We are building!
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow'”– Mary Anne Radmacher
“Inner citizenship is what we do when we take up this work of the soul of our country. When we seek to embody and express its soul to the best of our capacities, we are being active inner citizens.”
– David Spangler
The history books of the 22nd Century – if such things exist then – won’t list the heroes who brought human civilization back from the brink of destruction in the first half of the 21st: Not because we lack for heroes, but because we are now responsible for our own salvation, and the heroes of our age will be too many to name.
Never before in human history has there been a time such as this, when we feared the destruction of our world, not by supernatural forces beyond our understanding – but by our own hand, by the actions of people not much different from our friends and neighbors, not much different from ourselves. Never has there been greater need for all of us to step into the breach, to fight for our collective survival with our work, with the simple everyday goodness of our actions and intentions, with our integrity and our prayers.
While there will be monumental individual actions that stand out, the greatest power for change will come from the many small acts of kindness; from everyone who is willing to leave their comfort zone and adopt new attitudes and practices for a new world; from those who keep showing up day after day to do their best, even when everything around them seems to be saying “why bother”… and from those who help to lead us in the direction of the good, with their words and their songs and the examples they set.
In the years to come we will be tested by challenges on the outside – those will be pretty obvious to us – and on the inside, and those may be harder to grasp: The challenge to expand into our larger identity as human souls, that will occur because the world needs us to rise to its defense – and it is only in our expanded wholeness that we will have the capacity to do what is asked of us.
In this section of The Daily Hope, we give recognition to everyday heroes, offer support to those who are battle-weary, and look at ways to move forward with more courage, hope and strength.