The road to communion is beautiful. So open your heart to the world. We are meant to be one. We are one. We come forth—each and all of us—from the creative word of the same Father and Creator: “Let us make mankind in Our image, after Our likeness….” (Gn. 1:26).

Throw open the doors and windows of your heart to brothers and sisters looking for someone whose heart is filled with the wind of the Spirit…

Throw out the furniture to make more room, for only a heart that is poor and waiting can receive the other…

Throw down the welcome mat and refuse to no one access to your charity and compassion and care…

Let them come, my friends, these others who are your brothers and sisters. Let them come from wherever they are now, from whatever country, political persuasion, faith, poor or rich, healthy or suffering in any way, and together let us build a new way of living in communion.

What would it look like to live together knowing our total dependence on God for everything?

To wait upon the Lord…

To let gentleness live within us and among us…

To claim nothing as our own, but to share all things as one family…

To be single-hearted and pure of spirit…

To be makers of peace, to wish well-being to all…

To work that no one might suffer…

The road to communion is beautiful. The possibility of living the way of the beatitudes proclaimed by Jesus attracts us. When I was younger, I had great hopes for a heart characterized by this charity. At 57 I realize that I cannot change my own heart in so radical a way, much less transform others and the world. The terrors and pain that wound my brothers and sisters in the world frighten and overwhelm me. Sometimes they seem to steal my voice and paralyze my own hope.

At 57 I realize that the beauty of this path is created by the eagerness of the continued journey, and the willingness to let God wreck my idealism about myself and the world. So know, my friend, that deep inside your heart lies the seed of God’s own power to build communion. The gift of unity and shared respect grows like the mustard seed and in our tentative, gradual and often faltering steps this broken yet gifted world is transformed into the Kingdom. 

So allow others into your life and heart. They are God’s messengers to break you out of your own frozen places and constricted ideas and opinions about what is true, good, and beautiful. Even the ugly can teach you beauty. Even the harsh can call forth your tenderness. Even the proponent of ideologies you do not share can push you to kneel before the One alone who is Truth, Way, and Life.

Ask Jesus for the grace to know who you may need to forgive or where bitterness and resentment are keeping you apart from this oneness for which you are made. May these days be a time of healing, a calling to the center, a uniting into one family, a restoring of what has been lost, a re-membering of what has been forgotten. May these days be filled with graces beyond your wildest dreams.