October 18, 2015
I am fascinated by this simple insight. I heard this phrase while watching a PBS documentary about E.O. Wilson, a famous biologist who has focused his studies on ants, but who is also a deep thinker about human nature. Ants, like humans, are social animals, living in complex groups. His thinking about ants has given him insights into understanding humans. And, as we are social animals, this simple observation is true: “Exclusion makes us suffer, inclusion makes us thrive.”
(Talk a little bit more about Wilson’s ideas. Ants as a super orgainism. (This is how Paul describes the church, with its members all part of one body.) So we see that selfishness is good within a group but not among groups (quote)… He gives the example of two different kinds of ants fighting, and how each day ants line up to block the entrances and die… So, he came to feel that natural selection, the survival of the fittest, the selfish jean, was an idea that only went so far. It didn’t work as a way of understanding eusocial (Eusociality (Greekeu: "good/real" + "social"), the highest level of organization of animal sociality, is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive groups.[1][2]) animals. Wilson thinks that humans are eusocial, but clearly there is a tension, perhaps an evolutionarily rooted tension, between our competitive nature and our eusocial nature.
I found that E.O. Wilsons thoughts about human nature were very helpful in thinking about Jesus and Christianity.
Jesus embodied inclusion.
Gordon Cosby used to ask, with burning urgency, “Who are we, really? What is our essence? Our true nature? If it is inclusion, for the good of the group—even to the point of self-sacrifice for the good of the group, then perhaps Jesus does indeed reveal our real, truest nature. Another word for inclusion, and for self-sacrifice, is “Love.”
The inclusive God of Jesus loves everything. The nature of divine Love is to be radically inclusive. In Matthew 6, in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, we read:
43 Youhave heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,[a] what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
We now can see that our group, that which we depend on for survival, and which depends on us for survival, includes all the plants and all the animals of the earth, and even the geological earth itself. If we consider the earth as a commodity to be exploited, a resource to be consumed, spent, then we exclude it from our love and care, our stewardship, and we use up what turns out to be our very life support system. What does it look like when we do this? Right now we are inducing frequent earthquakes in OK, where earthquakes were never felt before, by the fracking process by which we extract natural gas from deep in the earth. We are drying up aquifers, deep, mysterious underground rivers that we always experienced as inexhaustible. We are changing the chemistry of the air, even the upper atmosphere, leading to global warming… This is all possible because we don’t love these things, we don’t experience them as infused with the holy, with the divine. One man who did experience them in this way was the Jesuit Priest and geologist Teillard de Chardin. He wrote of matter itself. We have this in the Biblical creation story, where God creates everything, the waters, the dry land, the dome of the sky, the sun and the moon, night and day, the stars—the cosmos—and all the plant kingdom, and all the animal kingdom, and humans, “made in our image…” and all of it was good. Do we think that destroying that which God made and loved as “good” is ok? We need to understand our group as an ever-larger circle, as including all people, and all plant and animal life, and the earth, and even the cosmos itself. And we need to be willing to sacrifice ourselves for the group.
The problem is a small view of groups and ourselves as isolated—a kind of tribalism, “It’s us or them.” But we have to realize that there is no “them.” This is where Jesus’ teachings are essential: we are all “sinners;” we are all flawed; we are all in need of mercy.
Is violence ok when a group becomes a mortal threat to other groups? Such as the Nazis, or perhaps the Islamic State, or for that matter our homegrown terrorists like the young man who killed nine African Americans in a bible study group in a church. I personally believe that it is ok and inevitable to use violence in a carefully considered and measured way to eliminate such threats, but I recognize that for Jesus, Love was the way, and to be true to Love was to fulfill his nature, and perhaps our true nature, our cosmic and divine destiny, and so to live in “the kin-dom of heaven.”
The tension is that religion has always created insiders and outsiders. So, Jesus was a Jew, but refused to observe the accepted exclusions which make people suffer—he refused to exclude women, the poor, the sick, non-Jews, sinners, etc. And he gave us a rite, a sacramental symbol of our participation in his nature, his inclusive nature, Communion. (Explore etymology of the word?) And, as Christianity developed, our old, competitive instinct, deep-rooted in fear, and the need for survival, which served us well up to a point, our old competitive instinct made Christianity, and even communion itself, exclusive! A friend of mine is a part of the Episcopal Church. His mother is a member of a local parish. When his mother in law began attending, she felt deeply drawn to it. My friend was sitting with the two of them in church one Sunday when his mother in law got up to receive communion, and his mother, horrified, sputtered, “But you’re not baptized!” You’re an outsider! You can’t commune with Jesus!
This tension was there among Jesus followers, who wanted to exclude people, and even was present to some degree in Jesus himself, who had to learn from the Syrophoenician woman whom he dismissed as unworthy, only to be re-awakened to Love by her statement that “even the dogs under the table need scraps…” This tension is powerful between Peter and Paul in the story in Acts of the early Church. Will Peter carry the day, saying you have to be circumcised to be “in”? Or will Paul, who is preaching to “gentiles,” or outsiders? Paul won that conflict, but this tension between exclusion and inclusion has never gone away, and for the most part, it seems to me, exclusion has carried the day.
We can see this tension played out in this wonderful new leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis. On the one hand, he speaks of the need for tolerance, on the other hand he makes veiled references in support of discrimination against—institutionalized exclusion of—gays, and other groups. To his credit his tone always seems to be loving, gentle and reconciliatory. But he is still beholden to an institution that is profoundly exclusive. Gordon used to speak occasionally of the fact that more people have been killed in the name of Christianity in the last 2,000 years than have been killed in the name of any other religion. He also recognized that, in his words, “Your Jesus might be my Jesus’ worst enemy.” I think he meant that if you are excluding others, and making them suffer, in the name of Jesus, then you haven’t understood Jesus as I have understood Jesus. How can the one who came espousing unconditional love become the basis of so much exclusion, the cause of so much suffering? And killing others in the name of Christianity, this is the ultimate exclusion: “If you don’t believe what I believe, or your group doesn’t believe what my group believes, we will kill you.”
I am convinced that practicing exclusion, which makes the excluded suffer, is a betrayal of Jesus and the Way he lived and taught. Jesus did not exclude even the worst sinners. A man being crucified—publically executed—next to him, a criminal who by his own admission deserves his fate, is not excluded: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)
Now, Jesus did come into conflict, sharp and bitter conflict. And his conflict was with the religious authorities of his day who were exclusive, who were judgmental, legalistic, and who made people feel unworthy.
My firm belief, rooted in my experience, and the witness of those who have gone deeper into the spiritual life (which is to say spiritual reality, which is to say reality itself) than I have, is that at the center, in the depths, at the core of all religions is a Oneness, a place of union. (Quote Richard Rohr on the soul in Jung…) As religious institutions have built up, and cultural accretions have encrusted the various traditions, Love—capital “L”, unconditional or divine love, the love which like the sun and the rain blesses good and evil alike, the love which flows even to our enemies—this Love has become love with a lower case “l,” exclusive love.
This is why contemplative practices, which open the way to mystical experiences, are so essential. Centering prayer, meditation, silent retreat, religious music, time fully present to the wonder of nature—which is a/the great communion—all of these things, and worship, and open sharing, deep listening,,, all of these things bring us down to the depths where union is inevitable.
But it is hard. It requires self-sacrifice, sometimes, as for Jesus, even the ultimate sacrifice.
35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” 36 And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” 37 And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” 38 But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” 39 They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42 So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Mark 10)
So, if we are to come home to our true nature, we need to love. We need to serve. We need to include and so help others to thrive, not exclude, and so cause suffering. In doing this we will participate in the divine nature Jesus was in union with, and so revealed, we will enter “the kingdom of heaven,” and instead of burdening others with reasons for their exclusion, we will be, by our very nature, an invitation for them, to enter too into the kingdom of heaven. And here we see the great mystery, also, that by loving, by serving, by including, by being healers, we fulfill our nature and so we enter the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are those who suffer persecution (exclusion) in the cause of righteousness (love), the kingdom of God is theirs. Blessed are you when you suffer insults and persecution and calumnies of all kinds for my sake. In the same way they persecuted the prophets before you. (and what do the prophets do? Call people to see their own sins and repent!) Rejoice and be glad, for you have a rich reward in heaven.” Then, if others exclude us, though it is painful, yet it is ok. It is tolerable. We live in the divine presence, in union with the divine Love, and in that we have the experience that “all is well, all is well, all manner of things is well.” (Julian of Norwich)