After a quick change out of my dress clothes to my all black running gear I step out of the world of all day meetings onto the streets of the city and into the sea of anonymity. It is not only the cool air that I find exhilarating but also the experience of the opposite of Cheers – no one knows my name here, and frankly don’t seem to care. In this moment it feels not only refreshing, but freeing.
I grew up in a small town where everyone not only knew your name, they knew your siblings, your parents and many knew your dog’s name. They also knew your business. Waving, greeting folks on the street and in stores was the norm. Anonymity was nowhere to be found in the culture. There were no strangers, only folks that were new or visiting that you had not met yet.
Now as a person who spends significant time traveling from community to community I have become acutely aware of both sides of anonymity. On the one hand the opportunity to navigate through the mass of humanity completely untethered feels incredibly freeing, especially when you have been in wall to wall meetings. On the other hand completely ignoring the existence of another human being feels somewhere between disrespectful and demoralizing.
Recently I was part of a Zoom call with Ted Smith the author of The End of Theological Education. One of his primary premises is the decline of the Church is not secularism but rather individualism. A premise which is hard to deny as you see the clear teeter totter graphic with the rise of individualism and the decline of the Church. And it also hard to deny the juxtaposition between the rise of individualism and an increased culture of anonymity.
Into this reality enters the new Pope with the consistent call for unity as he did in his inaugural message urging the Church to be, “a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world.” The Pope clearly has a grasp of an ever increasing divisive world that is often fueled by individualism and anonymity.
In our homes, places of work, or on the street the reality is in the myriad of rich diversity we embody it is all manifested in the common humanity, ‘comm-unity’ we share. As Archbishop Rowan Williams once offered, “To be human is to be in relationship. We become who we are not in isolation but in communion.” And, “Unity is not the same as uniformity; it is the harmony of differences held together by love.”
I believe the Pope and the Archbishop is right—unity is not only possible but essential for the healing of our world. When we are able to truly see and respect the dignity of every human being, and when we acknowledge and affirm our shared humanity, we live into the fullness of, “though many, are one body” (1 Cor. 12:12).
“We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.” – Thomas Merton
BP