JOINED TOGETHER

Holiday travels almost always include waiting in lines, and so I found myself in such a line this December. I, along with hundreds of other travelers stood, row upon row, moving through check-in, airport security, plane boarding, and baggage claim awaiting our final destination. As the line snaked back and forth toward the security screening machinery, I thought about strategies for getting through the line quickly and efficiently. But try as I might, my individual advancement through security was entirely dependent upon that of others in the line. So there I stood, shifting my weight from one position to another and inching my luggage along behind me. That’s when I noticed that as others moved forward we seemed to be shifting in the same rhythm, a rhythm created by the whole group. When one person did not advance in time with others, or moved more quickly, the group seemed to set a new rhythm to adjust to the interruption. As I observed this, I began to feel an odd sense of connectedness to this mass of strangers. I was no longer a separate being with an autonomous function, but part of a larger organism of fellow travelers. My shift forward in the line affected the movement of everyone else in line, and vice-versa.

As Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk and contemplative, said, “One must not forget the dimension of relatedness to others.”* Merton’s writings often focus on the way in which society’s drive for personal autonomy leaves us without a true sense of identity of others and thus denies our own true identity or self. He experienced this most profoundly one day amidst a crowd of people on a street corner in Louisville, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”* We know who we are by who we are with others. Our movement or shift in time and space is not our own, we are a part of the rhythm of others. Like it or not, we belong to the whole human race.

And so, we are brought back to the beginning of a new year where we prepare to shift forward into the future. While it is important to be intentional and aware of our own actions, a shift in our movement, thinking, or perspective is not entirely the by-product of our own will or decision. We are influenced, moved, shaped, and directed by all those who are around us and when we acknowledge their identity, we acknowledge our own. This is the message of Ephesians which tells us that we are indeed joined together and “built together into a dwelling place for God.” Everything we do is a part of this dwelling place, this body of Christ. Our movement, or shift, into the next year is also a collective movement with each of us affecting the rhythm of one another. May you, like Thomas Merton, experience the overwhelming realization that you belong to the whole people of God. Amen.

*Thomas Del Prete, Thomas Merton and the Education of the Whole Person (Birmingham, Alabama: Religious Education Press, 1990), p. 46, 47.