Building community cemented in love
How is your spiritual journey going these days? Yeah, me too. Two steps forward, one step back? If we’re lucky. This is not an easy time for measured development.
It seems to me that all spiritual progress and growth is a path of discovery. A path that moves us toward a deeper connection to creation; to nature and animals, to each other and, in a point of culmination, to Spirit. However, these days it seems as if we are becoming more isolated instead of more connected.
That is, dear readers, a difficult sentence to write.
How do we move along in this world? With compassion and understanding, with welcoming and generosity, with faith and trust? Do we seek to build community or do we move with fear and judgment, with revenge and selfishness, with separateness and destruction? Do we seek to stake a claim for ourselves that keeps others out?
Whatever our spiritual tradition, our faiths hold that we trust in a powerful, foundational love that supports us in all things. Unfortunately, watching recent tragedies whittles away our confidence in this trust. And yet, without it, where do we find hope? Where do we find the strength to keep building community in spite of the suffering that surrounds and envelops us?
As spiritual pilgrims, we must persevere. We must move our communities into a more peaceful, more inclusive state. Person by person, wound by wound, we must step into healing. Otherwise, love is merely an academic theory — how terribly sad would that be?
My prayer for the world during these days is this: May we not be blinded by stories of hate, fear and greed. May we live fully into a communal life of abundance, rooted in the foundation of love. May we share what is needed for a sustainable and healthy community that contributes to the wider world.
After all, I do believe that Jesus, Buddha, Black Elk, Moses, Krishna, Lao Tzu and Muhammed along with many others, would want this for all of us. They would be building that community right beside us, one brick at a time, with love being the mortar that binds us together.