The Why

Why do we cancel one another? Why do we admonish and sneer at people in prison? At people on the streets?

I know why.

It’s so we don’t have to see ourselves in them. So that we do not have to connect to the reality that in another life, in another set of events, we too might be there. It is to reject the notion that we too are capable of hate and violence and failing.

I had a professor in college say something that always stuck with me.

“We are all one degree away from homelessness.”

One disease. One diagnosis. One tragic event away from being someone we don’t recognize. It feels fragile. Unsure. Highlights our lack of control. The thread we live by. So we project that onto the person sitting on the street, the person behind bars, so that we can then tear them down and destroy that projection. So that we can kill it. Then it won’t be true.

But it is. I am the woman sleeping in her van at the gas station and the man who landed behind bars and the person who shows love to both. To all. I am all. 

And so are you.

“Compassion comes from a spacious place where a lot of things are put together and coexist,

where we recognize, forgive and make friends with the enemy within.

There’s nothing you hate, nothing you fear over there in other people that you haven’t met and forgiven within your own soul.

The passionate struggle with your own shadow becomes compassion for the struggles of our neighbor.” - Richard Rohr