Very few events and topics in our current world create a sense of unity between people, across borders, and over the barricades we have built outside ourselves. We have made connection and community nearly impossible. As I think almost too hard about this now, I can’t imagine anything that we can do or believe in that doesn’t create some kind of “other.” Our political ideologies, race, gender, sex, spiritual beliefs, theological leanings, sexual orientation, the country we live in — all create categories and labels that define us and create groups to silo ourselves with and apart from others.
Sometimes this labeling and grouping can create very good things: safety (physically, mentally, emotionally), familiarity, connection in commonality. Love blooms easily from fertile ground like this, and love is good and right. Whole communities are built on core commonalities, and in itself, I don’t think that is wholly wrong.
A host of reasons exist why someone naturally fits into or chooses one group or another. I think most of us can agree that it feels comforting and good to be part of something — to fit in and be surrounded by others who share our similarities.
We categorize to make sense of the world around us — to make sense of ourselves. This is where identity flourishes. We want to be set apart, different yet the same, important as individuals and as a collective. And again, making sense of the world in itself is not the issue.
Our problems begin when we see those outside our own groups as the “other.” Too often, we leave empathy at the door and see the other side or other person as a “monster,” an “alien,” or any other manner of words that strip away a person or group’s humanity and our ability to empathize with them. Demonizing our differences and pushing the “other” out of our communities, our families, or our hearts, kills our capacity for love.
And in the end, this othering defines us. This hatred, which usually stems from a fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the un-understandable, eats away at our work to unify, to find our commonality, to build a loving and safe community.
Hate has no home here.
The Belhar Confession certainly has something to say about resisting hatred and fighting for unity. This excerpt is from an affirmation of faith based on the Belhar Confession, Art. 1-2:
“We believe that Christ’s work of reconciliation is made manifest in the church as the community of believers who have been reconciled with God and with one another…We believe that this unity must become visible so that the world may believe that hatred among people is sin, which Christ has already conquered. Anything that threatens this unity may have no place in the church and must be resisted. Together we fight against all that may threaten or hinder this unity. Together we celebrate our differences as opportunities for the mutual service within the one visible people of God. Together we love each other.”
”Anything that threatens this unity may have no place in the church and must be resisted,” stands out to me. Sometimes we’re fighting something obviously evil: genocide, injustice, starvation, hatred, prejudices, etc. etc. etc. But often, what’s evil may not be so obvious or agreed upon by everyone. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand this disagreement or “gray area” in evil, but for this post’s purposes and from this affirmation of faith, we do know that hatred is sin and all that stems from hatred must be resisted.
So, what do we do with our divisions that are real and powerful and often scary? I don’t have a clear answer either on that yet or possibly ever, but I do believe that our pull to love and fight for unity, peace, and justice is stronger than our capacity to hate and to hurt. Defining ourselves solely through our differences only further chisels chasms between us. “Together we celebrate our differences as opportunities…” Our differences and divisions do not need to define us, especially when our divisions are built on hatred and contempt for our fellow human.
Unity blooms from love, and perhaps love is what should define us. Not a limp love of platitudes and niceness nor a love stuck on convincing others that we’re right. Instead, a love filled with true kindness and empathy, bursting with our best care for others (with a healthy dose of boundaries, of course).
This may sound trite, but I think love is the one thing that can unite us — if we are all willing to dive into this prescription to act in love and to resist all threats to love. Only through love can divisions crumble and barriers break. Let’s bring these walls down together.
“Together we love each other.”
4 Responses
This is the appeal of the Roman Catholic Church. One huge international, interracial, and multicultural communal institution.
The hardest thing we are called to do I think is to love our enemies (and pray for those who persecute us). It is easy to love those who like the same things we do, but to love those who think, feel, and act differently, and those who believe the opposite of what we hold dear is very hard. Maybe not humanly possible. A recent article in Christian Century called us to have transcendental love instead of transactional love. It is counter cultural but it is Christian.
Thanks for this. An observation: For decades, people with different mindsets brought different primary values to the table in the RCA. On one “side,” those who valued “truth”; on the other, “unity.” The first argued that while we are given the gift of unity, that gift is based in truth; therefore truth is the primary value. The second argued that unity is the matrix within which we inch our way toward truth. The first: truth is the propositional foundation; the second: truth is intersubjective discovery. You write “unity blooms from love,” which, interestingly enough, was absent from those tiresome conversations. And the few times that the General Synod tried to convene groups to hammer out a pathway forward for the denomination, the participants found a love for one another that enabled them to disagree in love, i.e., to coexist in unity, as distinct from agreement. In other words, people learned to honestly and sincerely desire the existence of the folks on the “other side.” And each time these groups brought this kind of report to the General Synod – proposing, more or less, that mutual love be the way forward for the church – they were defeated. To quote GK Chesterton: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
I like the penetrating (but sad) truth shown in your title. We have wrongly been letting what defines us be the thing that divides us. To “define” means to set a “finite” edge around something. When we “define” a word, we are saying that the word does not mean everything, but has only a limited set of meanings. To often when we de-fine ourselves or the truth, we are forget the implication of that word that we have a limited, finite grasp of reality. Defining ourselves is good, as long as we don’t confuse it with an in-finite grasp of reality. Better yet is to de-fine ourselves in relationship to the Infinite Trinity of Father, Son & Spirit.