We all know that unity requires the collaboration of distinct individuals. The concept is irresistibly catchy and rings through to our best instincts, like the 70s Coke ad where kimonos, plaid pants and saris float in the sunlit promise of peace. Most everyone nods approvingly to togetherness built on diversity. But I think, sans soundtrack, that focusing on that lovely, wide angle group shot can be a distraction from the real thing.
Operationally, there is no unity of the masses worth having without a human-sized focus on the one. Unless we approach our world, one fascinating, troublesome, unscripted person at a time, our unity will just be another fancy idea, political label and empty campaign.
Take me. I'm a middle-aged, married, Chinese American woman of Christian faith. All true. But I've come to know, finally, that each of those labels that I wear, and appropriately so, do not ultimately present me to you. You can't call me by a "team name" (for example, "Woman") and really call ME. You can maybe summarize me; but you can't do that without also minimizing me. To know me, you'd have to spend time with me, conversing, sharing airspace and soulspace, and in that place of patient appreciation, you begin to apprehend me. And I, you.
That's the glory of human beings (as well as the glory of God, by the way) - we are social, family, completed in connection. Knowledge about is not enough for us. We cannot Wikipedia or IMDB ourselves into fulfillment. Rather our brains actually change by human connection, by interpersonal mirroring and this starts from infancy and doesn't stop. There's an old Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy says, "To know me is to love me." I think the reverse is also close to true: "To love me is to know me." Love and knowledge of another isn't linear, but a circular dance of growing appreciation and discovery that reveals and transforms the people dancing face to face, and not by avatar.
Maybe that's why in the 10 commandments, there's this strange prohibition against graven images. Yes, I know, it helps curb outright worship of statues. But, I wonder if it isn't also because God knows we are tempted, in our immaturity and avarice, to short-cut the real in exchange for pocketable, storable symbols of the real. We are collectors and can feel the power of holding individuals, like baseball card players, in our hand rather than play ball with real, everyday amateurs like ourselves. Increasingly that's how we live our substitute lives. I have a thousand great looking "friends" with incredibly interesting lives and deep thoughts and killer wit --- on Facebook. We all know that don't mean a thing, really.
But geez, who has the time? We've got companies to manage, churches to shepherd, nations to harmonize. We may be thinking about the whole thing sideways. Less might be more if we trust the embedded design of relationship in our creation.
I have a friend with 3 children who found that their typically busy family was showing signs of time stress and relational unrest. She shared that she and her husband changed their game plan on how they invested family time. Instead of trying to spend time as a group in the evenings, they focused on one child for a special longer time each night. That child got to have Mom and Dad sit in bed with her and share for 10 minutes about whatever and perhaps read a special book together. This proved to be much more satisfying to everyone, relationally deeper, esteem-building and also do-able.
So back to unity. As John Lennon lyricized, "Say you're looking for some peace and love, Leader of a big old band, You wanna save humanity, But it's people that you just can't stand." If we're serious about unity, we have to ask ourselves, how are we handling just one? And, not incidentally, how are you handling yourself?
For me, I struggled to seriously honor my own distinctive value. Maybe this stemmed from being the 5th child, from my sensitive, peace-keeper tendancy, and maybe in part from an ethnic culture that emphasizes the group over the one. But because I couldn't truly love and honor myself, without any bells and whistles, I wasn't really so good at loving other individuals. I was eager to celebrate commonalities and building bridges, but shy about digging deep into the differences that ultimately makes people interesting, and potentially unharmonious. I didn't know until much further down the road that until I could lovingly regard myself and others in our unique potencies, unity would be elusive, diluted or sabotaged.
Know thyself. There's an important difference between self-knowledge and self-determination. Our current culture seems to blur them unhelpfully together. I've found the work of self-determination has frequently distracted me from knowing myself, especially what I need to know before I try to improve anything about my life. Specifically we need to know that we are loved and valuable as is. And if we enter into the machine of self-determination without that essential knowledge (as most of us do), we will be ground beef, pulled apart, chopped up and ready to fry.
I spent most of my life caught in the wheels of self-determination but missing essential self-knowledge. The silent script "I'm important, and here's why" beat in the background of my various fantastic efforts. What degrees I had, what unions I joined, my worldly ease in various settings, how I felt about my style, what expectations I standardized for myself as a woman, how much I inspired others in their faith -- these were ways I approached self-determination, mostly unconsciously trying to liberate myself. And none of it turned on the lights in me because guess what? Nothing we do can actually add value to who we are by right of God's magnanimous creation. Does that make you mad? For those of us who have worked hard to determine ourselves, it takes a kind of humility to drop it all and receive the gift of yourself. The apostle Paul wrote, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." That is to say, the love of God is your infuses you with identity, not your ethnicity, your social/political position or your sexuality. When I was finally graced to encounter myself as God receives me, it changed pretty much everything, and among other things, set me up much better to encounter and appreciate other people.
We're longing to be seen, to know who we are by what others might truly reflect back to us. The problem is a lot of us are cracked mirrors, or we grew up with people who contorted our image back to us. But I have hope that with God's work in us, we can offer profound experiences of knowing and loving to one another. And we're told that one day we're going to have a sublime, culminating experience of that with our Creator, so it makes sense that we warm up now.
A couple years ago, I was being introduced as a conference speaker by a young pastor who had been in a small group I led when he was a college student. He surprised me when, describing why I was an impactful person worth listening to, he told how, while in that college small group, when we spoke, he felt like he was important, like he was the ONLY person in the room. Those face to face, life on life interactions, had profound effect on him. We, and others who were in that small group, have a uniquely powerful bond, a unity, if you will. (To this day, over 20 years later, we half jokingly address each other as “mom” and “son”.)
May I suggest a way to start. Look squarely, patiently, awkwardly at someone. It might even be yourself. Let him speak, or not speak. Give space for breath. Permit what she is and what she is not. And while you're doing that, invite God, the father of us all to lift your perspective of this person above your habitual one. Don't assume you see with clarity or know what love is like, but ask God to help you see and love the one in front of you. Do it today. Then again, tomorrow. And see what happens.
