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“How good, how delightful it is to live as brothers and sisters all together!”Psalm 133.1
Sometimes the simplest concepts, like that expressed in this verse from Psalm 133, have the power to immediately warm our hearts. The experience of living together with our fellow human beings is one of the great joys of life.
And yet, at times our human existence as brothers and sisters living together can be anything but delightful! How easily our difference, self-interest and mistrust can divide us and turn us against each other.
But human beings need one another, we have an in-built need for community. And surely one of the simple delights of living together is being able to communicate with one another. Through conversation we build a world of shared significance – through the process of listening to another, sharing another perspective, we build trust and mutual respect. We don’t necessarily have to agree, but when we are willing to listen to one another, when we listen with our hearts, we discover those universal values that unite us in our diversity.
Even in the midst of the deep grief and suffering that we experience in our human existence together, we sense that there is an even more powerful experience of love and joy that sustains us and offers us a vision of hope. Through the simple process of dialogue, we recognize the love that makes us one humanity, we become witnesses with the Psalmist of “how good, how delightful it is to live as brothers and sisters all together!”
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