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WorshipWeb: Braver/Wiser: A Weekly Message of Courage and Compassion

These Are My People

By Karen G. Johnston

“This is the world I want to live in. The shared world….This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.” 
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A4” from Honeybee

I have heard that the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzburg has a spiritual practice when she flies. Waiting to board at the airport gate, she looks at the people sitting there and says to herself, These are my people.

In front of a glass wall facing an airport runway where a plane takes off, a line of diverse passengers lines up with luggage as if preparing to board a flight.

A random, possibly ragtag, set of strangers are her people? Seriously? Yes, seriously.

I have begun doing this. At the gate. On board. For the next few hours, these are my people. With weather delays, even longer.

And I have begun doing it elsewhere. When riding the train. Attending a concert. In the grocery store. I even did it in January, when I was one of hundreds of clergy who traveled to Minneapolis to march with 50,000+ for the future of our nation. Every so often, in that frigid cold, I would feel the crowd around me and think: These people: they are mine and I am theirs.

They weren’t my besties nor my chosen family. Not even my immediate neighbors, but the ones that the universe cast as my temporary lot. Random. Not of my choosing.

Except I choose to choose them. As a spiritual practice, it stretches me. This embrace of others that I believe my faith asks of me (requires of me?) is not necessarily logical, as well as occasionally mystical and nearly always complicated.

Does this change anything? Bring about healing or justice? I’m not certain, but I can’t help wondering if this one way we get closer to Love at the Center.

Does this transform me? Hell, yes. It commits me to the very nature of reality: interdependence. It reminds me that I—that we—belong to each other, like it or not.

I’m thankful for the deep (so deep) and real (so real) and true (so true) ways in which we risk growing Beloved Community. In which we dare creating mutual aid networks beyond those besties. In which we risk creating and sustaining the necessary, complex, messy, sometimes prickly, sometimes joyful community coalitions to get us through this authoritarian nightmare.

These are my people.
You are my people.

Prayer

Spirit of Life and Love, Ever-Presence of Interdependence and Transformation, if we shall be known by the company we keep, may that company support us in daring and risking a greater wholeness than we have known thus far.