Since August I have been working to internalize and live into some principles that I discovered at a retreat with author Parker Palmer. They are what he calls the five Habits of the Heart. The last couple of weeks have had me clinching my fists and furrowing my brow over the first of these habits: We are all in this together.

Palmer uses these five habits to help individuals and groups reflect on how they do their work, how we live in the world and how we creatively function as human beings in our time, in the places where we make meaning of our lives. This first habit is a biggie especially in a culture that has based much of its understanding on a notion of individualism. This is the culture that says: ” I can do anything I want to do, be anything I want to be.” “It is up to me to make it happen.” Or “It’s just me against the world!” These statements and so many like them breed a false sense of what it really means to live in a world that is so intricately woven together that the threads sometimes become invisible to us and we can only see our own single thread thinking it is the only and most important one in the tapestry of our world.

Over the last weeks when we have seen our government behave in ways much like happens in school yard bully scuffles, I have been thinking about this habit of the heart: We are all in this together.Trying to live into the fullness of that has allowed me to dig down deep and work to understand the playmates with whom I am most radically opposed. Because, like it or not, their behavior affects me….and you….and everyone else, just as mine and those whose views are more like my own do. This has been an often strange exercise and probably not any less frustrating than if I just railed at the television or radio shouting my own opinions.

But my faith tradition, this Christian household into which I was born, holds out a principle deep in its core that we all have sprung from an eternal seed of goodness, this sacred breath of the Holy. Not just me in my sense of righteousness but also all the others with whom my mind and heart do not agree. Even all those who look differently and those who believe differently and even those who can find no way in their hearts to believe much of anything, are still held in this eternal Breath. We are all in this together.

And so that is why I am thankful that Parker Palmer has chosen to name these gifts of his own imagination ‘habits’. As I understand it habits come from much practice. Anyone who has ever tried to establish an exercise regimen knows that you have to practice and practice before running or walking or, whatever it is, becomes a habit that leads to better health. To practice every day this notion that ‘we are all in this together’ opens my heart to a way of seeing and a way of being that just may become a habit. Every day I must practice, sometimes with the same grunting and sweating that comes from lifting weights, that I am in this living with a wide variety of people whose life experiences cause them to see the world in a particular way just as mine does.

My hope is, my prayer is, that as this practice becomes a habit I can more wisely see how every word, every action, every vote, every dollar spent, is a reflection of this togetherness. As practice builds muscle into habit, my hope is that I learn to hold gently these threads that unite us and never jerk or tug too strongly in my own direction, for my own perceived good or benefit.

This is my prayer for myself and for those to whom we have entrusted the ordering of our common life. May they, too, not be fooled by the single-mindedness of individualism and instead remember that ‘we are all in this together.’