41/50: Porosity
This song has meant so much to me in leaving systems of embrace. Continuing to look out for others who are still in those systems is hard but necessary work to move forward in wholeness.
“I know the darkness falls on you. And its just a point of view
When youre outside looking in you belong to someone and when
you feel like giving in and the coming of the end, like your
heart can break in two, someone loves you.”
Early in graduate school, I did an independent study on the psychology of fundamentalism. Using Miroslav Volf’s book Exclusion and Embrace (which I earlier referenced in writing about salvation), I looked at fundamentalism as a system of exclusion.
Volf was writing as a Croatian man while the gunpowder of the Balkan war had barely cooled. I was living in Central Europe then and traveled to towns where buildings were hollowed from bombs and faces were hollowed from trauma. The war was personal and enmeshed in long-standing hatred. Volf’s writing was born of trying to reconcile his hatred of the Serbian fighters who had pillaged and raped his home with the forgiveness of Christ modeled by embrace of his enemies.
The book was published in 1996, just two years after the Rwandan and Burundian genocides. Another place I have been privileged to go. A million people dead in a hundred days in Rwanda and similar, though slower-simmering tolls in Burundi. Again, these killings were personal — neighbor to neighbor, sometimes even husband to wife — based on ethnic identities that had been constructed by colonizers to consolidate their power. What does embrace mean there?
It is poignant to go back and read Volf’s words fifteen years later. And it gets more difficult to tour Rwanda’s genocide museum each time I go back. A decade ago, that kind of hatred and killing seemed barbaric and foreign. But now, the rhetoric that led up to those horrific tragedies is commonplace in America. I have had to confront the value that I place on lives. Do I value the life of a West Coast liberal as much as a Deep South conservative? Am I able to see a sibling in the face of those who voted for the other candidate or listen to a different radio station or have a different conviction about vaccinations?
Volf defines sin as exclusion. Anything that excludes is not of God.
Fundamentalism of any kind is a system of exclusion that functions by forming rigid, non-porous boundaries of beliefs and structures that define you as in or out. Volf says we must have porous boundaries. We keep boundaries around our identities, but we enter into the embrace of others — taking their perspective and personhood into ourselves. We also let go of the embrace and return to ourselves. However, with porous boundaries, we allow our selves to shift and change without losing who we are.
When I finished my research, my professor, Dwight Friesen, asked me, “And how do you embrace fundamentalists?” Fundamentalism can be found in any ideology or identity. It is not limited to conservative thinking. I struggle along with many to love those who have hurt me, harm others or whose ideas I find dangerous. But, the goal is always porous boundaries. I find that is measured when my reactivity is dialed down and my compassion is dialed up. Porosity is the fruit of apprenticing ourselves to the way of embrace, the way of Jesus.