People
I want to talk a little bit about people, and the way I’m coming to see them. I guess you might call this my emerging anthropology.
I think people are fundamentally good. Like the rest of creation, we’re wondrous and amazing and full of all kinds of potential. We get plopped into the universe and just by nature of existing go about the business of being miracles.
I think we’re also – every last one of us – plopped into a web of violence (Rene Girard and co. have some pretty brilliant things to say about this, in my opinion.). Other words could be used here instead of violence, like dysfunction or woundedness. But for me they all boil down to this end: by nature of existing, we get hurt. It can’t be helped.
So in addition to all of our sparkle and glory, we all of us become wounded creatures, acting and reacting in ways appropriate to the nature of our wounds. We develop holes inside, that crave love or belonging or respect or control or power or beauty or tenderness or attentiveness or whatever other things got broken out of us or into us in the course of our lives, or never were given enough to us in the first place. We thus become compelled to try and fill our holes. Or keep ourselves from developing more. Or prevent our originals from getting gouged out or eroded any deeper than they already are.
Often times this means pursuing life passions and vocations that actually make the world a better place – really wonderful organizations and institutions and laws and books and classes and conferences and entire social movements have been the offspring of painful personal experiences with life’s darker side.
But our attempts at filling our holes and/or protecting ourselves from developing deeper or new ones don’t only spread light. Just as often, I think they end up becoming part of that web I spoke about earlier. The violent one. The one that hurts us and only perpetuates itself and all the things from which we want to be free. One can think of any number of poster children from this camp, including any number of world leaders, past and present.
The tragic thing about our world is that this web is so ubiquitous. But…the wonderful thing about our world – the thing that gives me hope and gladness and inspiration in the face of all of the horrible, horrible yuck – is that darkness and violence aren’t the whole story.
They aren’t the whole story.
There is goodness in our world. And light and love. And despite some major and persisting set-backs, these have quite the tenacious life-force. So much so, that when they die or get snuffed out, they pop up again. Maybe not in the same place, but still… Life out of death. Resurrection. It’s that pattern I wrote about some time back.
The Story, as a whole, as I see it, is one of darkness and light, and in humans, as in so much of creation, a miraculous potential for healing and growth and change. And everywhere a life force, a kind of Holy Pulse, that pulls at us toward realizing that potential. Again and again.
To me, this way of understanding people and all the layers of violence and light that populate our planet feels radically different from one that sees humans as fundamentally evil. Rather than scolding fingers, it causes me to want to point compassion toward myself and toward humanity. Wounded animals need lots of tenderness to heal. And the last thing they need to be told is that they’re bad for trying to protect themselves. Or for trying to get the things their broken selves genuinely need.
I have a hunch that if we truly understood one another’s wounds, we’d find it very difficult to condemn. Anyone. Destructive behavior would still need to be addressed and contained, but I wonder if the goal even then would shift from punishment toward redemption, or a chance at healing change.