Searching for God # 137

 Any attempt to reconcile radically different opinions, especially those concerning how each nation is to be governed, those in which competing religions believe ‘their’s’ is the ‘one-and-only-and-proper religion, and those which are seeded in such blind, (perhaps even unconscious) biases/prejudices/fears/ignorance/history/cultural tutelage is going to take at least a millennium...or more. 

Whether we call our personal, community, religion, region, language ‘comfort zones’ or ‘pockets of parochialism,’ or even ‘both,’ we all are inheritors of and the subjects of inculcation/formation, as well as propagators of that soft and hard wiring. And none of us can truly and fully escape those imprints. Our very names, faces, body structures, hair endowments (or the lack thereof!) linguistic accents, wardrobe choices, vocational opportunities and choices, political and ideological ‘leanings,’ accomplishments/failures, beliefs/attitudes, and even our imagined aspirations all individually and collectively contribute to our ‘gestalt’ as humans. 

We legitimately, proudly and persistently celebrate, honour, even often sacralize our unique differences. We build and enhance community and religious rituals that embody the mythic stories on which our culture/home/family histories are founded. Occasionally, we visit ‘others’ when their communities are engaged in their respective and respected rituals, festivals, celebrations, wakes, memorials and victories and defeats/losses. Our birthdays are a personal model of such special days. 

And while such customs, traditions, beliefs, and perspectives help to define and sustain our ‘identities’ and enhance our personal pride of those identities, they also limit our world view. It is inconceivable for them not to constrict what we feel comfortable exploring. Travel, reading, study, both formal and informal, social activity, working environments where people from ‘other’ places are engaged, clients/patients who engage with us from different cultures and ethnicities also enrich our personal ‘experience’ as well as blend in with out pre-conceived ‘notions.’ And while, at a pace with which we attempt to adapt, these cultural encounters are welcome although often greeted with respectful distance, they nevertheless continue to occur. Some infusions of skilled workers from other lands arrive at government invitations; others arrive from less favourable circumstances often not of their own making. Our ‘perceived’ both personal and community ‘receptivity’ or openness to “people-from-away" as Newfoundlanders and Labrodoreans put it, rises and falls with both ‘numbers’ and what we perceive to be community resources capable of adapting to those numbers. 

Sadly, however, in a world in which we have all become ‘numbers,’ as in ‘case number,’ or ‘applicant number,’ or ‘customer number,’ or ‘student number,’ or ‘employee number,’ or ‘practitioner number,’ we currently live in a world where our unique differences, special skills, perceptions, curiosities, imaginations, ambitions, goals all take a back seat to our ‘facial identity’ and our ‘number.’ And that is on the individual level of perception from those who are ‘native’ to our ‘new’ address; as groups of those who arrive from a shared location, we are also ‘tarred’ too often with a brush that bespeaks that parochialism we all inherit from our youth. 

There are some exceptions, for example, English-speaking persons from British Commonwealth nations are given a more receptive welcome in other English-speaking ‘Commonwealth’ nations than those from other nations. Populations of indigent, starving, poor, homeless and desperate human beings arriving on the shores of nations who most likely are both unfamiliar with their culture and their life stories, face very different ‘welcomes’ from those of receptive nations. 

And this dynamic is increasingly finding its way into the front pages of newspapers around the world. Emerging from war, famine, drought, disease, racial and religious bigotry, bias and venom on both the personal and state level, these growing numbers of migrants, refugees, all of them frightened, anxious, as well as desperately hopeful, at least from their perspective, have usually risked their own lives just to make the journey to their new (hopefully) homeland. 

It is at the intersection of these arrivals with their new nations, communities/towns/cities, where the ‘rubber-meets-the-road' as the cliche has it. Conflict, not only physical but certainly political, is almost assured. First, presiding governments have taken few if any steps to prepare the indigenous population for such ‘invasions’ (as many characterize these migrations). Second, presiding governments have often, if not always, had little if any ‘warning’ or inclusion in the decisions made by those refugees/migrant, given their stateless character. Third, racism, that cancer that like a silent tumour waiting patiently for a ‘moment’ to become active out of triggered fear, triggered anxiety, triggered anticipated loss of national traditions and rituals and the ‘take-over’ of ‘our homeland’ by ‘foreigners,’ suddenly erupts into political ‘protectionism.’ 

Right wing political movements, and political parties espousing these ‘protectionist’ policies, have emerged in Germany, France, England, United States, Italy, Hungary, and likely other locations less widely reported in the West, and for many of us, that rising tide of protectionism is our ‘red flag’ warning about how our future might unfold. 

Often leaning in favour of leaders like Putin, (think trump also) while opposing the tolerance, acceptance and even admission of migrants and refugees, these movements foreshadow a decline, for example, in military and financial support for Ukraine, thereby triggering a warning about the division that might befall NATO. What is considered the national, as well as the collective security of western nations, the desired destinations of millions of migrants and refugees, is now morphing into one of the defining political issues of elections in various countries. Only recently the AfD party in Germany showed considerable success in the eastern provinces of that nation, eclipsing the Christian Democrats, the party of the Chancellor, himself a noted and committed supporter of Ukraine. Reports reaching the West indicate that the former ‘eastern Germany’ of old, now bereft of many of its industrial operations and suffering from collective depression may be emerging, without direct and overt Russian influence. 

Diplomacy, state craft focussing on what can be considered the legal, dry, somewhat abstract concept of ‘human rights’ is not going to cut through this growing impasse. Religious leaders from all the world’s faith communities, meeting in colloquia for months, searching for common theological perceptions, goals and aspirations, are not going to cut through this potentially ‘radioactive’ issue either. Even unheard of joint meetings between diplomats and religious thinkers and scholars, attempting to find common ground between their respective differences, in order to envision sketches of ‘bridges’ that might pave the way for reducing those ‘root’ causes of refugees and migrants, like war, famine, climate erosion, and terrorism would consume decades to accomplish basic ground rules for those meetings to continue. The establishment of, and/or the enhancement of judicial bodies to hear various states advocate for their nation on issues of their country’s capacity, both from the perspective of hard resources like water supply, sewer capacity, food access, shelter access, education and employment access, seems only a glimpse of a ‘hope’ in the imaginations of those who can and do envision the appropriateness and timeliness of such an idea. The chances of such an international initiative, whether under UN sponsorship or not (and certainly not under trump’s peace plan for Gaza) seem remote, if not ephemeral.  

Military intervention, along with security forces, in any attempt to prevent violence between refugees/migrants and national populations may forestall or limit the number of deaths and injuries to both groups. They are definitely not a solution, even to the pragmatics of ‘integrating’ new arrivals into established communities. 

Can local religious groups, for example, led by their respective clergy, begin to reflect on the potential of their town/village/diocese working together, in conjunction with their national and provincial governments to begin a process of ‘adjustment’ integration, and costing a level of tolerable new arrivals? The separate, denominational approach, while honourable and worthy for those few who ‘fit’ into such minimal expectations and capacities, will only serve as piecemeal approaches to a much wider and growing influx of desperate human beings, including men women and children. 

Clearly the capacity, including the public funding of UN agencies charged with addressing these migratory waves, along with their philanthropic counterparts, is stretched beyond breaking. And public interest among those donors who might make a significant difference is also waning.  

The gap between our shared parochialism, provincialism, NIMBY dynamic (not in our back yard) a universally shared perspective from which we cannot escape, and the obvious, growing, also shared ‘responsibility’ for millions of hopeless men, women and children, is one that none of us can either deny or turn a blind-eye or a deaf-ear to. And the various causes, not only of waves of homeless men and women and children cannot but sear the consciences, as well as the consciousness and the unconsciousness of all sentient, affluent,  citizens of what has come to be dubbed the ‘developed world.’ 

‘Developed,’ cannot be dumped into a catch-basin with WOKE, and then dismissed, as it will be by many. ‘Developed’ cannot also be brushed off as ‘educated, affluent, prosperous and ‘self-satisfied,’ if there is to be any shift in the power dynamics in which we are all enmeshed, and thereby to which we are all, whether we acknowledge it or not, subject. Ebola is spreading its venom in Africa, and is it only a matter of time that, with rapidly rising travel opportunities, it will infect people on other continents. Bacterial viruses know no national boundaries. And yet, each of these hypothetical warnings can no longer be used as ‘excuses’ to ‘bury our heads in the sand’ in either denial or dismissal of our shared and growing tsunami of homeless, hopeless, desperate, and potentially disaffected millions. 

We all share, directly and/or indirectly in the conditions that make the lives of these ‘canaries-in-our-shared-planetary-coal-mine' essentially uninhabitable. None of us would either choose, or even accept the conditions into which these families are expected to survive. We, or at least some of us, visit ballot boxes and mark ballots beside names of men and women whose ideas, aspirations, ideologies, hatreds, biases, prejudices and compassion can and will ultimately impact our daily lives. We have an obligation to get to know their preferences, especially how they might ‘glide past their hatred, fears, and ‘red lines’ in their campaign rhetoric. 

Our capacity to discern subtle, nuanced, and highly impactful nefarious motives among those seeking office has never been more necessary, more energized and more tested. Our responsibility for the shape, the size and the enriched capacity of our towns and cities to embrace the reality we all share as ‘citizens of the world’ is not only on display. It is facing us in the mirror in numbers, spectres, and potential divides like never before. 

And we cannot permit ourselves to divide issues like this one into files entitled: hunger, disease, employment, education, health care, housing, taxation and government policy. We have to build a working model that incorporates all of these ‘files’ and more...one entitled, ‘social, community and relationship integration.’ 

If there is one blind spot within the western cultures it is the glaring need and desire for, as well as the reticence, withdrawal from and lack of confidence in even considering the establishing of personal relationships as relevant and an important ingredient in all of our lives. Imagine, in our lonely and isolated and alienated state the degree of loneliness, isolation and alienation of those millions who have no hope! 

Of course, this piece will be dismissed by some as ‘exaggerated virtue-signalling'  and exaggerated dreaming. Let those critics dismiss. Some of us will continue to beat this drum, with persistence, with vigour and with clarity.  

Some of us are still searching for God.