All the ways lines are drawn and walls are built to shut out the light that we could be for one another. Karen Bray, “of soulless men in pursuit of power and influence.” All the logic of empire. And trying to remove access to affirming health care from trans kids whose lives depend upon being seen and known as themselves.Īll the work, in the words of my dear friend Dr. And would-be authoritarians in extremist-led state governments are banning books. Here the agents of imperial power are still enforcing our southern border with unimagined violence. Parents are putting stickers on their children with their blood types, preparing for a possibility I don’t want to let myself imagine.Īnd here. Ukranians are fleeing to Poland, or staying to fight, or sheltering underground. Russia’s Authoritarian Putin, mad for power and land, seeking to possess, always more, has invaded the growing Democracy in Ukraine. This response to our interdependence, this choice to be shelter or shadow, belongs to each of us. What matters is not so much the fact of our entanglement as our attention to it and our attunement to one another. We are tangled up in one another for good and for ill. We lived amidst deep interconnection, and I have often noted that an interconnected web of life can be a net to catch us, but it can also be a spider’s weapon to trap and kill.

He knows intimately that we live in both the shelter and the shadow of one another. O Tuama runs a Christian peace and reconciliation center in Northern Ireland called the Corrymeela Community, which was founded in 1965 to aid all affected by the Northern Irish conflict. It more literally means: “People exist in each other’s shadows.”

O Tuama’s poem, however, shows that the phrase has more than one valid translation.

In a poem in his Daily Prayer book, the Irish poet Padraig O Tuama examines an old Irish Proverb, “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine,” which is frequently translated: “In the shelter of one another the people live.”

In the shelter padraig