We Are All Connected

Long voting lines aren’t that bad if you bring a book. Last Thursday, I found myself in a queue that wrapped around our local library’s parking lot before snaking in and out of the stacks. I had been warned and came prepared because there was no way that I wasn’t going to vote. I read and chatted with my neighbors in line each six feet to the other side of me: a Florida transplant and a Nashville native who recently returned home after being overseas.

It’s funny how connections can spring out of nothing but proximity. All we initially had in common was our place in line, but that was enough to pleasantly pass the time to talk about the state of the world, how different regions have responded to the pandemic, and whether hipsters still dominate East Nashville. In the lulls—as I thought about neighbors and an election that touches so many people—I finished my book. And this is one of the things I read:

All of us, part of the same body.
This is our body.
All of us entangled.

If a doctor tells you that there is something seriously wrong with your leg, you would not laugh and say,
Whatever.
You would be alarmed,
and you would seek help,
immediately.
Because what’s happening in one part of your body
inevitably affects the rest of your body because ultimately you have one
body.

Every part everywhere exists within a whole.
All divisions take place within a unity.
-Rob Bell, Everything is Spiritual, 244

Bell talks about this a lot: the idea of entanglement. That we are all connected. It’s why conversations with strangers spark up in a line. It’s why a person in Washington, D.C. can affect the life of a random person in Iowa or how a child in Guatemala can transform the outlook of an individual in Tennessee. It’s why the second greatest/goes-hand-in-hand-with-the-first-greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. We are all wrapped up in this together.

And that entanglement seems so fragile right now. Obviously because of a worldwide pandemic, but also the very reason why I was willing to wait over a hour and a half in line to vote. Many—not all, but many—of the people I know are on edge right now because of the election. There is a laundry list of reasons why, but it mainly comes down to the fact that the individual that has been in power the last four years has been trying to violently disentangle that which cannot be torn totally asunder.

What I mean is that he has taken an already polarized culture and cranked the divisiveness up to unforeseen levels. Things are tense in families. Relationships have broken down. Christians are agonizing over the nationalism of their churches. He has made it clear that you are either for him or against him. And if you are against him then you are stupid and a liar and will probably cheat to win and likely live in an anarchist city. These are things he says to cheering crowds.

And the rhetoric does divide people, but it can’t sever relationships. We are hanging on to each other by painful threads. He keeps hacking away. He keeps slathering things red and blue. But we are still always going to be tied together. Every person: every race, every religion, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, the wealthy, the poor, every political stripe, the refugee, people on the other side of the globe, those 545 immigrant children who were taken away from their parents and we can’t find them (that is a completely different post, but I am furious about that). We are all bound up in this together and nothing is ever going to change that.

So we’ve got to stop electing people who thrive on creating fear and division. We have to stop amplifying voices that seek to sever that which cannot be separated. It only causes pain. It solely sows hurt. That is what it has done for more than four years now. I hear the hurt in voices of friends, family, ministry colleagues, and those people who stood in line with me last week. I read about the pain every day from people who are outside my worldview as a white straight male. To my Christian brothers and sisters, whatever temporary benefit you feel you have gained from this alliance, I hope you are cognizant of the terrible cost.

We are together and people are hurting. Like Bell wrote, if a doctor informs you that something is seriously wrong with your leg then you’re not going to blow it off. You would be concerned. You wouldn’t say to chop off the leg or claim that it is not really part of your body. You would tend to it. This man hurts lots of people. And I realize that there are many people out there who voted for him because they are hurting and felt like he provided the solution. My heart breaks for that. We definitely need to do a better job of hearing each other’s pain and working our way forward together. I also think that continuing down this road with this individual is not going to bring healing in any way.

I hesitate to write all of this. I am still going to love you if you vote for the president. I am going to strongly disagree with you and there will need to be some civilized conversations. Nor am I going to tie the sincerity of your faith to how you vote. Don’t get me wrong. I want to so badly, especially because that card has been played on me for most of my adult life. But I don’t want to do that. Also, it’s not like I see the other side of the ticket as the great hope of this country. There are plenty of problems over there too. This has not, nor ever has been, a partisan issue for me. It has been from day one a matter of human decency.

And, honestly, it’s been a matter of my faith because when I see this guy who has demeaned women and people of color and really just anyone who disagrees with him, lied repeatedly, has acted callously in the face of tragedy, has lusted for power, and committed a litany of other blatantly un-Christ-like actions be held up as God’s chosen candidate, it breaks my heart. It broke my heart four years ago and still does today. As someone who spent the majority of his life in the evangelical church, it makes me question a lot and it also makes me feel like I failed some of you.

So that’s my heart on this. We are all connected and we ought to love each other in how we act and speak and vote and do everything else. I’ll leave you with what I said to one of my line neighbors as we left last week, “Thanks for listening. I really hope you have a good day.”