Vice President Gore, as Harvard's 1994 commencement speaker, recounted the accidental near-death of his son. Gore said that he and his wife were astounded by the support from complete strangers: "The most important lesson for me was that people I didn't even know reached out to me and my family to lift us up in their hearts and in their prayers with...such intensity that I felt it as a palpable source, a healing reaching out of those multitudes of caring souls and falling on us like a mantle of divine grace." He cited the episode as an example of the hidden and positive forces that operate in individual lives within contemporary society. Despite the prevalence of cynicism, also at work in our midst are what Gore referred to as "the revolutionary forces of sympathy and compassion."
Social theorist Theodore Rozak maintains that all the popular interest in the marvelous is the unfolding of an authentic spiritual quest, and a transformation of human personality of evolutionary proportions is in progress. "We stand in witness," he says, "to a planet-wide mutation of mind which promises to liberate energies of will and resources of vision long maturing in the depths of our identity"
