What If Our Alikeness is Just Being Here

There, in my earliest memory of a long road trip, I'm a tween, maybe twelve. I wear bright colors back then and wish the world away with such sad music. I enjoy doing things on my own time and in my own space and at my own will. The Andy Warhol in my bedroom told me that everybody should like everybody because art is about liking things, but here I am, getting it from the gut to like anything at all. I tie myself to nature and call it God - the reservoir and the field and something like a ladybug - but people don't impress me, or fool me. I pick and choose and justify what kind of creation to call beautiful, and I'm a walking, mostly sleeping, dichotomy with little concept of how the world works but a clear picture of how it ought to be.

We were visiting family in Longmont and would be there a week. The five of us had packed our SUV tight with two week's worth of clothes if you were a girl and essentials to last three days if you were a boy. We'd collected an obscene amount of snacks on the off chance that the sky came falling or the highway stopped running, and Dad somehow rigged a seven-inch portable television to the top of our red Igloo cooler which squeezed unsuccessfully between the middle two seats. The three of us who weren't forty, we each selected our favorite DVD prior to the two-day drive and I still don't know how thirteen made it into that Walmart sack. During intermission, Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra would play and we'd harmonize until two of us were fighting about leg room. Twelve close-quartered hours broken up into days has its special, hellish way of multiplying when you're young and there's a place you're supposed to be and you're not in charge of getting there.

We'd stop over in Raton or someplace like Trinidad and there'd be nowhere to eat but Arby's. And it was just hours before this point where I'd start picking up on the cars that had been with us for miles. Hundreds of miles. The maroon four-door belonging to Baptists with the luggage secured on top by bungees and the silver Honda Civic that held a Hispanic family of four. A questionable Subaru that was in a fight with his wife down 287 and a passed down Chevy - the side mirror dangling from colored wires - that was a young man headed home for holiday. It was five of us, having traveled similar distances for whatever reason and finally catching up in town with still more to go. We'd offer an affirmative nod through our respective windows as one would pass, knowing good and well we'd likely pass again soon after bathroom and dinner.

It wasn't a competition, but a sliding and gliding sort of waltz within the comfort and safety of our own. Unlikely contenders on a high-speed pilgrimage to wherever it was that we were all going. We were married together on the road, and if you weren't in the Colorado caravan then you weren't in on the joke. The stretch of cars thereby excluded from the pack were plenty, but I had rationalized a certain filtered logic to be similar to these people, latched onto some fabricated meaning that might attach us as our journeys seemed the same, and I was just thinking recently that isn't it funny how we continue to need reason for our relationship with others? An excuse, an explanation, for the lane next to us to matter. I did this twelve years ago and I do it now, too.

Maybe this is only the cynic's kryptonite, but I'd suggest that the phenomenon of human connection is a real one and it plagues us all whether you're an introvert or unmarried or have autism or are mute. And in order to connect, we must compare, accentuating differences and weighing our options before we think it right to proceed. We don't act this way with other types of creation, we don't have to, because the abstract, intellectual gap that separates us is enough for us to remain emotionally unharmed. A rainbow, a swan, longer days and shorter nights, they're each at their most helpful just by being there at a time on the earth and we appreciate them and respect them as such. But people, we're an entirely different story, and how much more he cares for us than the birds, but goodness - these planks are in our eyes and it's tough to dig them out.

Richard Rohr, in his book called Falling Upward, tells us that "if we are created in the image and likeness of God, then whatever good, true, or beautiful things we can say about humanity or creation we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power." When I speak well of his creation and dismiss his likeness in humanity, I've taken my view of his infinite power and made it smaller, believing that he only makes half of it good. When I have to search high and low and through every tunnel for ways to associate with my neighbor, then I've been carrying his name wrong all along.

Rohr goes on to say that "in the second half of life, we can give our energy to making even the painful parts and the formally excluded parts belong to the now unified field - especially people who are different, and those who have never had a chance. If you have forgiven yourself for being imperfect and falling, you can now do it for just about everybody else. If you have not done it for yourself, I am afraid you will likely pass on your sadness, absurdity, judgment, and futility to others. If we know anything at this stage, we know that we are all in this together and that we are all equally naked underneath our clothes. Which probably does not feel like a whole lot of knowing, but even this little bit of honesty gives us a strange and restful consolation."

. . .

I am young, and if the Lord wills it, I still have more than half of the pie to eat, but I'll say this: a juvenile worldview is one that would take creation in pieces, honoring whichever side works in its favor and discarding the rest because it's lame or risky or time-consuming or temporary. The pressure of the two competing dissolves when we're familiar with our role as dust in the soil. Rather than spending our lives fumbling around to find a common ground with the Conservative and the Poor One and the Wife-Beater and the Kid, how much sweeter and more comprehensive would it be to know that our common ground is just in being here at a time on the earth and appreciating and respecting our kinship as such. All of us having traveled similar distances for whatever reason and finally catching up in town with still more to go. An affirmative nod and we're off - equally naked underneath our different clothes. It's a dance belonging to the cosmos and a humble one to be a part of.