chicagodads

Community is - to continue the unintentional vowel motif - accepting.

If my biggest hang-up is honesty and openness, then it seems to me that the biggest one of all people everywhere (in a law of averages, of course) is to be accepting. If, after all, it is hard for some of us to open up, it’s largely because it’s hard to entrust ourselves to people who would think of us as demons in tattered blue jeans.

The members of a community, however, are honest enough with themselves to know that we all are human, that we all have drastic, dramatic, and demonic failings. It’s just that people like myself are afraid of opening up because we can’t possibly believe that everyone is as hellishly messed up as we are. And yet there are those who would dare profit off of the failures of others, largely because of their own inadequacies.

And if we are all so bad - and truly good - and we are not so embedded in our own worst social tendencies, we can sympathize, empathize and commiserate in our broken humanity. And if we can together admit our brokenness, we can head towards healing and wholeness.

Isn’t that a legacy worth working for?

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