We Are The Other...

“Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules don’t matter as much as the relationship God wants to create with us.”

~ Richard Rohr

(Brandi Carlile, That Wasn't Me)

“The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.”

~ Henri Nouwen

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.”

~ Carl Jung

The mutuality of community is the willingness to live with the acceptance and inclusiveness of both the “other” and the other. We all are at the same time but to varying degrees and in differing perspectives and vantage points both the perceiver of the “other” and the other ourselves in another’s eyes. So then there is no escape from otherness except through radical acceptance of self (which is other) and the “other” (to us) into community and a camaraderie of belonging. It seems that when I accept what I believe to be the “other” as not other, I myself also no longer am other but rather known as participant in belonging in authentic community. Becoming whole persons, human beings, the image bearers of God through and by relational communal inclusive acceptance and thereby negation of the ontology of otherness.

In the realization that we are the other and the “other” is us is to come to know and love God and our neighbor as well as ourselves and as a corollary to know and love ourselves is to reciprocate the love from God and our neighbor inexorable outwards. As Jesus made clear in the parable of The Good Samaritan everyone is our neighbor - everyone including ourselves are other to someone. This relational love of humanity, which God created and gave the Godly image to, is the whole of the law and the prophets in the opinion of Jesus.  It was manifested and accomplished and made fully possible for all to experience by the Calvary death of Jesus and confirmed by and in his resurrection.

Then the teleological reality of the imagined objective ultimate possible world is understood by living in the subjective concrete that has itself been formed out of the imagination of the Trinity and is known and fully lived as abundant life through living in relationship and community and thus mirroring, re-imaging the relationality inherent in the Trinity. Love manifest by us, the other, and a desire to be loved and want to love.

None of this is remotely possible until and if we are willing to take a great risk and want to actually know what to us is the “other” – to be incarnate to both someone and someplace. For, until you know a person’s (the others’) story you do not know that person at all. We are all story and we live in the meta-narrative of the God story. We all are the sum and the products of our stories, all that has brought us to this present moment in time. Each life we encounter is to complex and to beautiful for any of us to think we can be the judge of it or the one living it, no matter how much we think we know we don’t know, nor can we know for we are not God. Only God can know objectively, he created us as subjective beings and presumably he knew what he was doing and that subjectivity on our part is what takes away from us the presumptuousness of God’s prerogative to know fully. Fortunately for us all grace always trumps anything else as God desires us more than anything else and our Father waits and watches with the open arms of forgiveness. Always...

There then is nothing left for us to do other than to love. Love all the people and their life stories we bump into and against while on our journeys.

"Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey sequence of bumping into's and tumblings apart."

~ Salman Rushdie