Togethering

There’s a way not to be broken that takes brokenness to find it. – Naomi Shihab Nye

Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done...We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others...we all need mercy, we all need justice... – Bryan Stevenson, from Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Spiegel and Grau: 2014). Posted as a link on Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations at The Center for Action and Contemplation (1.26.2022, see below).

There is a moral equivalency between you, me and everyone. An ancient teaching says “Whatever you do to others, you do to me.” That’s nondual thinking, which is not habituated in the Western weltanschauung. As long as we/they (all religious traditions) remain at the dualistic level, they can go to church and worship...and be greedy, selfish, and racist an hour later, not seeing any conflict with that at all. – adapted and edited from Fr. Richard Rohr.

From 1941 to 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators committed the systematic murder of over six million Jews, and millions of others . The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution” for eliminating all Jewish people within Nazi Germany’s grasp. Roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population were murdered. During the 42nd plenary session on November 1, 2005, the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution 60/7 designated today as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date that Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.