Discover Unity Among Strangers
(Posted May 30, 2025)
Here we are in the last days of this month of May. Somehow the season of Spring with its flowers and happiness has just slipped through our fingers. I miss the Maytime of my youth, where we did our best to bring a little joy to people we might not even know that well.
The Joy of Gifts from Strangers
Maybe it was a regional thing, growing up in Central New York. But Every May 1st was the day that you might open your front door and find, suspended from the door handle, a lovely little May basket full of little flowers, on a ribbon. It was nothing extravagant. Perhaps some violets and dandelions – whatever had responded to the first warm days with growth. It was important that your anonymous giver be just that: For the message was that any one of the people in your world might wish you beauty and had seen you, acknowledged you.
Times have changed. I haven’t seen a May basket on a ribbon in the last couple of decades, and certainly not in the last couple of years. We seemed to have morphed into an isolationist bunch, so turned in on ourselves that we view “strangers” with automatic suspicion.
How Do We Treat Strangers in an Isolated World?
So how do we square our current state with the words of Jesus, who this week is praying to his Father before returning to Paradise – praying for his ragtag bunch of disciples who only sort-of understood his message. He said:
"I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one”
I was reading an interview with a couple of urban young people, in whose world the concept of devising ways to seek revenge on people who betray others is very important. When they were asked what was important to note about Jesus and Judas, the young woman said, “the good thing was that for revenge, Jesus didn’t have to kill Judas, because he went and killed himself already.”
There you go. Automatic revenge. Somehow the concept of forgiveness had never made it into her mind when she thought about Jesus.
“That they may all be one.” Is it really possible for us to live the words of Jesus in this world where there always seems someone ready to betray us, that in our own way, we all have our own Judas?
We will explore now to navigate where the anti-morals of Big Brother are constantly thrust in front of us each day. I guarantee we’ll find the answer.