By Clara Sims
During last Thursday’s zoom webinar, The Disrupted and Dynamic Moment We Are Living In: Young Adult Conversations, six young adults of varying faith and cultural backgrounds gathered to discuss their hopes and fears, wisdom and insights about the complicated moment we are living in.
The conversation was rich and life-giving, and ultimately pointed toward a deeply rooted hope in the potential for us to evolve as a society toward the realization of greater compassion and justice.
Linda Sepulveda, who works at the Santa Maria de la Vid Abbey, was the first to speak to her own experience of witnessing remarkable compassion and a desire to help others in need that is emerging in this moment of such suffering and disruption.
One by one, the five other participants echoed and corroborated, in their own ways, Linda’s testament to the capacity for compassion and commitment to the well-being of others, strangers and friends alike, that is part of the larger narrative unfolding at this time.
Feeling myself, rather uncharacteristically, less optimistic about the trajectory of human behavior and basic decency in our country than my peers, I was both impressed and inspired by the deeply rooted hope and optimism expressed by them. They expressed a hope in both the potential and realized goodness, of which each and every one of us is capable of embodying.
Inhabiting faith in the truth of that goodness has been more difficult for me to do, and others too I imagine, during the vortex of global chaos that has characterized the last several months. Though I know there is an astonishing array of human kindness and virtue unfolding every second of every day on this planet, the last few months have left me disproportionately focused on and fearful of how scarcity, real or perceived, can undermine and obscure “the truths we know we know” : that what bonds us together was and always will be greater than what divides us, and that there is enough for everyone not just to survive, but to thrive.
I thank Arcelia Isais-Gastelum (ReNew, Mexico, ABQ) , Wendy Atcitty (Dine’ C.A.R.E, Navajo Nation), Celina Chavez (Santa Maria de la Vid Abbey), Rev. Emily Syal (United Church of Santa Fe), and Linda Sepulveda for reminding me and all who witnessed this event that we live amongst abundance – abundance of compassion and goodness, as well as abundance of nourishment and resources.
As each of us continues to face the reality and fall-out of COVID-19, while looking ahead to the even larger, looming threat of climate systems change and ecological collapse, let our common prayer be this: In remembering abundance, may we take less so that others have what they need, now and for all generations to come.
In remembering abundance, may we begin to re-learn what is essential – listening to the wisdom of Earth, of women, of our indigenous brothers and sisters, and of the most vulnerable among us. In doing so, may we walk toward new ways of being together centered in the reality of need, and in a compassion which honors the essential equality and preciousness of all beings.
The author is Young Adult Advisor to the NMIPL Board