Habits of Solidarity

"Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change. We lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with everyone. This basic awareness would enable the development of new convictions, attitudes and forms of life. A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal."

Pope Francis, On Care for Our Common Home, par. 202

Our future depends on our capacity to live together well. This capacity grows through habits—habits of dialogue, empathy, collaboration—and through dispositions, especially a willingness to learn from one another and to take the holiness of our lives seriously, sincerely, and earnestly. What Pope Francis calls above “our mutual belonging” is not a concept. It is a reality that we can learn through habits of solidarity.

As Peter-Hans Kolvenbach once suggested, "Solidarity is learned through 'contact' rather than through 'concepts.' When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection."

Change can be difficult, but connection to others provides both the impetus and the support we need for change. A simple first step is simply to allow ourselves to “be touched by direct experience” through encounters with others that invite us to think, to feel, to reflect, and to change.

What are you currently doing to contribute to a better world and how could you be more creative about it? What do you still have to learn and how and from whom will you learn it?

Each day holds a surprise

“Each day holds a surprise. But only if we expect it, can we see, hear, or feel it when it comes to us. Let us not be afraid to receive each day’s surprise, whether it comes to us as sorrow or as joy. It will open a new place in our hearts, a place where we can welcome new friends and celebrate more fully our shared humanity.”

Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey

Henri Nouwen’s simple observation can provide us with a straightforward, three-step way to order our days.

1) Expect a surprise each day. “Expect” here can mean anticipate, hope for, and be ready for it, by watching for it but also by opening our minds and hearts to it. Our own dispositions can condition how we understand, interpret and even experience our lives. If we succumb to undue skepticism and suspicion, for example, we will see bias and deceit everywhere. But bias and deceit, even where present, may not be all that is available to us to see, perceive and process. Anticipating surprise is really a way of allowing life and those around us to speak to us afresh.

2) Receive the surprises of each day from a space of greater inner neutrality, noticing them without moving immediately into patterned behaviors. When we have chronic stresses or long-standing relational patterns, it is easy to respond to a surprising situation in ways that do not allow us to view it afresh. In fact, our own patterns of interpretation can keep us from seeing something as it actually is. A surprise should encourage us to take note more carefully of a situation; it should be a signal to be aware and sensitive to a new situation, filing it away for reflection later.

3) If it is true that each day holds a surprise, then we should review the events of the day at the end of our day, asking ourselves “what surprised me today and why?” This simple practice allows us to notice the surprising features of the day, to consider how we handled what surprised us, and to reflect on how we want to continue to respond.

Surprise is the spice that adds flavor to our lives. It can certainly enhance the intensity of our lives, and surprise is not always a positive element. In these senses, Nouwen is wise to remind us that surprise can and should be shared. Even when a surprise brings sorrow, it can also bring greater solidarity. Sharing our surprising moments with others can help us to build and deepen our connections with others, creating empathy, compassion, meaning, and hope.

Divine joy is a delicate thing

“Divine joy is a delicate thing which is given only to the single-hearted.”

Bernard of Clairvaux

Life tends to bleed the joy out of us, and it can rob us of the habit of hope. We have to insist, as a discipline, that life, not only because it is a gift from God but also because it is a constant invitation to know, in an infinity of ways, the love of God, is seeded with joy.

Our job is to learn how to engage life the way that we would eat a pomegranate, so that the seeds of joy break forth in our mouth, in our hearts, in our ways of interacting with other. Our dedication to that way of life allows us to participate in God’s love coming more alive in our world.

As Pope Francis suggests, joy adapts and changes. We know joy in a variety of ways over the course of our lives; but the root of it is beyond us and beyond our personal circumstances. Joy is rooted in God, because it is rooted in love. Joy, Pope Francis says, “always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.” (Joy of the Gospel, par. 6)

How would our world be different if we constantly acted out of “our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved”?