In his award-winning book, Exclusion & Embrace, Bosnian-born theologian Miroslav Volf says, "It may not be too much to claim that the future of our world will depend on how we deal with identity and difference."...Where articles of belief threaten to set people in opposition to one another, we may embody articles of peace. Where difference is demonized, we may host suppers with surprising guest lists...We may test the premise that God uses the weak to confound the strong as well as the promise that the God who made others different from us is revealed in them as well as us.
Beloved Earth, ancient dreamer, keeper of bones and stories—
We, breath in your body, stardust in your veins,
Come before you with hearts both broken and burning.
In this time of the Great Turning,
When despair and possibility dance in the same holy darkness—
May we offer ourselves as imaginal cells in your metamorphosis...
May we be scattered like spores,
Each carrying a fraction of the future,
Each vital, each necessary, each aflame
With particular purpose...
May our courage rise to match the magnitude of these times.