Dear World: A Love Letter

Everyone sitting down?  Comfortable?  That uh… that probably won’t last.  As an introductory post in a new format for me, this one’s a doozy.

We spend a lot of time around those who we feel are “like” us.  That can be ok – if you find someone to be a jerk consistently, maybe don’t devote all your time to that relationship.  But I hope we can find the “like-ness” we have with others through meeting, listening, and developing relationship rather than through first appearances and filtering through whatever presuppositions we may consciously or subconsciously apply.  I’m discovering as I live that “my people” is not a phrase about pigmentation – or origin, or sex, or economic status, or age.  My people are the ones who engage in empathy even though it’s uncomfortable – because if we’re so pleased with how things are working out for us that we would rather not be bothered with what’s missing in other people’s lives, we’ve missed the point of what it is to be human together.

Introspection is not a terribly pleasant thing.  We know by now what we like about ourselves and our little worlds, and we know what we dislike – but the things we know we dislike tend to be focused externally.  There is ugliness hiding in our hearts that we become experts at compartmentalizing and ignoring – we don’t want it to be illuminated by looking in on ourselves, and we avoid doing so in surprising ways.  Sometimes we avoid it by joking, dangerously close to the topic we know we have trouble with, and thereby disarming it in our minds if we can get someone else to chuckle.  Sometimes we ignore any mention of it.  Other times still we know it’s there and we embrace it – these are the grating conversations that sound appalling to a passerby but in which we don’t see anything wrong ourselves.  When the rubber hits the road, this is almost an easier starting point than the first two scenarios – because the light is shining on it, whether it’s pretty or not.

Let’s talk about fear.  Because most of what we get wrong is a result of entertaining our fear.  In life we make ourselves very good at masking our fears.  We don’t even recognize them as fears, because somehow we’ve convinced ourselves as a society that fear and acknowledgement of fear is weakness and undesirable.  In our everlasting pursuit of irony we weaken ourselves by refusing to understand what we fear and what we need help with.

Perfect love drives out fear.  Whoa, and now we’re talking about love.  Let’s back it up.  What is love? (baby don’t hurt me… don’t hurt me – no more)  Well… it’s patient.  It’s kind.  It’s not envious, boastful, prideful, rude.  It’s not insistently self-serving, easily angered, and it doesn’t keep a score card of wrongdoing.  It doesn’t find solace in evil – those ugly corners of ourselves that are under lockdown – but it rejoices in truth.  It always protects, trusts, hopes and perseveres.

There’s a lot to unpack there – never mind the fact that these phrases are very familiar to some of you, and you may even have a gag reaction to reading them because of the people who you’ve witnessed in your life lauding these things and yet practicing them so poorly.  I’m certainly one of them.

This isn’t a self-help situation.  One where we talk about some feelings, try to be better, and pat ourselves on the back for feeling like we’ve done something.  This isn’t “go make a new [insert not your ethnicity here] friend and get to understand their outlook and experience in life.”  I mean it certainly is – please do that – but it goes well beyond that.  This is a God-help-us situation.  At this point you grasp that the things I’m talking about are predicated on a particular understanding of the world, a created universe with beings that are here purposefully.  If that’s not true, there doesn’t seem to be much point in bothering with these discussions at all.  Concepts of decency, humanity, empathy, morality – there’s no place or need for these in a reality that has no purpose other than to hurl through space in our advanced state of various dusty bits that will someday become less advanced dusty bits.  Even those whose beliefs boil down to an observable universe devoid of purpose are often adamant about defending that outlook – at our cores we yearn for an intentionality in why we’re here and why we believe and feel as we do.

So, then, why dig into and address our fears?  Because most of the choices we make that have detrimental consequences are borne out of some form of fear, large or small.  Because we harm ourselves and everyone else when we let the same longstanding, generation-to-generation fears carry on in those corners of our hearts where they’re stashed away.  When we find ourselves at a loss for words because these same problems resurface in horrific ways that we feel should have been resolved decades – generations – millennia ago, and even our most jaded selves say “God help us,” we’re asking to be looked in on and have what is hidden even from ourselves exposed so we can figure out what’s rotting us from the inside.  It’s the stubborn dad in us finally going to the doctor because something’s clearly wrong.

Notice how the “taboo” topics of our cultures are usually the things we have the roughest time with.  They’re not fun to really address in depth and in polite conversation, so we relegate them to private discussion – out of the public view.  Even now I’m fascinated to see all the entities that are committing to donate to organizations which intend to help us work through racial issues in particular – and I’m glad to see that… I just hope that we don’t fall into the classic approach of trying to throw money at a problem to make it go away and consider our part done so we can get back to doing our own lives the way we want.  This is an exercise of action beyond opening up a checkbook.  Do that too, but let’s not leave it at that.

And yes, by the way, we need desperately to seek justice when we do wrong.  Revenge may be briefly satisfying, but we need our idea and constructs of justice to be spoken into by truth so that we can recognize and enact it.  To act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

We’ve had an unusual opportunity, time-wise, for introspection these last few months – I don’t know that we’ve used it for that as much as for binging the ‘Flix, but we’ve certainly built up a stir-crazy feeling of needing to get out and do something.  Some of us feel like breaking things.  Rage boils up in us when we see incontrovertible injustice – or when we feel like our way of life is under threat.  It’s an easy step to turn that rage toward whatever window or building we’re walking by, without a thought for how it may undermine the efficacy of what we’re moving toward in doing so.  It’s easy to turn that rage against the individuals we perceive to be on a “side” of an issue.  It’s much harder to unclench our fists, lay down the brick and the riot shield, and kneel before each other and before God to say we have problems and we need help to find them and fix them.  It’s harder to come to each other with humility and to do the work of empathy, not just imagining ourselves in a different situation but finding out what living is really like for someone un“like” us.  Again, we may fear losing something – and action out of fear doesn’t produce good results.

To drive out fear then, why love?  How?  We love because He first loved us.  I didn’t know how to change a tire before seeing it done.  These action items that are the foundation of actually doing love are things that we don’t do well if we have not already been a recipient of them and experienced how they work.  Being patient with someone requires knowing them.  Being kind to someone is not passive, it is acting on their life in a way that benefits them without any motive aside from that end.  Wanting what we believe someone else has – or lording over them what we believe we have – are inactions that prevent active love (pro tip: we don’t keep any of it).  Always taking care of ourselves first, letting our tempers rule us, keeping track of the wrong that’s done to us – building a case to justify our own wrongdoing – these prevent it too.  Love doesn’t love evil – that seems pretty straightforward.  It rejoices in truth?  That can be voicing the beauty in others that is different than yours.  It can be speaking against that which is untrue.  Love is protecting those who need protection.  Trusting – not so much in our individual efforts, in a politician or a political party – but trusting in truth and God’s guidance as we seek it.  It’s hoping – seeing that there is a point to this and that it’s worth doing the work.  And persevering… not giving up at the first push back, but continually honing our practice of active love.  These are all things you can certainly apply effort to in a self-help construct, regardless of whether you believe what I do.  I can’t vouch for their efficacy outside of the context they’re designed into.  But if we allow God to begin a work in us, he’s promised to be faithful to complete it.  For some of us, that’s whatcha call the Holy Spirit pulling us in a direction.  Tends to be against the one we want to head in on our own.

Oh yeah, pride – our calling card.  That’s going to be a tough one to get around – and likely the reason why this lands as entirely unpalatable to a lot of us.  That’s ok.  I’d invite you to come back and read this again in a couple weeks and just see if it hits any differently.

Here’s an idea of what goes through my mind when I feel compelled to justify to myself – for some reason – why my life is the way it is at any given moment.  I think about how hard I work and how I try to be so fair in how I approach each circumstance that comes up in my day to day life.  Then the introspection comes: if I was exactly myself, thought every same thought, spoke every same word, had each exact personal interaction, responded to every input identically to the way I have so far, would my life be exactly the same if I was… not white?  If the honest answer to that inward inquiry is anything other than absolutely yes, we have a basis for having this conversation on every level, from within our existing relationships all the way to a global scale.

While we’re getting busy not allowing ourselves to get hung up on “white” and “black” as the sole bases of disparities we face, let’s also remember that there are dozens of international and hundreds of regional and circumstantial sub-cultures within just these two generalized concepts of ethnicity.  That the same problems we may struggle with in this particular venue exist in varying forms among all cultures, and that practicing empathy and being love to people pervades any kind of difference we may inadvertently or overtly detect between ourselves and someone else.  I’m inspired by a dear friend who has striven to be so transparently introspective and fair that he approaches situations by first trying to identify and neutralize the biases he knows he has from his own culture, upbringing, personality and experiences.  That’s whatcha call wisdom, folks.  We stand to learn in this time from people who have longer life experience battling these things than we do – and from those who are younger than us and have yet to entrench themselves to the extent we have.  We stand to learn from those whose bodies are different from ours, whose limbs, senses or minds don’t work like ours do.  When we surround ourselves solely with those who we perceive to be “like” us, we truncate the breadth and depth of understanding life as we’re meant to enjoy it.

If we are so entrenched – if we’ve dug ourselves in to where we are – as long as there’s breath in our bodies we still have a shovel to begin digging out.  We who are still here can breathe.  So let’s dig.