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Just before bed, after you’ve brushed your teeth, you take one last look in the mirror before turning off the lights. Who do you want staring back?
What kind of person do you want to see standing before you, that raw slice of humanity with all its masks ripped off and disguises tossed aside?

Right now, our cultural and political landscape is in chaos. It is aflame with transition, with power shifting, with new rules and laws hammered out daily.

Voices shout at other voices; louder and louder they scream, as if being the loudest means being the truest! We claim to hate such venom, yet we are the ones who listen to those loud voices, who stand in the sweltering heat for rally tickets, who tune religiously into TV stations and streaming platforms.

These actions have the unholy effect of convincing those loud voices that they are indeed right and true! As always, when power shifts, new definitions of what is Truth are inked on governing parchments and handed down for immediate obedience.

Overnight, the world changes, and with each dusk giving way to a new dawn, it changes yet again! But in all of this, in all this transition and change, you still get to decide what will govern you and dictate how you move through the world and treat those around you. You still have the power to determine what goodness means to you.

Full circle, I call you back to my original question: “When you look into the mirror, who do you want to stare back at you?” I bet you want to be someone your friends and family can be proud of. I bet you want to be someone who makes a difference in the world. I bet you want to leave the world better than you found it. In short, I bet you want to be good.

But what is goodness? Smarter people than me have tried and failed to define goodness. It is a fool’s errand. Yet, I’ll try anyhow, since I have no problem playing the fool: Goodness is the virtue inside that calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Goodness directs our gaze beyond our own needs and desires, looking at the horizon of humanity standing before us with open arms, crying out, “Help us!” Goodness stirs us to action, forcing us down into the dirt of the world, finding its gutter places, and making sure nobody sleeps in a land of shadows!
You want to be good, don’t you? I bet you do. But it’s getting harder and harder each day to be good when the powers and principalities of this world are grinding the most vulnerable beneath their legislative thumbs.

It’s harder to be good when basic foodstuffs are becoming so expensive, and funding for vulnerable, legal refugees was stripped by a would-be oligarch. It’s hard to be good when goodness is no longer prized, when goodness has been supplanted by power, when goodness is cruelty wearing a mask of righteousness.

But hard things are often the things most worth doing, most in need of doing. We can be good. We really can. And it begins with you and me making the decision to set aside all biases and prejudices, looking first at the vulnerable humanity held in common with everybody: rich and poor, all colors, creeds, and nationalities, all those with blood flowing through their veins and breath in their lungs. We can decide this together, despite the prevailing winds of our society pushing us towards brutal individualism once again.

But goodness is like the fragile flower seeded under concrete. Over time, that flower forces its way through the stone and decides that its beauty was too rich to lie buried under the dirt. Our common humanity is too beautiful to be tossed aside in favor of anything that divides us. That wasn’t hyperbole or exaggeration.

My first allegiance as a Christian is to the God who calls me to see everybody as my neighbor, and then to love my neighbor as myself. Before there were nation-states and empires, before churches and holy places, before language even, when all our species had were primal cries and grunts, we knew nothing of the imaginary lines we have placed over our modern humanity.

It was survival of the fittest. And the only way we survived, the only way we became the dominant species, was because we knew how to come together and evolve best as a pack, a tribe, a people.

Circumstances aren’t what they once were. The world has become infinitely more complex and complicated. We speak in binary computing codes and thousands of dialects and languages. Yet, underneath the labels and lines, the flags and papers, is still the same heart that beats best when united with our neighbor for the good of all. If we could begin right now with a commitment to being excellent to one another, we might have a fighting chance at survival. Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s how we save the world.

Chris Adams is the Rector at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Washington.