The locals speak

One of the things we have been about in the recent years is trying to promote concern for caring especially for those who are strangers among us and those who are our elders. We live in a society which unfortunately seems at times to be too focused on individuals and pays decreasing amounts of attention and energy to others in our midst ... and we do so to our own detriment.

Conscious of this glaring gap, we must make conscious efforts to right this wrong. We begin by identifying the strangers among us (and they can sometimes be in our very backyards). We do well to listen to the stories of days of yore, when fraternity and hospitality were more an accepted part of our society than they may be today. These lessons learned at the knee of our elders help us to gain or maintain a valuable perspective, and might just give us a glimpse into concrete ways to make a difference in the lives of our confreres.

Changing the situation begins with changing ourselves: identifying perhaps small but significant things that we can do to pay attention to others. As one wise voice said only today, "we do not choose our brothers"; we do however choose how we relate to them.

At times we may be tempted to resist the call to such effort, because we wait for gestures of welcome to be proffered our way first, but to do so runs the risk of missing a valuable opportunity to make an impression, not out of any political sense of wanting payback, but out of a deep-seated knowledge that we all get along, we must all get along, we have been commanded to do so.