AFFIRMING COMMON ROOTS

Affirming Common Roots

Affirming Common Roots

After reading the Merton extract I was recalled of how much alike we actually are. Individualism, and even more so ethnocentrism, is certain thing that tears at the heart until it is incapable to love any thing but what is close and familiar. It is what fuels racism and violence…and ignorance. In the devout sense, individualism is a blindfold to reality and comprehending, and except we take it off we can not ever glimpse what God has proposed for us to discover and understand: that we are all the identical, and that we all came from the identical place: the hands of God (Breit et al, 1986).

So what then should our answer be? I manage not believe it can be any thing but what God has instructed us to manage from the beginning. Love. Love your neighbor; love your enemy. Love those who gaze different; love those who adoration different. I really accept as factual that a answer of factual love in the direction of God's creation would alleviate much of the individualism and ethnocentrism in society. It does not require to occur in the next blink of my eyes, but it can occur over time (Breit et al, 2002).

I presume the knack would be to start small. We start by adoring our close by, the atheist. We start by adoring our co-worker, the Jew, or our classmate, the Muslim. We love them not because we realise them, but because they are God's creation. And then we listen. We hear to their stories; we hear to their beliefs. We hear for what we share rather than what we manage not understand. I believe we would be shocked by what we would discover if we listened. If we hear and love, as God loves, we can ...