Reflect

All around us the world is alive with thousands of wildly diverse cultures, beliefs, political systems, ecologies, songs, and stories. And then there’s you, in this moment — full of your own complexities, joys, and sorrows — yearning to resist the fractured world with your singular life. It’s possible you’re on a heroic path that will yield large-scale systemic change; we need that. It’s more likely that you’re trying to live a good, meaningful, generous, and joyful life right where you are, with the people you love, in the community you call home. This is the reality for most of us.

To live in a way that resists and helps heal what’s broken in the world is a tall order. When violence and oppression are systemic, it can be hard to trust in the combined impact of our individual gestures. But that is all there has ever been — our individual commitments, joined with others’, to resist and heal what is broken and breaking, eventually moving the needle in a positive direction. To remember this, it helps to re-root in what’s important to you and to lean into the values of living gratefully: kindness over cruelty, sharing over hoarding, connection over isolation.

Br. David Steindl-Rast offers a path for how we can show up to the world. He says, “I think we should look at the bad things in the world with the eyes of a mother that looks at her so-called bad child and says, ‘You can do better.’ With that look and attitude, she creates the space to encourage whatever little good is there to come out and throw off the husk of badness.” This is what it can look like to lovingly heal what is broken, to be planted in our values and to know that things can be better.

This week’s practices invite you to remember what you love about the world and to let that love guide you in the days ahead.