interconnection
Monday, July 17th, 2022
January 17, 2022This is where we are, not to regulate and protect, but defend, on our own, to stay alive. -dayle
[Brandon Bell/Getty Images]
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker — who was among the four hostages at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, on Saturday — said his congregation has taken security training over the years from Colleyville police, FBI, Anti-Defamation League and Secure Community Network.
- “We are alive today because of that education,” he said in a statement. “I encourage all Jewish congregations, religious groups, schools, and others to participate in active-shooter and security courses.”
- “In the last hour of our hostage crisis, the gunman became increasingly belligerent and threatening. Without the instruction, … we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself.”
[AXIOS]
Center for Action and Contemplation
Writer Victoria Loorz, co-founder of the “Wild Church Network:”
The word religion, at its roots, means re, “again,” and ligios, “connection,” like ligaments. Religion is meant to offer us support to connect again what has been separated. Apparently we need constant reminders to continually reconnect with the fullness of life, the whole, the holy. What we’ve created is more like disligion: disconnection from people and species unlike us. When religion loses its purpose and colludes with the forces of separation instead, it becomes irrelevant and even irreverent. . . .
Loorz seeks to encourage people towards deeper love by encountering the Holy outdoors:
The new story is emerging, and I cannot pretend to know all the layers. Yet one aspect that seems essential relates to the worldview of belonging—a way of being human that acts as if we belong to a community larger than our own family, race, class, and culture, and larger even than our own species. The apocalyptic unveiling happening in our world right now makes it difficult even for those who have been sheltered in privilege to look away from the reality, both tragic and beautiful, that we are all deeply interconnected. Humans, trees, oceans, deer, viruses, bees. God.
Many people, whether they go to church regularly or avoid it, feel closest to God while they are in nature. Even a simple gaze at a full moon can be a spiritual experience if you are mindful enough. And a glorious sunset can summon hallelujahs from deep in your soul. Humans are made to engage in life-affirming conversation with the whole, holy web of life. . . .
Mystical experience in nature—those moments when you sense your interconnection with all things—are more than just interesting encounters. They are invitations into relationship. Beyond caring for creation or stewarding Earth’s “resources,” it is entering into an actual relationship with particular places and beings of the living world that can provide an embodied, rooted foundation for transformation. The global shift necessary to actually survive the crises we’ve created depends on a deep inner change.
The Wild Church Network is here to encourage and support people who are starting Wild Churches. The Church of the Wild book offers inspiration for those who feel the call from Spirit and Earth herself to create a spiritual community that reconnects us to the rest of the alive and sacred world.
“This book will be of great use to all who feel a little broken by the world right now—those of a Christian heritage especially, but really everyone yearning to reconnect with something larger. I think the wisest course of action would be to slip it into a knapsack and remove yourself outdoors to read it.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Falter, Eaarth, and The End of Nature
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The Wild Church Network is here to encourage and support people who are starting Wild Churches. The Church of the Wild book offers inspiration for those who feel the call from Spirit and Earth herself to create a spiritual community that reconnects us to the rest of the alive and sacred world.
“This book will be of great use to all who feel a little broken by the world right now—those of a Christian heritage especially, but really everyone yearning to reconnect with something larger. I think the wisest course of action would be to slip it into a knapsack and remove yourself outdoors to read it.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Falter, Eaarth, and The End of Nature
A Movement is Emerging…
From isolation to connection.
From detachment to immersion.
From dualism to interBeing.
Popping up all over the land, like wild mushrooms after a spring rain,
Wild Church communities are responding to a call from deep within
to change the way we relate to the natural world, moving
“from a collection of objects, to a communion of subjects”
Thomas Berry
One.
February 5, 2018
“True expression rises through us. In this expression, all the conversations and honest sharing that passed through our small tribe(s) over those years permeated (our) consciousness, the way the ocean saturates a sponge. A sponge doesn’t create the water it holds. […] We soak up the deepest meaning from each other and the water of wisdom passes through us.”
-Mark Nepo
☆
“Everything exists as a vibration in time and space. Only the frequencies separates sand from water, soul from dust and me from you. In the boundless order beyond the Universe we are ONE. Only briefly ‘separate’ from each other under the stars, moon and the sun.”
-Super Soul Sunday
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Righteousness is not just the private practice of doing good; it sums up the global responsibility of the human community to make sure every human being has what they need, that everyone pursues a fair sense of justice for every other human being, and that everyone lives in right relationship with one another, creation, and God.
[…]
- …this discovery is life’s real and highest goal. Our supreme purpose in life is not to make a fortune, nor to pursue pleasure, nor to write our name on history, but to discover this spark of the divine that is in our hearts.
- Last, when we realize this goal, we discover simultaneously that the divinity within ourselves is one and the same in all—all individuals, all creatures, all of life.
God’s passion is justice. . . . As the social form of compassion, justice is about politics [the word “politics” comes from the Greek polis for “city”]. . . . Politics is about the shape and shaping, the structure and structuring, of the city and, by extension, of human communities more generally, ranging from the family to society as a whole. . . . Justice is the political form of compassion, the social form of love, a compassionate justice grounded in God as compassionate.
-Richard Rohr
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The Slow Arm of All That Matters
I have fallen through and worked into
a deeper way – one step at a time, one pain
at a time, one grief at a time, one amends at a
time-until the long, slow arm of all that matters
has bowed my estimation of heaven. Now, like a
heron wairting for the waters to clear, I look for
heaven on earth and wait of for the turbulence to settle.
And I confess, for all the ways we stir things
up, I can see that though we can stop, life never
stops: the lonely bird crashes into the window
just as the sun disperses my favorite doubt, a
sudden wind closes your willing heart as the
moment of truth passes between us, and the
damn phone rings as my father is dying. All
these intrusions, majestically unfair, and not of our
timing. So we spin and drop and catch and land.
And sometimes, we fall onto these little islands of stillness,
like now, from which we are renewed by our kinship
with all and that irrepressible feeling resurrects our want to be here,
to push off again into the untamable stream.
☆
Under all the conflicts and dilemmas we face, we can discover over and over that everything, and everyone, in life is connected.
-Mark Nepo
jai
☆