Daily Meditation for January 21, 2022

Karry recalled her childhood experience of crossing the Minnesota-North Dakota border, wondering how the land would look on the other side. There was no distinction. The same terrain continued. The astronauts on the Apollo moon flight witnessed that when looking at earth from outer space, no lines marked off various nations or races. They saw earth, a small ball, on which all of us and other beings live. What, then, pushes us to categorize and label each other as we/them, who’s in/who’s out, competitors, threats? Why do we think that the ecological hazards we cause do not affect other countries? What are the immediate and long-term effects of looking through such limiting and destructive lens? What effects can we foster—no matter how incidental—when we shift to what Astronaut Thomas Pesquet encourages: “Behold the universe [each aspect] through the eyes of another?” Perhaps we’d see that all of us are “in.”

By Mary Reuter, OSB