[Opinion] Let`s Hand over a World Close to Nature

At my church, we have a ceremony where all the congregants pray for a newborn child attending church for the first time. We held one last week for a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, held by the father and mother.

The pastor received the baby and showed the child to the congregation. You could hardly see the child`s face through the wrapped clothes but the people shined their happy smiles as they gazed at the face of a new life. The pastor gave thanks for the child`s life in the family and prayed that the family and society will become brighter and warmer through the child`s life. He also prayed that the darkness would not overcome the child but that the child will break through the hardships and live in the light. The moment when we all prayed for that new life was truly beautiful. We found ourselves praying more fervently as we gazed at the baby comfortably asleep in the parents` arms and thought about the hardship and pain that the child will face as he grows up. We finished our pledge to help raise this child with the parents.

The words ``we will help raise this child together`` in the prayer particularly touches me. I feel like we are praying for this not just for this one child, but for every child in the world. I feel that every person directing their prayers to the child out of their love have become one and that we are connected to every new life in the world.

We think that we are raising our child with our own hands, our power, our protection and spend all our time and energy on our child alone. Yet it is never just the parents who raise their child. A child grows in the many communities surrounding him. Those members of the community directly and indirectly connected to the child raise him `together`. Hence, it is misguided to think that ``I and only I`ll raise my child.`` Despite our best intentions, a child cannot properly grow and mature if our society is corrupt.

As I realize that we are all connected to new life, I notice a host of mixed feelings waking up inside me. I have seen so many people who could not find their place in the world, living as wanderers, and this worries me as I think about the future of our children.

Those young lives must not be swept under the rough currents of this world . . . , they have to find their place and live a life full of light . . . , my heart becomes anxious as I think about the harsh environment in which these children have to grow up. They will have to live with the mindset ``only the fittest survive and the only the best are remembered`` fostered by the inhumane competitiveness of the globalized info tech era.

What, then, is the final goal of such heartless competition? Everyone is shouting with one voice – only by beating the competition and grabbing money can one by happy. Money is the basis of happiness, they believe, and this of course becomes their only goal in life. Consequently, the adults are pushing their children from an early age to strive for money and power, to rule and dominate others, and seek satisfaction in being arrogant.

There can be no peace in a world where everyone is fighting to get more. And in such a broken world, neither the rich nor poor, those with education nor those without education can really be happy. We end up, then, seeking our children`s happiness while in actuality pursuing the opposite path, pushing our children into a world of destructive competition.

I dream of a future when our children can live in a world close to nature. Nature is full of diversity yet they live harmoniously. Life in nature do not have to rush or hurry. Things automatically take place at the right time and the right place. Nature nurtures and spreads all kinds of life forms yet it neither hoards them nor dominates them. I would like to leave a world like that to our children.

Chang Mi-Ran (Vice President, Korea Altrusa)