REVELATION-final1

DAY 33(Wednesday, 21 May 2014)THE HUMAN CONDITIONIt is DAY 33 of my hunger strike and I have used it to clear my head and to think idle thoughts.I did not start the day with this intention, but it turned out that way once I found myself unable toget inside St. Peter’s square for my daily prayer, due to the mass of worshippers assembled toreceive Pope Francis’ blessings, which happens every Wednesday.As I walked around the perimeter, trying fruitlessly to find a way in and shuffling through themaddening crowd, it dawned on me how choked with need the Church must feel and howimpossible it is to find a quiet and peaceful moment, or make any progress whatsoever, oraccomplish anything of value in such a hustle and bustle that only exhausts the body and stainsthe mind and drains the spirit.What an apt analogy this suffocating mass of people, looking for salvation, for relief, fordirection, for help, for mercy, for forgiveness, it is for the state of the world. The more is notalways the merrier. There comes a point where a balance is destroyed between just enough toshare the work and the fruits of our labors to being too many and getting in each other’s way andfighting for space and things and peace.During my travels, and I have had many, as I have been to about one hundred countries and havetwice journeyed around the world, I could not help but notice that the higher the populationdensity the lower the quality of life and the greater the number of laws and rules and bylaws andregulations that curtail and control human conduct and individual freedom.In Hong Kong, where the population density is amongst the highest in the world at 6,544 peopleper square kilometer (or 17,024 per square mile), people are forced to live in closet-sizedapartments that most westerners would not be able to tolerate for a day let alone a lifetime. Andin India, where resources are so overtaxed by its 1.1 billion people and life so devoid of luxuries,street children are rounded up by cruel gangs and mutilated so they can earn a “decent living” asbeggars, since the cripple elicit more pity and therefore more alms. That is how desperatepoverty, caused by overcrowding, dehumanizes people and how life becomes cheap andcheapened even further by the cruelty of those without scruples.And history has even harsher lessons, as the Great Chinese Famine of 1958 to 1961 attests when40 million people died of starvation and countless others survived only because they resorted tocannibalism on a scale unprecedented in the 20 th century. Sure, one can argue about causes untilthe cows come home, but fact remains that such calamity could only have happened in one of the154