We have grown so much in our understanding of the world as interrelated - through the use of the internet, the greater ease of travel and communication, the dependence of nation’s economies upon one another, and the ever growing perception of the effect of human action and decision upon the environment that we live in.  And yet our intimate sense of relationship in many ways still lags behind what our deeper self knows and feels. 

For we are still prone to considering our hearts to be too small to care for all, to be capable of only deeply loving a few people – those who have been given to us as ‘kin’ – and to relegate to a less intimate place in our emotional constellation those who seem far away either because they are distant from us in space, or because they are different from us in background or in the quality of the values they hold.  We have not yet come to recognize our ‘family’ as inclusive of all the inhabitants of the Earth, because we do not deem all of these inhabitants to be ‘familiar’ to us. 

Recognition of ‘family’ must be ‘familiar.’  It must come to us with a sense of inner belonging and participation.  It must be recognizable in the same way that parents, children, brothers, sisters, and cousins recognize each other – ‘in the blood.’  Yet, here, it is spiritual ‘blood’ that must replace the physical, and it is spiritual kinship that must replace the legacy of genes and genealogy.

We hear statistics every day that cause a shroud to form over our heads and often over our hearts, statistics concerning car bombs and bombings of mosques and marketplaces, revenge enacted by one ethnic group toward another, street crimes and crimes against large populations.   Yet these can seem far away.  They are not happening to ‘us.’ They are not happening to those we know personally.  And so we continue to experience a filter through which we respond to the events that happen to others, a filter through which certain events impact us more closely according to how near they are to where we live, or who we know that might have been involved with an event, or how similar with respect to ‘station in life’ the one’s to whom the event occurred might be. We do not do this intentionally, we do not separate ourselves intentionally, but nevertheless we do not intimately experience the human family in its belongingness to us.  We do not experience the lives of those we do not know because they are not ‘familiar’ enough.  

Many who recognize this situation ask how it can change, how the world can become one, how all may live in peace.  The answer is that we must become open in heart as well as in thought, and we must find the basis for familiarity that is not built on outer seeing but on inner knowing.

We cannot know everyone in the world outwardly and be acquainted with the way in which each lives – their customs, language, habits, and beliefs.  But we can know them from the inside out, as souls moving through the same journey of human experience as we are, created by the same Creator as we, embodying a soul that is as real to us as our own.  We can look in the faces of those who dress differently and think differently, and know that they are, in their deeper being, souls.

Part of this transition can happen as we turn away from exclusiveness and exclusion and as we reject the idea of our own heart being too small to love all.  Part can happen as we reject numbness and indifference and determine to be awake and alive to the events that concern others who live at a distance.  Yet, the major part is not a decision of this order but a decision of another kind.  It is a decision to be open in heart and body to spiritual light and truth so that the motive of love can become more important than all other motives, and so that the recognition of ourselves as souls can become more real than any other definition that we carry.

We will come to see others as ‘family’ when we become familiar with ourselves as souls.  For it is the awakening of this truth of our own inner being that liberates us to the truth of others.  And it is the dropping of the old labels that we have carried that sets us free to embrace others in their deeper truth.

We become family by joining with the heart and soul of all of life - by sinking deeper into our true selves so that we may recognize this heart and soul and feel it beating in the air we breathe, in the food we eat, and in each one that we meet.  When we can do this, then the world will become family to us, and even the blades of grass and the little insects that live among them will speak to us of the everpresent nature of a life that is divinely created, a sacred life that is eternally One. 

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