I feel like I’m at the end. I have no energy to fight this depression with. Well that’s not totally true. I got out of bed. I did my breakfast routine. I went to Father Greg on YouTube hoping he would help. I copied out those words about community. I cleaned up the dog’s mess, and I took her for a walk out the driveway.
This talk is an hour long, so I copied out what meant the most to me. I think the community he describes fits Kindred Spirits.
“A community of kinship such that God might recognize it — imagine a circle of compassion and then imagine that nobody’s standing outside that circle. How do we seek, together, to dismantle the barriers that exclude, how do we inch ourselves out to the edges of those margins, and by standing there the margins get erased. And so we stand with people, with particular folks, the poor, the powerless, and the voiceless, we stand with those whose dignity has been denied, we stand with those whose burdens are more than they can bear. Every once in a while we have this great privileged moment where we get to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out, with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop, and with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
“To stand in awe at what the poor have to carry, rather than in judgement of how they do it.” “We help each other to work out our own salvation.”