What if I was able to transcend myself and my own life experience. By doing
this, by transcending my own experiences, I am supernaturally then able to live
in another's shoes and to reorient myself with that other human life elsewhere
in the world. There in their shoes I’m able to not merely eat with that other
person, or commune in the same village with them, but to more completely really
and fully get to know what it is like to be them.
If I’m able to really have that persons parents, to be of the same race,
nationality, and to have the same friendships and same cultural persuasions. If
I’m able to come to know what that person is naturally drawn to in the world.
An evangelist from abroad might ask or demand that person to step out of
their own native experiences to receive something alien to them but I’d be
refraining from any demands like this to accept ideological correctness.
I’d instead now have a full awareness of the native persuasions shaping
other people. My awareness of those persuasions now are as near to me as the
persuasions I’ve experienced here in my country that have shaped me until now. I
wonder if that awareness would then allow me to truly empathize with that other
person elsewhere. I predict I would then see the fog lift and see another simple
mind possessing dignity and vulnerability and confused by the world. Possibly
I’d see them in a fairer way with far greater understanding now with empathy. I
might abandon any form of judgmental condemnation or religious, racial,
ideological, or national suspicion.
I’ve come to see with schizophrenia that not only am I confused about
things but we are all confused in life, all of us, wherever we are. By making
this kind of journey I’d desire to shed my selfishness that’s worried me about
my future security. I’d temporarily shelf my own “get out of jail” free card or
“go to Heaven with God” free card in order to get to better know another human
being in our shared human experience. It might take considerable courage to do
this of course. I’d not seek to merely find the comfort and reassurances in like
thinking circles. I’d not go to that familiar place where I’d be repetitively
reminded of being right about the world. Instead I’d willfully venture into a
larger earthly struggle facing everyone who lives with an open heart and with an
open-mindedness.
The journey of being uprooted from self and from that interest to truly see
another person might mean leaving behind ideological security. It's implications
might demand I truly see other people more fairly. The ideology I had held unto
had sized up the human drama and secured my place in the minority of all human
beings in the order of existence across time sparing only a few from damnation.
I had found familiarity through this belief with a community believing in a
narrow road to life. By a preachers words I had been taught that I was given
survival through eternal life from anything that could befall on me forever.
Now I might be testing the possibility that I really need for God’s love
and mercy to extend far past those boundaries I and people like me have felt
reasonable with. I however still trust in the same crucified Jesus dying for the
sin of the world.
So temporarily now I leave my own beliefs for a time behind transplanted
thousands of miles away into the midst of another culture. Here I meet that
other person and here I become like them in every way. I end up feeling their
struggle, knowing their reasoning, dealing with the very same uncertainty that’s
universal in all of us.
Here too I find are the same teachers and shapers of minds. Here, like
everywhere, this other logic is entrenched in understandings following lineages
of traditions. These ideas are shared through inherited family beliefs and
through that culture. The religions differ here but yet nonetheless I get to
know the aspirations of the person in my new familiar home. I find here among
other people that they are not only worth finding compassion for but are worthy
of an equally shared humanity as well. They are worthy of God’s love as everyone
is.
Love as a force had lead me here I realize. I fought by coming here for the
trust that there believably could be hope in this life across the planet for
everyone. I desirably asked what if there is a fairer ordering of earth then the
different traditions of belief have been able to organize life fully into so
far. Can there be a wiser knowledge that transcends even all the good things
exceeding them and what we currently now know. Surely God is greater then
everything we human beings know. Of course He is greater then how we think about
Him.
Compassion came over me in thought as I listened to the sound of waters.
These mighty rivers that make glad the city of God. Here was the Holy place
where the most high dwells.
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