The Predicament of Our Shared Humanity

Like many worldwide, I watched this week in horror as video and pictures of the Hamas attack and Israeli retaliations streamed on my devices. I don’t understand violence. No conflict can be fully understood from a distance. Beyond geopolitics, beyond rights and transgressions, beyond tactical details, I saw bleeding little children. 

What if that bleeding child was my granddaughter?

What force blinds the human heart to love? Is it pure evil? Is it hatred? I searched my soul for the answer. There is no denying hatred is real. It manifests in the human heart. But something more indigenous and primal must place it there. 

In search of an answer, I turned to love.

Love is mysterious. The more we try to possess love, the more it eludes us. The great poet Rumi wrote, “Love is the bridge between you and everything.” If true, why is the bridge so often hidden from view and, when found, so difficult to cross?

In his masterwork, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran hints at the answer: “Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”

Individuals invent hatred. No one has dominion over love.  

When I say I’m “in love,” I’m really saying I’ve opened my heart and let love in. Miraculously, this love cannot be contained, meaning the same love can enter you. When in love, we share an indwelling Spirit. 

The opposite of love is not evil or hatred; it is separation. 

Violence is said to spring from hatred, but that is inaccurate. Violence is spawned by the view that we are distinct and separated from one another.

Suppressing hatred will never put an end to violence. The solution to violence lies in opening our hearts to look beyond the illusion of separation.  

Nothing in the universe is genuinely separate. Separation is manufactured in our brains, and stored in our hearts. There is no greater source of emotional pain.

Unity is always possible. Even sworn enemies can agree on the beauty of a sunrise or the love of their children. Those capable of such feats are wise. Wise people see connections everywhere. They are extremely rare.

I am an optimist, but I fear the world has entered a new and perilous phase. In addition to the  ongoing war in Ukraine, we now have a new potentially contagious war in the Middle East.  At home, our dysfunctional House of Representatives can’t even find sufficient unity to choose a leader. Unity in our modern world appears to have gone missing.

At this very moment, it is more critical than ever for each of us to open our hearts, if only just a crack, to the reality and predicament of our shared humanity.

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