25/40: Co-exist
In community small or large there is the challenge of holding space for different ways of being rather than the suffering of need one to supercede the other.
Have you seen it? Perhaps a bumper sticker on the back of a car?
As a symbol of religious pluralism it is anathema to dogmatists.
Fundamentalists of all stripes wish there to be only one way. Their way. It doesn’t really matter whether one is a religious/atheist fundamentalist or one of a certain kind of lifestyle or way to eat.
It is a path of exclusion, that says it is inherently wrong for humans to peacefully co-exist, because that means that my (insert belief here: religion, atheism, lifestyle, eating preference) is only one among many.
The ‘reality’ is, of course, that mine should pre-dominate.
Reality Can Be Difficult to Inhabit
Arguably we have never be as siloed as we are in the second quarter of the 21st century. The algorithms that rule the internet as we use it decide what we see when we do a search, if we use Google or such, and social media help box us in further with every like, follow, or share with our chosen tribe.
This however is not Reality As It Is. It is a construct, just as artificial as the villages or moated castles of previous ages, that give the inhabitants the feeling of being safe within a group of more or less homogenous people, safe from the scary world of strangers and enemies.
Actually the island we live on is Earth and we perforce co-exist not only with more than 8 billion people speaking some 7,000 plus languages believing or not in perhaps 10,000 religious faiths.
There are over 70 gender identities humans can have with a whole bunch of different personality types (MBTI, Enneagram, socionics, etc etc). En bref, a dizzying array of ways of being, feeling, speaking, believing, and doing in the world.
That’s just humans. There are also all the animals, insects, plants, non-organic things, energies, and possibly entities that fall outside of scientific categorisation.
And of course this is just the tiny island home we live on, rushing through space at a speed that is difficult to grasp, in an orbit around a sun that is one star among something like 10 to the power of 24 stars in the universe. Plus the existence of dark matter, all the kinds of light and energy that are still beyond our powers to observe or catalogue, and so on, and so forth.
This is the Reality that some wish to reduce to a single perspective. Wow.
Co-exist: A Challenge on Every Level
So much for trying to reduce all of reality to a single perspective. Perhaps we can at least agree that in my family, we all _______?
Good luck. Unless your family only consists of you, and even then, didn’t Walt Whitman say, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’?
There will be inner conflict in each person between beliefs of the various parts that are within. Even a small family will have strongly held beliefs and opinions that may clash harshly. The bigger the extended family, the more variety and conflicts. So inherently community on every level, whether virtual or in person, whether a ‘community’ of one, a handful, dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions will have this choice before it: to seek to peacefully co-exist in all its diversity or to accept the notion that there is a ruler or ruling class that gets to decide what is best for the community.
There are of course all kinds of variations on the theme, but broad strokes, something like that.
Ultimate Concern
Co-existing is easy when it’s about things that aren’t really important, right? There are countless things humans could and do fight over, but not all matter equally to all people. With awareness that the following is non-inclusive language, I share the following from Paul Tillich’s writings:
Man is ultimately concerned about his being and meaning. “To be or not to be” in this sense is a matter of ultimate, unconditional, total, and infinite concern. Man is infinitely concerned about the infinity to which he belongs, from which he is separated, and for which he is longing. Man is totally concerned about the totality which is his true being and which is disrupted in time and space. Man is unconditionally concerned about that which conditions his being beyond all the conditions in him and around him. Man is ultimately concerned about that which determines his ultimate destiny beyond all preliminary necessities and accidents. (ST, I, p. 14)[5]
An Encounter with Paul Tillich’s Theology
Thus it is precisely due to the importance certain foundational beliefs have in a human’s life that that becomes the hill they will die upon. There is a sense of ‘ultimate destiny beyond all preliminary necessities and accidents’.
Perhaps you have been in a ‘flame war’ over beliefs online or IRL. Experiences of being in the middle of a fight over things that matter very deeply to humans are enough to discourage many from getting involved in discussions about religion or politics.
But I contend just about every chance I get that simply trying to avoid conversations about religion and politics is part of what has gotten us to the place we are now where polarisation has become painfully acute to an unbelievable extent.
We need more and better conversations about beliefs of all kinds. Fearless ones where we honestly share what we think and feel, carefully listen to others’ thoughts and feelings, and learn together to find a path to walk on with each other that both fully respects our differences while not seeking our way of being to be first and pre-eminent.