Author and Harvard professor Danielle Allen writes this summary in The Atlantic of the state of our country:
“A culture of anxiety and depression has spread far and wide as people face health crises without access to affordable care. An opioid epidemic ensnares ever larger numbers of the alienated and desperate; among certain groups, life spans are actually shortening. Some of those who aren’t harming themselves are harming others in mass shootings; many of the killers are infected with an ideology of white supremacy. Also, the prisons are full. The economy, at least, seems to be in decent shape for now, but income inequality continues to widen … “
There’s a word for this: “disunion.” Increasingly, ours is a culture of conflict. Ours is a space of separation. We are infected with the ills of intolerance, inequity and injustice. We are experiencing disunion.
This, of course, is not a new experience. Pick any chapter in our country’s story, and you’ll find disunion. There have always been groups oppressed by others, suffering at the hands of others–indigenous people exiled and exterminated; black people shackled, segregated and suppressed; women kept from economic and political equality; men and women rejected for their country of origin or their sexual preference.
The Christian faith, however, holds out hope that we are capable of something much better. We have the capacity for what the Christian mystics called “union.” We’ve been created and redeemed for the purpose of living in radical oneness with God and with each other. God’s people have been commissioned to create community with the kind of communion that tears asunder all those things we’ve used to keep others apart.
Union is what Jesus describes when he says, “I and the father are one.” (Jn. 10:30). And, it’s what Paul describes when he writes, “He made us Jews and you who are not Jews one people … His purpose was to make the two groups become one in him.” (Eph. 3:14-15 ERV). Union is the oneness that is possible when we pursue the life God created us for.
This means that the movement of every relationship created by an individual or an institution is ultimately intended to be toward other people, not away from other people–irrespective of class, color or creed. Union means individuals and institutions highlighting the inherent worth of every person. It means individuals and institutions demolishing walls erected to denigrate others. Union means God is our center, not our border. He is calling me ever closer to himself, and ever closer to every person. People and policies that contribute to bias and boundaries stand in direct opposition to our divine mandate. At the end of time, the primary question asked will be this: did we proactively and passionately pursue union with all God has made?
This is the goal of the Christian faith. The Christian mystics proposed that we reach this goal through awakening, purgation and illumination. We’ll look next at another ancient model highlighting the path toward union–that of Bernard of Clairvaux.
