Has God been lacking
in our lives?

In these times when there are so many abuses and acts of corruption in the political sphere, it is good to remember what Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the renowned author of "The Gulag Archipelago," wrote in an important article published years ago by the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo ( The Sao Paulo State), in which the well-known Russian writer said that it was necessary to bring God back to human concerns, both in politics and in cultural and social field.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote: "No, all hope may not depend on science, technology, economic growth. The victory of the technological civilization has also instilled in us the insecurity of the  spirit. Their talents enrich us, but also enslave us. "

It's important to clarify that the "Gulag Archipelago" is probably the strongest and certainly the most influential work on how the gulags functioned (concentration camps and forced labor in the former Soviet Union) in the days of Josef Stalin. The book of 1,800 pages is a narrative about facts witnessed by the author, who was held as a prisoner for eleven years in Kolima, one of the fields in the archipelago, and also of two hundred and thirty-seven people, who trusted his letters and reports to the author. Written between 1958 and 1967, the work was published in the West in 1973 and had circulated clandestinely in the Soviet Union, in a tiny version, hidden until its official publication in 1989.

Born at a time when the socialist regime was already installed in Russia, as from the moment the author decided to publish his book, he could no longer live in his country. As they say in politics, he had fallen in disgrace to uncover the lies and the abuses that were hiding behind the so-called Iron Curtain. Their complaint, which was made many years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union gives him, therefore, indisputable moral authority to point out not only the evils of Soviet socialism regime but the illusions inherent in capitalist economies.

His analysis about the behavior that characterizes the materialistic society on earth seems drawn from the works any serious spiritists, such is the affinity of ideas. In fact, Dr. Bezerra de Menezes, in a memorable message that opens the book "The Spirit of Truth", a book published in 1961, authored by several spirits, by Waldo Vieira e Chico Xavier, when referring to the problems of the world, proclaimed that "out of Christ there is no solution," meaning by "Christ" the Gospel read, understood and applied, what Bezerra de Menezes considers sufficient to solve any so-called human problems.

It is not possible to criticize the proposal of the Russian writer or the conclusion of the beloved spiritual  benefactor.

We are spirits, not merely organic compounds. The material world is a temporary stop which serves us as a school in order to prepare our souls to a grand destiny. Clinging to it, enslaving yourself to its values, giving the temporal matters a greater importance than they have, it means to confuse the fundamental goals of human existence, complicating the future and life.

About the question that serves as a title to this article, the answer is easy: Yes, God has been missing in our lives, in our actions, in our projects; in the individual an in the political sphere.

Everything we are and have comes from God, but we act as if he did not exist and had no importance in our lives.

Spiritism teaches that one of the purposes of the incarnation is to enable people to do their part in the work of creation, which leads us to conclude that man cannot only think about themselves and in the satisfaction of their interests.

The reflections of the Russian writer call attention to exactly that. They should be read and meditated, in order to make the materialism which dominates the modern man to weaken a little, this is what we truly desire.