This is more than a contentious election year. The spiritual realm is at war. The enemy seeks to divide and conquer, and is seeping into my family – as I’m sure it is countless others. Where do we find common ground when everything is polarized? If our foe is identified simply by their ballot, what becomes of the intriguing complexities of the human spirit?
I fear the consequences of sinking into an echo chamber where my opinions reverberate back to me. It is through challenging discourse that I have experienced the most significant growth in my life. We have to re-learn, and reprioritize, the art of conversation in our lives, because these divisions will only widen if we keep down this path as a country, as a people. It is clear that we are losing the ability to empathize, which is strengthened as we form deep relationships with others. As we learn about each other and engage in acts of life together, we find comfort in the discovery of foundational human desires and fears. In every great community there is great intimacy, which requires deep vulnerability.
Psalms 137 exclaims this symptom of the human condition, "how can we sing in a foreign land?", and ends with a wish for the children of their enemy to be smashed against a rock. How can such angst exist in the scriptures? Because God allows for human emotion to be expressed without judgement. Do we?
I believe that human connection is the desire of a God (spirit - universal energy, wherever one places their trust and hope) who created personalities and color to see if we could find unity through the celebration of our diversity. Instead, I see a culture that is increasingly driven by tribalism rather than community. Tribes are homogenous, driven by a common hatred for the enemy; communities are heterogeneous, strengthened by an amalgam of race, experiences, skills, and beliefs. Do we seek to feel good more than we seek the truth? Do we want to change people's minds more than we want to love them?
The former leads to a pitiless dystopia of our own creation – fear stands in the way of freedom, resentment in the way of trust, clicks and shares in the way communication. Any aptitude for empathy devolves into a mere vestigial trait, evincing what was but is no longer of use like the wings of a flightless bird. In an attempt to uphold our self-righteous posturing, we construct defenses to restrict the divulgence of any insecurities or dialectical discourse. The mission to maintain such resistance disengages all capacity for rest and reason, breeding adversaries as our list of offenses grow. Unable to preserve our own sanctimonious pretenses, we finally surrender any last scraps of intellectual ingenuity to a revolution of rhetorical chants sanctioned by the forfeiture of responsibility for our failures and flaws.