“The land beneath our feet”

H,

It is unthinkable that we have a cosmic sense of life and reduce it to a stoic nationalism that excludes more than it includes. The land beneath our feet shapes who we are and how we see things, but it must not and, most times, should not shape where we are going. There is no reason to choose a place over people or to take people who look, sound or talk like us as more valuable than others. There is no life of faith, call of faith or practice of faith that can justify this. The inherent value of human beings must always remind us that we are loved from the start and not because of who we are or what we do. The divine romance is predicated on being and not doing.

This distinction is vital because reasons to love or follow or believe in a thing, lessen our ability to look beyond that value and instead lead us to ascribe qualifiers on our love and decency. The root of all rabid nationalism or racism is the idea that some qualities, even facile ones like nationality and race, are more desirable than others.

We must always remember that countries are artificial constructs and the human race is divided more in tone and shape than in substance. We develop language and mores and habits from things around us, but we are joined inseparably and finally by the things within us.

Where we are born and where we live and the passports we carry show our present location and the places where we work to be a light in the chaos, but they have no bearing, in themselves, on the eternal nature of the universe and those virtues that we pursue.