I AM Not You

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

By Andrea Lingle

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. God worked really hard on them, thinking not only of the majesty of mountains and lions, but also of the whimsy of flamingos and grasshoppers. God created untold vastness and depth, unimaginable complexity and patterns, and spun it all out dripping in beauty and motion.

And called it good.

It was very good.

Except. There was but one disappointment in the whole whirling dervish of nebulae and microbe. Loneliness. We are trapped in the isolation of our own consciousness. There are even those, solipsists, who have convinced themselves that they are the only real consciousness and everything and everyone else is an illusion. While solipsism seems a bit of a stretch, but there is something true about it. No matter how hard you try, you cannot really know what it is to be someone else. You can never really know what cinnamon tastes like to your neighbor or what the color green looks like to your mom. You have your view of the world, and that is it.

God created intimacy to give some relief from the isolation of self consciousness, but it isn’t a complete fix. While community is part of the solution, we have to work really hard to remember that there are people out there who hate cheese and love the feel of microsuede: not everyone is like me. Or you. Even through intimacy we can not experience life through the eyes and lives of the other. No matter how much I love my partner, his splinter does not send pain signals to my brain. I might wince, but I cannot feel the sharpness of the wood or the agony of punctured skin. Because I love him, I might share the emotion of injury, but I do not experience it fully. Even if I could know a person’s thoughts, could be as close as skin, I am not truly able to inhabit anyone else’s experience.

It’s almost like God saw the problem—Adam was alone—and chose not to solve it. When God answered Adam’s isolation with the creation of a separate human, God chose to allow humanity to persist in isolated minds. This is profoundly disappointing. The agony of isolation, truly overwhelming to some minds, seems like a problem worth a solution. Surely loneliness is unnecessary. God is love. How can Love not rescue us from loneliness?

When Jesus was crucified, bloodied and suffocating, he is recorded to have gasped out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Was that the moment when Jesus first experienced isolation? Is God in God’s fullness true non-isolation? Or did God take on isolation when God set Creation loose.

I cannot know.

But I can trust that God is love. If God is truly love, then God’s reaction to loneliness must reveal something about love. Love requires participation and intention. It requires attention and trust. There is absolute disappointment when we fully come to terms with the insurmountability of isolation. There is no way around the self, but sacred disappointment flowers when each self embraces the sacred responsibility of Loving our Neighbor—ultimate stranger though she is. Love is not becoming the other, it is refusing the myth that the other does not truly exist. It is limiting the self…the only person that we can ever be…on behalf of that which we can never truly inhabit.

This is sacred. This is love.