News alerts keep piling up: missiles in the Middle East, drones over Eastern Europe, warships circling the waters of Asia. Each headline feels like another drumbeat in a march nobody wants to finish. I cannot help wondering—are we stumbling, step by step, toward another world war?

I ask that question not as a historian or strategist, but as an ordinary observer who reads the morning news with a cup of coffee that suddenly tastes less comforting. Turn on any broadcast, and the map of the world looks bruised. The fighting between Israel and its enemies has already shaken the Middle East, while Russia’s war in Ukraine drags on with grim stubbornness. Meanwhile, tensions simmer in places like the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. None of these conflicts is the same, yet they share an unsettling feature: powerful nations standing behind smaller fires, sometimes openly, sometimes from the shadows.

What troubles me most is how quickly the language of war now slips into everyday conversation. Politicians speak of “red lines,” military “deterrence,” and “strategic responses,” as if the world were a chessboard and human lives were pieces to be moved with cool fingers. But real war does not unfold like a chess match. It burns cities, empties homes, and leaves behind quiet cemeteries where young names are carved into cold stone. History has already shown us this twice in the last century.

The danger today lies not in a single war, but in the way separate conflicts can collide like storm systems. The First World War did not begin as a global war either. It began with alliances, pride, miscalculations, and leaders’ belief that the fighting would be quick. Within months, the entire planet was pulled into a catastrophe no one had truly planned. That lesson should haunt every government office and military headquarters on earth.

What makes our moment even more fragile is the frightening speed of modern weapons. Drones circle above battlefields like mechanical hawks. Missiles travel across continents in minutes. Nuclear arsenals—still sitting quietly in silos and submarines—remain capable of ending civilization many times over. The technology meant to protect nations has also given them the ability to destroy the world faster than any previous generation could imagine.
And yet, when I step outside my door, life continues in its ordinary rhythm. Jeepneys rattle down the street, vendors argue about the price of vegetables, and children laugh on their way home from school. That contrast always strikes me. While diplomats argue and armies move, most people on earth simply want to work, eat, raise families, and sleep peacefully at night. The distance between the lives of ordinary citizens and the calculations of global power can feel painfully wide.

Sometimes I suspect that history’s greatest tragedies arise from that distance. Decisions about war are often made in quiet rooms far removed from the neighborhoods that will eventually pay the price. Meanwhile, the rest of us watch from afar, hoping cooler heads will prevail. Hope, of course, is not a strategy—but it remains one of the few things ordinary people can hold onto while the great powers circle one another.

So, when I ask whether today’s conflicts could lead to another world war, the honest answer is yes. But they do not have to. The world still has diplomats, institutions, and voices of reason strong enough to slow the march toward catastrophe—if leaders choose restraint over pride and dialogue over threats. For my part, I keep hoping that somewhere behind the closed doors of power, someone remembers the simple truth that the rest of us already know: war may begin with ambition, but it always ends with grief.

THAT gospel episode about Christ curing a man born blind (cfr. Jn 9,1-41) reminds us that given the truth of our faith that we are supposed to live a spiritual and supernatural life with God, we are prone to have some kind of natural, if not infranatural blindness because we fail to enter into the spiritual and supernatural world, and prefer to remain in the natural level of our life.

Because of that, we miss to see many things that are actually proper for us to know and to live by. Our infranatural blindness is worse than our natural blindness because we can even fail to see the natural things of our life. That’s when we are in the state of sin that obviously would have a big effect on how we see and understand even the natural things.
Remember that in the beginning, in the life of our first parents before they fell into sin, they were in the state of original justice. They could see God and the things of God directly.
But since they fell into sin, they lost that state of original justice. And we, being their descendants, would now be born without that state of original justice. In this sense, we can also be said to be born blind. That’s what original sin is all about.

And to cure this blindness, the only way is to go to Christ who clearly said, “I am the light of the world…whoever follows me will have the life of life.” (Jn 8,12) Obviously, the upshot of this consideration is for us to know and love Christ to such an extent that we become like him as we should. In other words, we become “alter Christus” (another Christ).

As “alter Christus,” we should go to the extent when we can echo St. Paul’s words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So, I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal 2,20)
With Christ we would have discernment, able to see the things of the heart of men rather than relying simply on appearance or some worldly trends. With Christ, we would be able to make proper judgments, rather than being judgmental.

We therefore should do everything to become more and more like Christ. We need to know him more by studying his life, meditating on the gospel, and following his exYes, we have all the means for us to truly become “alter Christus.” We have the sources of divine revelation that show us the truth about ourselves. We have the word of God. We have the Church and the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist.

We just have to make the necessary adjustments in the way we think, in the way we identify ourselves. It would not be presumptuous, even given our limitations and woundedness, to start thinking that “I am another Christ, ‘alter Christus.’” We just have to try our best, with God’s grace to think and act like Christ.

With Christ we would have the proper understanding of things. We would have a universal outlook, and we can take on anything that can happen to us, whether good or bad, because Christ himself has assumed everything human including to be like sin even if he himself has not committed any sin. “He (God) made him (Christ) to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Cor 5, 21)