There is no grammatical mistake in the title. I am not asking us to identify ourselves. I am asking us to identify our ‘we’. When you say ‘we’, who is that?
‘We’ is not a plural pronoun. (Forget what you learned in school. It’s wrong.) ‘Us’ is a singular entity. A union. An amalgam. A single collective. A unit.
Who do we identify ourselves with is the question. Whoever we identify with becomes our ‘we’. We inhabit our we’s. We distance ourselves from our thems. If I don’t identify with you, you are my ‘them’….not my ‘us’.
We’ve all seen infants whose consciousness has not yet grown to fill up their own body. Their hands twitch, moving, from the baby’s perspective, on its own. They have not yet identified with their own hand. The synaptic relationships between limb and brain have not yet been activated. As every piano player or athlete knows, connecting brain and body requires practice. Communication doesn’t always flow naturally. Sometimes it requires commitment and extensive effort.
Effective communication transforms them into us. We may limit our identity to our physical body and its sensations, but we are wired to relate not just to one body, not even just within our own species; we ultimately share common origin with everything else coded with DNA. It’s all one living body filling up space-time in earth’s biosphere.
Next time you listen to yourself talk, listen to your pronouns for a picture of your level of integration within your world. Most of us nurtured in the materialist culture of capitalism, have accepted a world of I / them as our ultimate reality. We function by understanding both well (i.e. ourselves and them….and between the two, we know who the de-facto problematic party is).
Many of us have no permanent we’s. Our ‘we’ shifts with our location and focus. Some of us have managed to locate ourselves reasonably comfortably within the matrix of family, or house of worship, or circle of friends, or school of ideology or activism, or afficionado of some hobby, or habit; many float on the wind of the moment. But only when we identify our ‘we’, can we transcend our ‘I’ and find meaning to human life, which is wired for a sense of belonging. We have our egos. But we can’t live with them. We need balance for sanity.
Finding where we fit allows us to find meaningful function. The ego can only compete. Competition nourishes ego….. or crushes it. Either way, the ego by itself is insane, unsound, and tormented. The only choices it has are
- Find someone to control
- Find someone to love
Sadly, many can’t seem to tell the difference. The potential of creating ‘we’ space in life is what the character identified as Jesus Christ promises. The theological term for His mission is the ‘Ministry of Reconciliation’.
By removing the impediments to we-ness – guilt, fear, shame, hate, resentment, revenge, remorse, pride, contempt, condescension, etc. etc….every offense of spirit – the blockages in the free flow of the communication of thought and feeling that make ‘we’ possible; common identity and harmonious function are restored.
That’s the theology. However the fact is that Christianity was not introduced in the Caribbean as a living culture, not even as a dead tradition, but as a veneer for domination. A psychological tool for mass control. (Read again the original letter introducing Christ to the Caribbean, not from Apostle Paul or Peter, but from their claimed Apostolic successor, Rodrigo De Borja, Bishop of Rome, written in the name of Ferdinand and Juana on his behalf, delivered by Saint Christopher (even if he did not make the votes for canonization….. he came close enough).
Consequently, while we may be familiar with the Bible and its teachings, what has been practiced in its name and under its mesmerism is tantamount to witchcraft – The manipulation of will, rather than the nurture of consciousness.
The problem then, is for people most of whom have never heard one day, good news associated with the teaching of Christ, how is it possible to convince one of what one already thinks one knows and is only too familiar with? Any wonder that for many of our people, Jesus is despised or ignored before the age of 70+? Then we’re ‘ready’. (And don’t tell me how much things have changed since we received the letter when attitudes, judging from multiple conversations and observations, remain pretty similar even if subdued, in current expressions of the Caribbean Church.)
How many of us identify the Jesus we claim to worship, with the description of Ephesians 1:23. or 4:10?
“the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” “filling all things with himself” ?
Don’t we worship an infant Jesus who shares our prejudices and peeves? A church stuck in Christmas, never growing up to face its Easter cross? An infant, mirroring our ego, bottled up by its fears into its own head, watching things twitch and jerk around us sometimes in amazement, sometimes in confusion. Our Christianity, for the most part, is for us, just another walled off identity in a world of religious difference, not a door, path or window of access to the source of all identity, the Great ‘I Am’. The DNA Encoder Himself.
Something we all should consider?
… God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
On creating, nurturing and expanding we-space, see
See also
YeKengalé 
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