"When you've seen me, you've seen the Father" (Gospel of John 14.9). Spirit - here appearing as Jesus - manifests through particularity. Jesus and you are manifestations of Life. You have as much potential to be Christ for others as Jesus did or anyone at any time. There are no Christ experts.
Christian contemplative Therese Descamp, in Hands Like Roots, writes, "I think that to deny the importance of particular love is to reject humanness. I do understand the psychological importance of detachment. I just happen to believe that passion is just as important." See proceeds, "Nearsighted particularity inflicts suffering and ignites wars. But passion, that deep love of the particular, when it is extended and fully realized, has the capacity to draw us out beyond ourselves." Hence, the one we see as other can so penetrate us, that they draw us out of the particular into the everyone, everything.
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The Jewish Scriptures, Proverbs 3.3 (NLT) -
Never let loyalty and kindness leave you! Tie them around your neck as a reminder. Write them deep within your heart.
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Fifteen years ago, the presence of someone I had not met before broke into my life, and my presence broke into his life. Kindness we shared. This improbable meeting occurred at a homeless shelter.
I met this man at the homeless shelter in Gainesville, Florida, where he, with many other unhoused, came to enjoy a Thanksgiving meal. I served as pastor at a nearby church. Being single and with no family nearby to share Thanksgiving with, I decided to serve food at the shelter.
After assisting in meal preparation, the men and women outside waiting were invited into the building. I was assigned to assist in keeping the line in order and moving. I positioned myself near the door and began speaking to those who were incoming, giving them directions.
I said, "Thank you" as the line moved along. I used "please" when informing them on how to proceed. My parents raised me to express courtesy with phrases like "thank you," "please," and "may I," as well as other gestures of respect.
Soon, a middle-aged man stepped up close to me. He leaned over toward me and spoke quietly, "No one has ever spoken that way to me before." I could see joy in his eyes and upon his face. We would say in the culture in which I was born, "His heart had been touched." He came for food; he received that and more. I came to serve him food, and he served me so much more.
We experienced our shared kinship. Yet, we were kin before that day. We are still kin. We all are kin. Kindly is how we naturally treat each other when realizing our shared kinship.
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My saying "experienced our shared kinship" is key to realization of the kinship. Pranada Comtois, in her Wise-Love: Bhakti and the Search for the Soul of Consciousness, observes, "Though reason is indispens[a]ble and objectivity valuable and honored, a reason-only, objective (and by extension, cautious) life can be flavorless. We can know something through reason, but we cannot experience that thing." Hence, we move beyond the ideal or theory of inclusivity by experience of it. We cannot reason our way to love, for example, those we struggle to love. We cannot reason our way to forgiveness. We cannot reason our way to any quality of the heart. My own journey from being raised as a child in a racist culture and exclusive toward other religions and ways of life came through experience. The idea of kinship did not ferry me to the shore of borderless belonging, but it did help. We, by some grace, taste the unwalled welcome, and we are drawn to it by the heart. For the heart is where our kinship lies and all inclusivity manifests. We must feel the welcome to become and live the welcome.
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Humans set up illusory boundaries to turn us against one another, in their grasping for power, control, and wealth; still, they cannot destroy our kinship, they can only deceive many into believing we are not all kin.
Conservative evangelical Christians even preach a heaven where they alone will spend an eternity together, no one else; rather, the others burn in a furnace fire forever. I proclaimed this same message for several decades. So, I do not write to throw mud, but I speak from one who knows the cruelty of such teaching and how it impacts social relations. An ill-devised, but deceptive, fiction! - the ultimate statement of elitism, specialness, cultism, and inhumanity. Still, they cannot erase their kinship with those they condemn to hell. Those who deny the kinship bring harm to themselves in their denial, however - and, again, I know this through personal experience. So entwined we are, in denying another, we deny ourself, in welcoming the other, we welcome ourself.
So, what led me to the posture of kinship? Love. I found that love in the example of Jesus, and I found it to be the nature of my own heart. I had spoken untruth out of ignorance. Then, I had to walk the path of healing from those decades of religious, political, and social exclusivism. This included associating with and learning from persons who could support me in this new adventure of healing. I had to learn a new way to see and live.
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We might think we rarely have moments of unplanned communion with others available to us. One might, instead, ask, "Is it, rather, that I am not prepared for them to happen?" Or, "Could it be they are happening, and I don't see?" And, "Could it be nonhuman creatures are invitations to this kinship sharing, too?" In my own experience, the opening of heart in communion and gratitude has extended to other beings, human, non-human, here in this realm and elsewhere.
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The renowned Tibetan teacher Dromtönpa was circumambulating a temple with a few of his disciples. At the edge of the walking path, a stray dog was lying on the ground. Instead of walking down the middle of the path, Dromtönpa went around the dog to include it in the ritual of reverence. One of his disciples asked him why he was paying such respect to a stray dog. Dromtönpa said, "I'm not paying respect to a dog. I'm paying respect to a being whose nature is enlightened."
The word "kindness" comes from a substantive translated "nation." Dromtönpa realizes the dog is of his nation, his people, his kin - all beings are to the Dromtönpas of this world. He knows the dog is more than a dog.
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That day at the homeless shelter, some twenty-eight years ago, I saw through the skin of a homeless man. I saw more than a homeless man. I saw Christ. I saw Love. I saw this world and worlds of living beings, human and otherwise. I saw God. I saw my ancestors and your ancestors. I saw you. I saw myself. How could I not treat him with reverence? Yet, if I did not see him as more than a homeless man, how would I have treated him otherwise than a man without a place many call home?
So, how do we show kindness to everyone, seen and unseen? We do this through particularity. We are a particular being to share that particularity with other particular beings. Hence, oneness is not some transcendent aloofness from the man at the homeless shelter or the dog at the Buddhist temple. Oneness is not an escape from the many. We have temple-bodies to love one another. This is the principal function of the body: to give and receive love. This can entail a smile, laughter, words, a handshake, an encouraging email, a phone call, a "hello" or "have a good day" or "thank you," a hug, a kiss, a bow, a song, a shared meal, silently listening when one needs to be heard and not given advice, sexual intercourse, quietly sitting by someone who is preparing to leave the body, ...
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This is a shift we much need: one into kindness arising out of reverence for particular beings, peoples, and non-peoples, and a kin-feeling, a passion warming the heart, for it arises from the heart.
We could call this a loving attachment. Yet, it is not sticky, for there is no sense of ownership of the other, no felt need to possess them, to merge into some illusory oneness in which the other loses their sacred singularity in an emotional globe of neediness or subservience.
As a human race, much of our present conflict is a veiled, sometimes not veiled, denial of this summons to boundless kinship, a call arising from our hearts and which cannot be silenced - no one can silence it. Persons caught in particularity, therefore materialists, are not answering this summons to our shared kinship. These materialists, many of them in religious and political leadership, could they be fearful of the freedom of boundless welcome? Do they know they will have to change, as I did, to open the heart to a space where all equally belong? Do they not see the reason we say "human race" for our species, not "human races"?
Religious and political conservatism are cultures of fear of what appears other but is equally them. They deny themselves and injure their hearts. And, hence, the betrayal of the Jesus teaching among these men and women, "Love the other as you love yourself" (Gospel of Matthew 12.31, etc.). And, "[T]hey themselves are crucifying the Son of God [Jesus] all over again and subjecting Him to open shame" (Hebrews 6.6).
Conservative religionists, politicians, and citizens who deny and seek to kill this kinship summons are like the old white-people churches from the days of segregation. These buildings were designed with a place for people of color to worship with the white congregants; that is, if worshipping with them meant sitting in a balcony apart. I visited a church building like this years ago in the deep South of the United States. There were two entrances, one on either side of the building, for slaves of color. The building was designed so that they would enter the sanctuary without any interaction with the white people.
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Well, what is your role in all this? Live this kinship. Demonstrate it in kindness, so much so the other appears before you as equally with you. Otherness is invited, by Love and loving into communion unscripted, unbounded by walls and fences and borders and words. Say "no" to the rampant hate by saying "yes" to the all-embracing, inborn kinship by loving someone or something, one at a time, and in reverence for their particular way of appearing in the world.
