Responding Together - November 2025

Our co-founders, Mary Anne and Victoria, each answered a question from the our Listening Cards.

Mary Anne Inglis, Co-Founder

What does your tradition teach about love?
What are your own experiences with spiritual or unconditional love?
Spiritual Thought Category

My tradition is rooted in Christianity.  Recently, I have had the privilege of facilitating a Women’s Bible Study at my church, St. John in the Wilderness Flat Rock, on the Gospel of John.  Reading scripture accompanied by the commentary of N. T. Wright’s John for Everyone and the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: The Gospel of John, we have come to a deeper understanding of the centrality of Love whose thread runs throughout this Gospel.  We have seen how Jesus loved the Samaritan woman at the well, healed numerous people of diseases, raised Lazarus from the dead and taught his disciples to love one another in John 13: 34-35: “I’m giving you a new commandment and it is this: love one another!  Just as I have loved you, you must love one another. This is how everybody will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for each other.” 

Throughout this Gospel, Jesus continually points to his unity with God, his Father, our Father, the God of love.  This culminates in Chapter 17 when Jesus prays for those who knew him then and will know him in the ages to come - praying that they would be one as He and the Father are one.  Jesus prays for unity in our lives - unity in love - the love God the Father has for Him and for the whole world.  This prayer comes before his final act of love of dying on the cross for the sins of the world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in HIm may not perish but may have eternal life.”  John 3:16

That life begins here as we love one another, by God’s grace.  I have experienced that love in many different ways through family, friends, and even animals - all ambassadors of God’s love to me, but only possible by the ultimate love of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit for us all. 

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Victoria Chance, Executive Director

Why do you think humans continue to make space for hate and discrimination in our speech, our stories, our religious institutions, and in our homes? In what ways is it seemingly beneficial? In what ways not?
Who Are We? Category

I am baffled by our willingness to hate anything that is not directly linked to human suffering or things that damage other creatures and our Earthly home; poverty, greed, poisonous pollution all come to mind as hateful things. I guess this is because these wretched conditions are the results of our selfish grasping, and we are all full of desires—large and small—whether it’s for a new car or a clean house; enough money to give some away or to fill up a vault. What’s confusing is our willingness to hate our neighbor because of our grasping after power, control, or because we perceive they are different and these differences somehow threatened us instead of enrich us. For example, some of us seem very tolerant of the thuggish and terrorizing behavior of ICE because this behavior must satisfy some desire we harbor for brutality toward other men, women, and children who are in our country. We say we fear and hate them because of something about their skin color. What? How and why can this be? Skin color? Or something about someone’s sexuality? What? How does that harm me? And why in the world is it my business? But having skin color, sexual identity, a gender, ethnicity, religion, these all help me understand why hatred is seemingly beneficial. It allows us to put folks in tidy groups and then point and say, “to be in our group and to be loved and protected by us, you must reject these; that’s how we’ll know you’re a part of us.”

There’s just one problem with that. “I love you and you love me” is always true. What?! Yes, here’s how this works. All things are one, the web of life, love your neighbor as yourself, do to others as you would have them do to you, God is love—all of this is true and you can test it and embrace it all the time (which is what our sacred texts teach, by the way). This point of view and stance for living is irresistible—literally. So, let’s go back to this anonymous, masked ICE agent cruising around in the middle of the night looking for someone to arrest. How do I love him? Honestly, how? Well, I am driven and inspired, too. I love duty, success, making people I know proud. I love taking a risk for what I believe in—I share these with this agent; we are absolutely connected in this basic human way, and that gives me room in my imagination for love instead of hate. How does he love me? Same, in fact, there’s a good chance this agent is protecting me for love of our country as well. Y’all, we’re in this—together. All of us.

I love you and you love me.

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Thank you for joining us for this special opportunity to hear the voices of the women who started it all, Mary Anne and Victoria.

Want to share YOUR voice? Join us for an upcoming event!