Whoever you are, whatever your name or nationality, religion or politics, whatever your ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age or skin color, wherever you live on this planet and however you define your clan, your tribe or your people, I know something about you.
I know that if we could both trace our ancestry back far enough, we’d find that we are kin.
And if we went back a little further, we’d discover that there was a single woman who gave birth to the children from whom our respective ancestors began their long journeys across time.
In other words, I know that we are family.
And yet, here we are, still pretending that we don't know each other, pretending we don't owe each other, and pretending we needn't do better for each other.
We get away with that – treating each other as strangers and sometimes as enemies – because we are all masters of disguise, and we usually accept the masks that others wear to protect themselves. And yet we are all family. We are all human beings worthy of compassion, even when we deny compassion to our brothers and sisters. We are worthy of respect, even when we do not respect our unacknowledged relatives. We are each worthy of a life of dignity and meaning, even though some of us would strip our kin of their chance for such a life.
So I must do the difficult work of seeing through your disguise, of opening my heart to include you in it. I must do the difficult work of challenging your ideas while affirming your humanity. I must do the difficult work of holding you accountable while offering you forgiveness and reconciliation and love. And you must do the same of me.
I don’t know how to do this alone, so I have to resist the urge to isolate, to retreat from difficult conversations, to live in a protected bubble. I know I can’t do that. I know I must find a way to talk with those I fear and to get real with those who anger me.
The only effective and reliable way I know to do this is through a process of community-building. Community-building is governed by simple guidelines that help people set aside the judgments and fear in their hearts. A community circle is a refuge from that cold and barren world of competition, isolation and fear that so many of our leaders and so much of our media perpetuate as a way to retain power and control . Community is an invitation to take our rightful places in the circle with others, to warm our hands by the fire, to share our story and our pain, to speak our deepest hopes and dreams, that we might remember and recognize each other once again as brothers and sisters.
I must do this, and you must do this, because otherwise this thing we call civilization may fall completely apart during our children’s and grandchildren’s lifetimes. As a family, we can turn this thing around. We can remake humankind’s place on this planet into a global celebration of who we each are and what we are all becoming.
That’s what Everybody As Our Own is all about: our long-overdue family reunion. Like any reunion of relatives long lost, long forgotten, ignored and denied, there will be tears and anguish along with the joy and laughter. There are many losses to grieve and many wrongs to right. There will be tension and there will be upset and there will be painful scenes.
I have been to many such reunions, sat in many such circles with members of my family I had never met before, and about whom I carried many judgments, and sometimes against whom I felt deep resentment, even contempt or hatred. And I have done the work with them to outlast our mutual enmity, to endure the hours of hard feelings, to talk it out, to listen and to go where our hearts lead us, and I am here to tell you that it is worth the effort, worth the pain and boredom and anxiety, because what waits for us on the far side of all that is a shared sense of well-being, safety, peace, respect and grace that I have found nowhere else on earth. It does not mean that we will cease to have differences. We will still have painful feelings and negative judgments to grapple with. But when we approach that work from a place of commitment, a place of covenant, we will find that the impossible is possible.
You are invited to help create that reunion, and my deepest hope is that you will not send your regrets, but that you will bring yourself. Come in disguise, come angry and offended, come ready to prove we are not family and that we have nothing in common. It doesn’t matter, as long as you bring your heart. Because whatever you may think you know, your heart knows better. Your heart knows that this is what it longs for more than anything else on earth: to be among your family, accepted and welcomed and loved.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, you are invited to that reunion. Because whoever you are, wherever you are, we are family.
Eric Miller