Separation

I have been reflecting recently on the beauty of community. Language barriers cannot hold back basic human connection. Humanity cannot be defined by a difference in communication. There are so many things that transcend these kinds of barriers, like laughing, dancing, humming, hand games, eye contact, a smile or a quick nod to a stranger, physical touch, pointing, gifts, being. And there are so many things that are universal across languages, like a simple hello, counting with kiddos, basic human needs, love.

Here in Rwanda, I don’t need to know much Kinyarwanda to convey any of these things. All of my communication comes down to the one thing shared across any kind of difference – humanity. Even as a “glow in the dark” muzungu, I am welcome here. I am family, because I too am human. There is dignity and purpose in simply being a human because life is meant to be lived together. We were created for fellowship. Life itself is a collection of togetherness, holistic.

But we have begun to separate all its parts. I have learned and witnessed firsthand in this season that power can only be gained in division. This power is always destructive. I feel that there can be nothing good in power, especially not a power that divides.

As people, especially in the West, we have divided life and attempted to rule its parts. We fight to rule one another, creating hierarchies of better or worse, black and white, immigrant or “American.” We confuse opinions for facts, demanding freedom from truth when it is inconvenient. We push against time, stretching ourselves to breaking as students, employees, entrepreneurs. We defy dignity, writing people off for simple mistakes, for a lack of opportunity, for poverty, forever branding them “criminal.” Then we scream about the absence of plenty, demanding more and more, creating caverns of want in spaces where enough ought to be enough. We take and steal and pitch fits when we don’t get what we want. We turn borders into walls, separating communities. We attempt to rule economies with Wall Street as our god. Life rises and falls with the DOW and the NASDAQ. We divorce ourselves from feeling and loving because we are individuals – an ideology which insists that we can do this alone. We separate honesty from reality, curating social media profiles flooded with the aesthetics of staged perfection. We unplug from the tangible to plug in to the intangible, viewing life through a screen and creating literal separations in our neural pathways.

We see this separation in every area of life. Separation of church and state, wage gaps, borders, divorce rates, you name it. Hell, we even separate lives from the bodies they belong to through rape, school shootings, abuse. We have separated people from the very things that make them human, reducing one another to animals to justify treatment fit for no creature. Somewhere in all of this mess, we have completely lost control. We have become so consumed with division to conquer that we fail to realize this power beginning to rule us instead. We have killed life by reducing it to a feeling that only certain people are allowed to experience.

Human rights, a set of dignities given regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other markable status, have been categorized for ease of access in picking them apart. We have separated life so completely, locking each part in cages until they waste away. We have waged war on life, but that war quickly turned to genocide. We have murdered a thing that cannot fight back, wiped out an ideal because of our misunderstanding.

We are missing the whole damn point.

“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Micah 6:8

How is any of this fight for power just? How does any separation of life’s parts show a love of mercy? What made us think we could rule over others with division and pride? What makes that okay? I cannot find the words to ask the questions swirling in my head and heart about this. I’m simply spent. True community is so unspeakably beautiful, and we are absolutely butchering it.

As the Church, we are called to love our neighbors. But do we even know our physical neighbors? When was the last time you interacted with someone you live immediately next to? If you are hard-pressed to remember this time, or even to recall their names, I am begging you to change this.

Division cannot prosper if there are lives working for community. Separation cannot rule if we are locked in togetherness. There can be no unequal and destructive power in spaces of equity. Humanity cannot be defined by a difference in something as fundamental as communication. If the force of roughly 6,500 languages spoken in our world today cannot stop basic human connection, if the dignity of shared existence is intrinsic in who we are as a species upon this earth, if laughter can bubble up between strangers who have never met or exchanged a single word, who are we to think we can defy and control that?