Dear Community,
Now We Choose
In time we come to know, welcome in our daily lives the understanding that there is no saving grace in misleading or being misled. Deep and real differences may define our families and friendships but we realize there will be no lasting peace in lies and being misled.
Anchoring these times and spaces of our lives,
we can carefully listen to the voices of ancestors
and the integrity of friends, “Through love alone
will hate be healed.”
We all know that we have awakened many times before, left behind a season’s ignorance, the restless, uneasy ways of wanting, hate, and fear.
Slowly, we are abandoning the belief that a man or woman can own another, assume or create a relation that does not recognize the inherent rights and dignity of the other.
At work, as in marriage, our communities, and civic relations, this entitlement is now a birthright, an achievement of what is best in all of us. We are awakening, slowly reaching the understanding that war is not sustainable.
The war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq, Gaza, wherever conflict appears, we are coming to know that war profits a very small minority. For too long we have listened to all their lies, the reasons why our sons and daughters must continue to be sacrificed for profit.
Why it is that those who have had the most for so long, generation after generation, merit further privileges to accumulate more.
There is no saving grace in being misled. We are also awakening to the precious and fragile gift of our freedom, how our voice and how we choose is equal to any other.
Will it ever be easy to recognize, accept, and release how we have been deceived? Each of us knows a deeply visceral answer to this question.
But as the typhoons come and the tornadoes grow stronger, as species extinction accelerates, and our divorce rates incline, as our coastal cities submerge and our mothers and fathers die of unrelenting heat, we can awaken, recognize
how we have been used.
What comes to mind when we hear deceitful and barren platforms full of hateful intentions? It is claimed that we should deport millions of men and women, persons who are seeking, as we have sought, a better life, or listening to their insatiable urge for ever deeper extraction with no respect for those who follow.
What comes to mind and must be remembered is a lost and wounded child, a little boy, stepping down from a broken bus, “They just let you do it.”
May we all be granted the integrity to awaken, resist, and create a new union. Now we choose.
!
