Oh, The Humanity

from The Spirtual Seniors Newsleter

December 19, 2025

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity. –George Bernard Shaw

The past weekend was heavy. As reports circulated from Brown to Bondi Beach to Brentwood, a sense of foreboding covered us all. In a season that usually points toward hope, what happened only sharpened the contrast. When the world feels this unsettled, the question for those who recognize the pattern is not whether we feel it, but how we respond—and what steadiness looks like in the face of tragedy.
 

In moments like this, elders are being watched more closely than we realize. During a season of gatherings, rituals, and heightened emotion, younger family members and friends take their cues from us. Not because we have better answers, but because we have learned—sometimes painfully—how to stay present when the world disappoints us. Our steadiness becomes a refuge. The way we speak, what we refuse to inflame, where we place our attention—these are not small choices. In this month devoted to care and generosity, that is how wisdom shows up.
 

The Weight of Steadiness

Steadiness is not about good manners or emotional restraint. It grows out of recognition—the understanding that this has been a brutal year, marked by repeated losses and moments that have tested the limits of compassion. When violence strikes again, and again, it leaves people raw. Grief stacks up. Fear deepens. Trust wanes. Pretending otherwise does no one any good.
 

Steadiness means refusing indifference while rejecting escalation. It means allowing the weight of what has happened to be felt, without letting it harden into despair. It means speaking with care, because words can wound further. This is not restraint born of fear. It is right action born of responsibility.
 

For those of us who have lived through other seasons of upheaval, this is familiar ground. We know that panic spreads faster than truth, and that cruelty multiplies when it is echoed. Steadiness, by contrast, works more deeply. It reassures by refusing to let loss dictate our conduct. In this way, it can protect the young, the anxious, and the grieving.
 

When Silence Stops Being Neutral

There are moments when restraint can begin to look like silence, and that distinction matters. Calm has its place. So does patience. But when harm repeats itself and is plainly visible, silence stops being neutral. Martin Luther King Jr. once observed that the deepest tragedy is not the cruelty itself, but the silence of those who know better. His words endure not because they inflame, but because they name a truth that still unsettles us: what we withhold in moments like this does not disappear. It teaches.
 

Our children and grandchildren are paying attention in ways we often underestimate. They watch how we speak when the facts are painful, how we state what is wrong, and where we clearly draw lines. Clarity isn’t learned from pious proclamations. It’s learned from what we are willing to say plainly, and what we refuse to excuse. That, more than any lesson, is what endures.
 

For those of us who understand ourselves as spiritual beings, this kind of clarity works on us first. It asks something inward before it offers anything outward. There is a cost to seeing clearly and speaking, even gently. It disrupts the habit of staying comfortable. And yet it brings its own steadiness—the relief that comes from no longer carrying what we know in silence. It often begins quietly, when we stop turning away from what we recognize to be true and remain with it long enough to let it shape how we live. Saying we value compassion while excusing cruelty, invoking faith while avoiding responsibility, calling for peace while tolerating harm—these contradictions erode trust. Steadiness requires more of us than that. It requires alignment between what we claim to believe and how we conduct ourselves when it costs us something.
 

What This Season Asks of Us

What confronted us last weekend was not abstract. It was painfully concrete: another school shattered by gunfire, a mass act of antisemitic violence that targeted people simply for who they are, and the unthinkable killing of parents by a son overtaken by addiction and despair. These were not isolated shocks. They arrived close together, in full view, and they landed on a year already heavy with loss. To acknowledge this plainly is not to dramatize it. It is to refuse the quiet drift toward acceptance—the dangerous habit of treating what should never be ordinary as if it somehow is.
 

Love does not require us to mute our response to what we witnessed. Grief, anger, and moral outrage are not failures of steadiness; they are signs that something sacred has been violated. What steadiness asks is not that we feel less, but that we refuse to let those feelings metastasize into cruelty, indifference, or despair. To respond in love is to name what is wrong without flinching, to grieve without surrendering our humanity, and to insist that violence, hatred, and despair are not inevitable features of the world we accept. Anything less risks becoming a quiet form of consent.
 

There is a long spiritual tradition that makes room for moral outrage and righteous indignation when love itself is under assault. Jesus did not avert his eyes from cruelty or hypocrisy; he confronted it directly. The Buddha spoke against suffering born of indifference and moral blindness. The Hebrew prophets raised their voices against injustice even when it made them unwelcome in their own communities. Gandhi understood nonviolence not as passivity, but as disciplined resistance to evil. Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that love could be fierce, and that indignation in the face of injustice was not a failure of faith but one of its obligations. What united them was not anger for its own sake, but a refusal to confuse calm with goodness or silence with virtue. Their outrage was anchored—guided by love, constrained by conscience, and aimed toward the restoration of human dignity.
 

May we have the courage to stay human when the world feels bent toward cruelty. May we grieve what deserves grief without becoming hardened by it. May our anger be clean, our compassion unsentimental, and our love strong enough to tell the truth. In days that test our spirit, may we remain people whose presence steadies a room, whose words do not wound further, and whose lives quietly affirm that dignity is still worth defending.
 

But a blessing alone is not enough. The name we claim—Spiritual Seniors—carries weight precisely because moments like this demand more than sympathy. They demand alignment. They ask us to live in a way that refuses hypocrisy, that speaks when silence would be easier, and that models a moral adulthood others are searching for. As we move through these holy days—whether marked by Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or quiet reflection—may our steadiness become a gift others can lean on. This is not a season for retreat. It is a season for showing up, with steadiness, with clarity, and with the courage to hold ourselves to a higher standard when it matters most.