Humanity

 

I was hungry and you gave me food. (Mathew 25)

In a world in which people are oppressed, the image and likeness of God are the very humanity involved in the struggle against the forces against of humanity

Christ often comes to us as the crucified and powerless (Adam Bucko)

 The commitment to take care of one another is often described as a vow to invite all sentient beings to be our guests (Pema Chodron)

Jesus came into the world to show us how to love each other asking us to do unto others as we would have done unto ourselves.  Through this radical acceptance of each other, we heal ourselves and our broken world.  This is what God looks like in the world, treating each other with humanity and respect.

Not all spiritual traditions invoke the Divine or Jesus in this holy act of compassion, but all of the wisdom traditions ask us to be more compassionate to ourselves and others.  They all would agree that to be compassionate, we need to tame our egoic nature.   Letting go of the ego is a nearly impossible task that requires great strength, courage, faith, but above all practice.  Without practice, we will for the most part remain imprisoned in our own self-absorbed and self-centeredness.  Because in the letting go of the ego, the part of us that believes we are in control of our lives, we face an almost unbearable groundlessness and uneasiness.  It is not unlike letting go of the trapeze bar when there is no net below.  What will be there to catch us? Only through regular and disciplined spiritual practices of prayer, meditation, self-reflection, service can we learn to tolerate the uneasiness and little by little tame the egoic separateness from the Divine.    

The smallest of efforts made along the spiritual plane will begin to move us in the direction of compassion and care becoming more helpful and less destructive.