Читать книгу Our December Hearts - Anne McConney - Страница 11

Perhaps the first essential of life is that we do not live it alone. A mammalian infant of any species cannot survive without the care and nurturing of others of its kind. Even after it becomes able to see to its own basic needs, it must be taught to do so, and the long childhood of the human species may indicate an uncommonly large need of learning.

Even after the child matures, the society of others is essential. Psychiatrists have documented the mental states of individuals subjected to extended periods of total isolation and have found them to be almost invariably abnormal. The inability to break out of personal isolation is a hallmark of most mental illness.

Somehow, then, the society of our fellows is essential to our humanity, and so it would have been for Jesus too. The nurturing of his mother Mary, the care and protection of Joseph, and membership in what, in that era, would have been a large extended family, all contributed to the humanity of the man who was also God. It is perhaps a paradox, certainly a basic truth, that we do not achieve individuation without the help of others. It would seem that the I cannot fully develop until it recognizes and interacts with the not-I.

Yet the matter goes further. Today we are more and more coming to understand what few persons in Jesus’ time would have known or even cared to know: we are all interlinked in a great web of dependency upon one another. This is the concept the British theologian Charles Williams called co-inherence and which he was convinced operated on a mental and spiritual level as well as a physical one.

According to Williams, the command that we bear one another's burdens is quite simple and straightforward: we are to carry not only boxes and bags for each other but mental and spiritual burdens as well. We are not simply to lend a sympathetic ear, either—we are to actively relieve the other person by taking the burden on ourselves.

Is your friend worried by a necessary car trip in bad weather? You can agree to bear the burden of worry for her. Though she herself will still have to make the trip, she will do so without anxiety. Does your brother fear medical tests? Your offer to carry his fear can put him at peace and allow him to face the tests calmly. In Williams’ thought, such substitutions are “the open secret of the saints,” known and practiced in the church from its earliest days and taking their power from the one great substitution made by Christ.

Spiritual exchange or simple psychological comfort, these substitutionary concepts serve to keep us aware of the great web of life that covers our planet, weaving a single tapestry rich with color and movement.

Less than half a century has passed since we saw the first photograph of the world as it truly is, a fragile blue bubble singing its song of being against the black silence of space. We have seen that the seas wash many shores, that the land masses have no boundaries marked upon them. This single image says more clearly than words that we are all one, caught in the great matrix of existence.

We are flung out from God's hand to walk for a time on this sphere that looks like no more than a Christmas ornament, then gathered home again. And meanwhile all who draw or have ever drawn breath are our brothers and sisters.

There are, of course, exiles among us, but they are not those you think—not the broken, not the outcasts, not the prisoners nor yet the homeless. They are, rather, the self-exiled. They are those who refuse to think in terms other than Us and Them. They are those who believe that power confers right and that all the earth is theirs to use. The god they have made in their own image always agrees with them.

They too are part of the dance; God draws no circles of exclusion, and they are welcome whenever they are ready to claim admittance to the great gathering where birth is the only entrance fee and the music of kinship plays for all.

The host is coming to feast with us; in Advent we prepare to dance with him.