.

Buddhist and certain Christian Orders have monks and nuns who choose a commitment to lifelong enclosure. They need stability for spiritual, emotional and physical welfare. Those in secular life can follow this spiritual attitude.

Those who believe in a Creator God, and believe that He has a plan for us, can find the path to help us to allow God's stability into our hearts.

Stability allows God to work creatively in our situation with surprising results. We need to abandon the constant nagging inner struggle that causes us to feel that life owes us more than it gives us. We get from life what we put into it.

Correct attitudes are essential for all creatures to live in harmony with each other and with their environment. The change comes not from within us, from our own reservoir of strength, but from the unfailing support of God, and His Holy Spirit working within us.

Whatever our beliefs and lifestyles, if we have the spiritual strength and faith to accept our situation, discipline sets us in the place where we can become the person we are intended to be. We must consider our home as 'holy ground', and treat it as such.

It is the place where all personal and intra-communal relationships are formed and fostered, and fulfillment of our true potential can be realised.

In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, we must not allow erratic and irrational responses to drive the rehabilitation and rebuilding of families.

In accepting the challenge that this situation has brought about, we must use this opportunity to rationalise the development processes of the nation. Regional development is crucial, for basic human needs to be met nationwide, and not only for the capital city.

Under-developed and neglected areas desperately need good schools and teachers, hospitals, houses, job opportunities, build up of agriculture and industry and the necessary infrastructure to develop and sustain communities where they live.

We cannot keep on sustaining the human 'tsunami' tide that desperately floods into Colombo in search of jobs and houses.

We experience daily the reckless and dangerous 'tsunami' of vehicles that pours into and out of Colombo; the appalling undisciplined behaviour of most drivers, the damaged environment, pollution, noise and epidemic illnesses that makes existence dreadful and life destroying.

We are a sick society: sick and poor. A poverty that encompasses those deprived of life's basic requirements as well as the spectre that confronts us now - spiritual and humanitarian poverty.

Let all of us who are involved in the rehabilitation work make a compact: to rebuild not only houses, schools, institutions, but also homes and families; to enable all our peoples to realise their true potential and become the people they were meant to be.

We have invaluable human resources, and our children must be nurtured in stable, secure surroundings and raised with correct mind-set and way of living, whether they are rich or poor in material terms.

If we make this fundamental change, a committed and positive people will arise from the ruins, to make this a homeland fit for all to live in.