PHOTO: ILKA HARTMANN “UNITY FAIR” 1976
“We have the choice to be true to the gifts we are given.”
“I would insists that the gifts we are given are not simply, and perhaps not primarily, for ourselves. They are simply not for our personal selves. The gifts are for our larger self, for the role we have in the larger community of things. That, to my mind, is the reason for the gifts we are given. That is why nature diversifies.
“As Thomas Aquinas says in a beautiful passage,’ So that the perfection lacking to one would be supplied by the other.’ We are supplying the perfection lacking in one another. What we do not have as individuals is enormously greater than what we do have.
“We need all the people around us, we need everyone, we need every leaf on every tree, we need every earthworm in the earth, we need every bacterial reality, every microbe and every event. We need everything. The community is the larger reality, our larger personal destiny. Yet community depends on the integral development of each individual.”
~Thomas Berry from Befriending the Earth: A Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth
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