Recognizing That We Are One

Dear Friends,

Many Americans have already voted. Each of our votes count, yet it’s worth remembering that we don’t vote in isolation, but in solidarity with others who make up our nation. While voting is on our minds, this is a good time to deepen in ourselves the awareness, the conviction, the joy that arises from the understanding that all of our fellow voters and we ourselves belong to a big family person. We are all siblings of one another. The anatomy of our bodies, the types of blood in our bloodstreams, the fact that all of us feel anxiety, delight, too cold, too hot, all tell us that we are more kin than we want to acknowledge. As far back as Exodus 22, read in today’s liturgy, God reminds us that we are not aliens, foreigners to one another, and that God’s wish for all of us is that we understand that we are, indeed, all one.

Speaking of the “Human Family,” Maya Angelou tells her readers:

                “I note the obvious differences in the human family.
                Some of us are serious, some thrive on comedy…
                The variety of our skin tones can confuse, bemuse, delight,
                Brown and pink and beige and purple, tan and blue and white.
                I note the obvious difference between each sort and type,
                But we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

We do know what it means to be a stranger, an alien, a foreigner, but so often, when life changes for us and we become an insider, accepted for who we are, we forget how it used to be. We don’t zero in on Jesus’ call to us in today’s Gospel. “Love God with your whole heart, your whole soul and your whole mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.” How we act, going forward as Americans after this election, depends on how well we have internalized the compassionate love of God.

Martin Luther King Junior helps us look ourselves in the eye and consider our motives as we respond to the questions of our day:

                “Cowardice asks the question ‘Is it safe?’
                Expedience asks ‘Is it politically correct?’
                Vanity asks ‘Is it popular?’
                Conscience asks ‘Is it right?’”

Why will we do what we do in the next four years?

For us to become a great, and I daresay, a nation at one with God, our country must take positions which are not safe or popular or even politically correct. We must take a position because it is right. Right and just and true, just as God is right and just and true, and who we are. That is the only way we can love God and our neighbor.

~Sister Joan Sobala