Becoming Human
To truly nurture the new and help it blossom into something extraordinary, we must be anchored by certain unwavering principles that guide our way.
First: all humans are sacred, whatever their culture, race, or religion, whatever their capacities or in capacities, and whatever their weaknesses or strengths may be. Each of us has an instrument to bring to the vast orchestra of humanity, and each of us needs help to become all that we might be.
Second: our world and our lives are in the process of evolving. It is not a question of rejecting the past but of letting the past flow into the present and letting this process guide us as to how to live in the future.
Third: maturity comes through working with others, through dialogue, and through a sense of belonging and searching together.
Fourth: human beings need to be encouraged to make choices, and to become responsible for their own lives and the lives of others.
Fifth: in order to make such choices, we need to reflect and to seek truth and meaning. Reality is the first principle of truth. To be human means to remain connected to our humanness and to reality. It means to abandon the loneliness of being closed up in illusions, dreams and ideologies, frightened of reality, and to choose to move towards connectedness.
The belief in the inner beauty of each and every human being is at the heart of all true education and at the heart of being human. As soon as we start selecting and judging people instead of welcoming them as they are we are reducing life, not fostering it.
Weakness, recognized, accepted and offered, is at the heart of belonging, so it is at the heart of communion with another. It is the trust that comes from the intuitive knowledge that we are safe in the hands of another and that we can be open and vulnerable, one to another.
Belonging is the place where we can find a certain emotional security. It is the place where we learn a lot about ourselves, our fears, our blockages, and our violence, as well as our capacity to give life; it is the place where we grow to appreciate others, to live with them, to share and work together, discovering each other’s gifts and weaknesses.
In the same way, each person, big or small, has a role to play in the world. As we start to really get to know others, as we begin to listen to each other’s stories, things begin to change. We no longer judge each other according to concepts of power and knowledge or according to group identity, but according to these personal, heart-to-heart encounters. We begin the movement from exclusion to inclusion, from fear to trust, from closedness to openness, from judgement and prejudice to forgiveness and understanding. It is a movement of the heart. We begin to see each other as brothers and sisters in humanity. We are no longer governed by fear but by the heart.
