So many cruelty and bullying happening around us that some finds its way to the world-wide web that led me to share a talk by Neal A. Maxwell entitled "Spiritual Ecology" during his 1975 BYU speech. Bear with me for this post is long, but guarantees an enlightened mind and, hopefully, a change of heart.
Excerpt:
"The message we bear is one in which there is a spiritual ecology. We hear a lot today about ecology in the world of biological and physical things. We are learning that some of its laws are inexorable, that when we violate them we pay a penalty; we pay a price. There is an ecology that pertains to spiritual things, to human nature, which, when violated, brings a series of consequences—just as inexorable and just as automatic as the ecology that is born of the cluster of laws governing nature. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a collection of principles woven together in the fabric of immutable law; this is the romance and the high adventure of orthodoxy: these principles, bound together, not only give us salvation, but they also give us balance, depth, and happiness in our lives.
The doctrines of Jesus Christ are so powerful that any one of these doctrines, having been broken away from the rest, goes wild and mad, as G. K. Chesterton observed. The principle of love without the principles of justice and discipline goes wild. Any doctrine, unless it is woven into the fabric of orthodoxy, goes wild. The doctrines of the kingdom need each other just as the people of the kingdom need each other. ... We do not fully understand all these laws that operate in the world of spiritual ecology, but they are there. We worry about pollution and rightfully so, but a home in which there is not adequate love pollutes society just as surely as we pollute the air and streams around us, and people further “down stream” pay a price. If we were to versify modern scripture, we might say, McKay 1:1: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home,” for this is a spiritual law of the first magnitude. When we sing that song, “Love at Home,” as trite as it may seem to us, we happen to be verbalizing concepts that deal with a most sublime concept in the gospel.
When there is not “love at home,” when there is scarring and emotional deprivation, society pays a price just as inexorably as society pays a price for the other forms of pollution."
