Reflection
The end of an election season does not return a fractured society to civility. Well before this election season began, we lost sight of what is most sacred for our survival: our shared humanity. . We seem to have forgotten our interdependence and, as a result, have divided ourselves up by teams, where there are winners and losers. How are we to repair our communities and build a world worthy of our descendants if we don’t seek understanding? Fear is our greatest barrier to understanding because it separates us. Rather than being a people of possibility — a hopeful people — we become narrow, stingy, and impotent with scarcity guiding our hearts. The work ahead for all of us will not be easy, but it begins by opening our hearts rather than sealing them off out of fear and disappointment. We need the courage to build communities of belonging, nourishing our compassionate spirits as we work to repair and heal, helping us to deepen our perspective through greater understanding, May the gifts in our lives remind us of all we are invited to preserve for those who will inherit what we have done and what we have left undone.
Adapted from Joe Primo, CEO Grateful Living
Prayer
Give me a compassionate spirit of understanding and courage.
Action
Start within yourself and let it turn outward. How can you begin to repair divisions and foster understanding and acceptance? What is one specific step you can take and continue?
Suggested Reading
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:28
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
James 5:16
That they all may be one, just as you are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
John 17:21
Love is not limited to the relationship between two or three people, or to friends or to family, it goes beyond. It comprises civil and political relationships including the relationship with nature. Since we are social and political beings, one of the highest expressions of love is specifically social and political, which is decisive for human development and in order to face any type of crisis.
Pope Francis
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
Thomas Merton
“When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace. The Dalai Lama
Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
Mahatma Gandhi
“Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.
Sherry Turkle
Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.
Rachel Naomi Remen
A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men. Our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
Herman Melville
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.
Margaret J. Wheatley
Human connection is based on trust, and it is trust that is continually violated when people do not practice setting aside their narrow self-interests in consideration of the needs and interests of others, such as their coworkers, family, neighbors, and community.
Diane Kalen-Sukra
Humans need to belong. Humans have always needed tribes. Today we find tribes in family or clubs or religion. What happens when we fall out of them? I suppose, in prehistoric times, it was fatal to be cast out of a tribe, to be exiled or excommunicated from the group, away from the people we love and need. Exile from the tribe is a form of execution.
Richard Paul Evan