journal entry

On Healing a Community

There’s an old Chinese Proverb that goes like this:

If there is light in the soul, There will be beauty in the person.

If there is beauty in the person, There will be harmony in the house.

If there is harmony in the house, There will be order in the nation.

If there is order in the nation, There will be peace in the world.

Lately, we have become a divided community, nation, world. Study history—it’s nothing new. What would be new, and refreshing though, is to put major focus on developing areas of common ground. Does it take a major catastrophe for us to come together to support each other? Can we not heal our divide? I, for one, do not want to dwell on what separates us. I don’t want to live in fear and darkness, surrounded by hate. There is too much beauty in the world for that. This is not just talk; we are living this philosophy through our work at The Journal.

Community is where it starts or where it can end. We are all human and have the capacity to feel the same human emotions: love, happiness, hate, anger, greed, etc. “There is no us and them,” says Father Van Bankston of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Milford, PA. “There is no us and it. No one and no thing are apart from creation.”

Because we lean this way or that politically does not make us bad or evil people. We should not forget that opinions are just that, opinions, and it is human to look at life through different perspectives. What is not good, however, is the inability to have an open-minded, calm discussion with someone who has opposing points of view. And that too seems to be the way of the world right now. But again, I say, look to history. This mode of unsupportive, unconnected behavior only changes with real effort by individual people within their own communities.

Local communities are a microcosm of what happens in the rest of the country, the rest of the world, that’s true…but behavioral change has to start with each individual.

Finger pointing is not the answer. A vibrant, healthy community takes work and lots of positive energy. It all starts here.