The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World

by Sharon Brous

At its core is the firmly held belief that we who hold a dream of building a different kind of society must begin by building a different kind of community.

In our time, a cultural love affair with the myth of rugged individualism met the era of smartphones and social media, leaving us particularly vulnerable to isolation and disconnection and highly susceptible to loneliness.

the intersection of mutual concern and shared purpose,

every person, created in God’s own image, has endless potential.

What would it mean to build a society in which every person

is treated as an image of the Divine?

She treated him as though he, an image of God, was someone’s

child and, therefore, her shared responsibility.

Becoming ourselves is a spiritual imperative of the highest order—for our own sakes and for the sake of the world. Because we are both big and small, everything and nothing.

Grieve deeply, and leave room for the light. Celebrate wholeheartedly, but always with humble awareness of where the pain lives. Grieve and live. Live and grieve.

Lack of curiosity, fear, isolation, repulsion, tribal biases—these are neural patterns. The call of our time is to establish new neural patterns. We

need

spiritual rewiring that enables us to see one another, in our pain and in our fear, in our joy and in our yearning. In our humanity. It’s what I’ve been calling throughout this book the amen effect: repeated, ritualized encounters with the other, designed...

That is precisely what we must now do. Put to rest an old story—loneliness, isolation, polarization, and extremism, broken politics, and ailing spirit—and in its place, lay the foundation for a new

story. One in which we see each other in all our bruises and all our beauty. See each other, not despite our own broken hearts, but precisely because our hearts are broken, too. See each other not only because we can, but because we must. Say “Amen” to one another’s sorrow and celebration because we understand that’s what it means to be

bound up in the bond...