Welcome and Release

The fruit of un-othering

Somehow humans have weaponized finding our identity. We will decide who we are by alienating someone else. We form our group, not by receiving but through casting out and marginalizing. We make those who could be partners and friends into “the Other”.

Humans are comforted but certainty even if that certainty eliminates options for making our lives and our world a better place. We can ruin ourselves with this stubbornness.

Instead of embrace, we will choose differentiation and even scorn.

Instead of welcome, we will choose mistrust and even assume a threat.

Instead of hospitality, we will choose to reject those who have been sent to bring about our collective salvation.

What if we didn’t choose to “other” those we feel out outside our circle? The welcome we extend could be our release and our hope. It could create the mighty exhale that brings us back to ourselves and back to our flourishing.

What have we done when we’ve divided ourselves into embattled foes instead of created multiple pathways to connection, re-connection, and restoration? We’ve sealed our future with suffering and failures.

It is time to first take a personal inventory of the opponents we have othered into statues of evil. We must first make our heart into flesh that can see flesh in the other once again. For when we other someone we too have become othered automatically by consequence.

Center down into the deepest part of your being where oneness is available. Find the common desire we share to be received, to be accepted, to be connected. Be received into yourself by your own love and use that fullness to be the welcoming agent of love.

Be that kind of person for whom it will be said, “I felt their deep welcome and love.”