Kinship

“You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

Mary Oliver writes, ‘There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long.’

The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives. The prophet Jeremiah writes: ‘In this place of which you say it is a waste … there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness … the voices of those who sing.’

Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills in this way: we’ve just ‘forgotten that we belong to each other.’

…Serving others is good. It’s a start. But it’s just the hallway that leads to the Grand Ballroom.

Kinship— not serving the other, but being one with the other. Jesus was not ‘a man for others’; he was one with them. There is a world of difference in that.”
~Gregory Boyle (from Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion)