Sunday
The Holy Spirit is looking to essentially flow into our lives, take whatever is left of us, and reassemble it into something that can become our unique gift to the world.
—Adam Bucko
Monday
Why do humans so often presume that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination? If something comes toward us with grace and can pass through us and toward others with grace, we can trust it as the voice of God.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Love is the deepest calling of the Christian life, the standard by which everything about our lives is measured. Any decision-making process that fails to ask the love question misses the point of the Christian practice of discernment.
—Ruth Haley Barton
Wednesday
Our goal consists in doing the will of God, but first we have to remove our attachment to our own will so that we can recognize the difference between the two.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
Like the biblical prophets and contemporary people who live in their lineage, all those of us on a liberation journey are called to listen, to learn, and then to act to bring a more fruitful future into the world.
—Nahum Ward-Lev
Friday
Visionaries, prophets, and Jesus have all warned us that this journey that we are on will be beset by troubles. In this life, you will have trouble. How we handle that trouble is our witness to future generations.
—Barbara Holmes
Week Forty-Three Practice
Building Bridges for Radical Belonging
Rev. Ben McBride encourages us to listen to our hearts as well as those of our neighbors to build bridges and live out our belonging to one another:
You don’t have to have anything to get started, really: just a will, which I believe is already within you, and a way. Do the work your way, with the intention of expanding the circle of human concern and creating radical belonging for others.…
Get to work. Build. Bridge. Belong. This call for belonging is not about saving ourselves as individuals in terms of the resources that we have or the access we have been granted. Belonging is about saving our very humanity.
If you are not thriving, then I am not thriving; if you do not have peace, then I do not have peace; if you do not belong, then I myself do not belong. There is an Nguni expression, ubuntu, which means “humanity” and “I am because we are.”… The Mayans use a term in lak’ech, which means “You are the other me.” When we truly see one another, we literally become. The challenges to belong cannot be resolved in isolation but can only be resolved when we are existing together across differences.
We have to be willing to meet each other on the porch in peace, to make room for each other, to listen to each other. Even if, at first, we might be inclined to presume the other person or group doesn’t belong…. Welcome your neighbor. Have a conversation. Listen not with a need to agree or disagree but with an open heart and a desire to try to understand their perspective…. You never know what you might learn about this other human being. Or what you might learn about yourself. Our ability to sit with each other in that space, through our differences, is the gateway to radical belonging. It is how we learn. It is how we grow. It is how we become.
Reference:
Ben McBride, Troubling the Water: The Urgent Work of Radical Belonging (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023), 193–194.
Image credit and inspiration: Kuo-Chiao Lin, After Work (detail), 2017, photo, Taiwan, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. When we are listening we stop, be still and quiet, because we don’t want to miss the voice that is speaking.
