The human pilgrimage is moving from the shame, fear, and bondage of insecurity and inadequacy of those striving to be perfect (to be God) to the humility, openness, and freedom of the beginners mind—one at peace with their becoming & limits (to be invited into a journey of communion with God as we are). It is the movement from separateness toward community.
One is the reaction of the acted upon. The other emerges from action, the fruit of slow practice.
The fearful feel oppressed and so oppress. They cling, compete and exclude because they experience limits as scarcity. Whiteness, in this sense, is repressed anxiety turned outward into offensive initiatives that seek to take, control, own, and dictate.
But the humble find peace. So they liberate. They share, cooperate, and interconnect because they know there is only scarcity when individuals meant for relationship isolate. The humble know that their lackings are not the result of curse. Rather they flow from original blessing: a leaf does not consider itself flawed because it must be attached to a branch to thrive.
Fundamentalist moralism expects an impossibility: the ethically-spiritually “arrived” individual, the in not out, the saved not the damned. We will always feel the shame of inadequacy within such a sham binary paradigm of human worth, because in the experience of everyday life we always find ourselves in a process of becoming, always just beginning, as a child.
In Christ, who enters into our life as we enter into God’s, we find a path of becoming whole. No longer an isolated self which could never be complete alone, fulfillment comes in embracing weakness that opens space to enter the other and be entered into. Wholeness is joining all the cosmos in ecstatic dance with(in) their Creator. We rediscover ourselves as leaves, leaves who were misled to believe we could or should live apart from the branch. Such fairy tales of self-sufficiency were always a silly fiction that misrepresented, and indeed disfigured, the meaning of our lives—and the shape of our society.
Because this becoming who we are meant to be is holistically relational, contrary to what some Christian mystics have taught, this is not a spiritual journey that extracts us from the material and political. It is rather a never-ending plunge into fully embodied and emplaced solidarity that can move in love beyond narrow, fearful self interests.
However, the political participation of those becoming whole in Christ transforms the political. Our pilgrimage leads to the love of enemies. It is not given to reductive power politics. Again the binary is rejected. The isolated ego struggling to portray itself as self-sufficient is terrified to fail, therefore it only chooses goals that it believes are winnable. In the freedom of Christ, action can become cruciform. Freed from the necessity of short-term success through the hope of resurrection, the mystic can imagine and act with radical prophetic imagination; can do the small and subversive work of shoving rocks in the gears of empire; can weave Beloved Communities founded on the revolutionary practices of cooperation, interconnectedness, and mutual giving; and even hold open the doors of belonging for enemies.