Love and the Irrelevancy of Division

“The endless divisions that we create between us and that we live and die for—whether they are our religions, our ethnic groups, our nationalities—are so totally irrelevant to God. God just wants us to love each other.”

~Archbishop Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream (2004)

If it wasn’t so sad when we see Christians warring with one another on doctrine it would be laughable. The dividers are not of Christ.

But this sort of subject, even when it is framed in the Divine, is not essentially about Christianity; as God is beyond bounds-of-limitation, so is this subject, borderless.

God created us, one entity as humankind, each human being—one, within community—that each one would have not only the capacity, but the will to love: to accept, not reject; to move toward others, not away; to embrace concepts and the people behind them, not destroy them.

Division is not a godly construct, despite much conflicting doctrine, myriad realities, differences of opinion, and the plethora of variance so vast only God can know.

In spite of the cosmic confusion that living this life presents, including the voluminous chasms of thought involved in eternity, division has no place in the here and now; it serves nil useful purpose. This is such a basic tenet that small children understand it, but full-grown adults do not—those loving their silos of silliness.

If Only There Were No Cost

Silliness, of course, would be perfectly fine if it were not for the cost that’s borne to a class of being—beings of the human variety—and the damage done. Damage is always easier to procure than construction is; it’s easier to destroy than to build.

This is no better illustrated than by the differences that characterise us—similar, if not the same, in most of our views, but the one that’s about to trip us up. Before we know it, we’ve failed the test—that which was designed to unify us.

The benefits of acceptance are whittled away in the blink of an eye at the warrant of rejection. When the direst of human need is to be accepted, one salient rejection sends most of the human array into an emotional tailspin—and, there, division has its stupefying genesis.

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There is no divine or human reason to set up, or maintain, divisions. As the Lord is a Threefold Community of One, we too are made to enjoy community as one. Division is the concept of the flesh; union in the concept of the Spirit.

We can only succeed in, and enjoy, the community of oneness when we begin to think as God would think. Because we cannot do this sustainably, we must walk humbly with our Lord so he will show us how, one day at a time.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.