Fromm’s words, quoted above, on the nature of humanity and how it must intersect with, if not completely overtake, our social existence resonates powerfully with me every day. History, especially as it reflects negatively on us, suggests we’re divorced from our loving nature and the idea that we might devise a way to weave our loving ways into the social fabric of our world seems almost other-worldly. As if, as if we might actually manage to pull off a total revolution of love such that all of our social constructs and systems, sources and industrial complexes transform into a state we would identify as love-infused, the thought whispers something of heaven on earth. And all I can say to that is, “Why not?!”.
Truly, if we do not aim for the highest, the utmost best living for ourselves and for each other, we will not move beyond the now that appears to be solely dominated by greed, by fear and hatred, by war, by sexual oppression, by empire and by an industry-riddled human/body concept of being human. We appear to have been totally assimilated by the Borg, and in fact, many of us have been trapped. Without a tribe, without friendships and community, without healing, without neighborhoods standing up to the agents frozen in their icy refusals of love we cannot rise above the entrapments so many of us have endured generation after generation.
But there are such neighborhoods, aren’t there? We live in a world where ICE is sent packing and people come together in refusal of the big lie, the lie fear poses across the canvas of our world each day, the lie that we are not one, not truly knitted to each other for eternity. We truly are tied together. And that fact can guide our choices each day as we face the world roiling, as we choose to refuse defeat and despair (and get the help we need for defeat and despair). One way we can choose that refusal is to commit to befriending our own humanity and the humanity of those with whom we’re connected and those we encounter as strangers. Love must be fully embraced on deeply personal, life-altering levels by every precious human being on this wonderful planet.
Without love, we are all strangers in a strange land, alienated from any possible richness of living. But the wonderful truth here is that we are not without love. We are not without the presence of a divine source within and beyond us, a force calling us to reach higher and grasp more deeply. Love is not an airy fairy, pie-in-the-sky notional vibration. Love is play and toil, sweat and laughter, tears and healing, blood and strength, plans and shouts, integrity and intent. Presence. Action. Vision. Commitment. These are the stuff of love and they speak to the truth that any society can insist itself into a love-focus, a love-commitment that transforms and births a beautiful world where we are not only one in our hearts, but in our actions and in our creations.
A transformation embracing the whole world, a revolution that heals every life open to the truth of our unity is as simple as refusing any other motive force but love.
On with it…
J. Ruth Kelly 
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