Dear friends,
You know those times when you say, “I’m sorry,” simply because someone’s story makes you sad for them? And they always say, “It’s not your fault.”
I read that kind of exchange in fiction this week:
“I’m so sorry, Ellen, so sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize, Mr. Theo. It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe not. But maybe yes. Ellen, the older I get, the more convinced I am that every hurt the world has ever known is somehow the fault of every person who ever lived. Maybe not directly and never entirely, but somehow, I fear, we own all of the world’s hurts together.”*
Those words resonate with me and maybe they do with you, too. They don’t make me feel shame or guilt or—that overused word—complicit (as in, the heavy burden of obligation is all mine if I was late to understand the injustice of a certain system). But they do make me feel a kind of collective responsibility. A kinship with all the people I know who get it wrong while also getting it right.
Miroslav Volf, in his book The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better than Others Makes us Worse talks about striving for excellence instead of striving for superiority. Striving for excellence gives us ample opportunity for this kind of deep collective responsibility. Yes, I want to, as Mahatma Gandhi was supposed to have said, “be the change I wish to see in the world,” and I know you do, too. But are we? Is that change always evident? Not in my world.
Being sorry along with others is what keeps me from becoming a shrill justice warrior or a strident moralist. It stops the “I’m all about love, and you’re all about hate” narrative that is all too easy to read between the lines on t-shirts and memes and in everyday conversation today. My sorrow also keeps me from becoming a Pharisee who feels smug about my own “small acts of kindness,” so much so that I give myself a pass on genuine kindness.
I take great encouragement from this collective responsibility in the work of welcome I share with you, mostly because we are in it and less because we are achieving it. As they say at the gym: “We’re not going for perfection. We’re going for progress.” Inherent in progress is some failure, and even when the failure isn’t always a direct line to the suffering we see around us, it’s necessary to be sorry together. And then to welcome as best we can.
With you in joy and sorrow,
Kitti
P.S. – Photos below are from a stop at Refuge of Crossfit Liminal’s Ruck for Refugees last Saturday.
* From Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, p. 161
