The Parts of Our Sum is not Equal to the Sum of Our Parts: On becoming a more perfect union
My inboxes have been stuffed full of lots of messages over the past week from outraged conservatives and progressives both. The former upset over my belief that supporting politicians who try to overturn abortion laws is not the way I’ve chosen combat the symptom of abortion in our country. The latter upset that I made my statement so late in the game (“too little, too late,” is the common quote). As long as I live, I’ll feel okay about my decisions if folks from both sides of any argument or institution don’t want to own me.
I am not a Democrat, nor a Republican, nor do I think either has the moral upper hand on any issue. At the end of the day, we have to weigh the many complex options before us, decide to both trust the Lord and do our best, and then make the decision. Some of you will be motivated by the legality of abortion and some by the accessibility of it and some by the reason for it. There may be precious few who can hold all three with equal tension, but we do not (at present) have a viable political party who does. Therefore, we do our best. We pick one and fight with all our might to see it through. I can respect you for choosing the legalityof it. Can you respect me for choosing the reason for it? If we can’t respect one another, we have much, much deeper problems than abortion.
If we can’t respect one another, then our problem has turned partisan. We have begun to see human beings as, as I said in a conversation with a friend this week, merely the parts of their sum and not also the sum of their parts. What do I mean by this? I mean 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 4. So 4 matters, but also each of those 1s matters, and without each of those 1s, the 4 wouldn’t be. Here’s how we saw this play out with Trump over the past four years.
Trump is Prolife (1), Accused of Rape (1), A Narcissist (1), A proven liar (1) = Chosen to represent the Republican Party in the United States as President (4). Christians all over the US defended their vote of Trump because of the first 1. Because he was only part of his sum (pro-life).
Kamala Harris, will be the first woman, Black woman, woman of Asian descent, and daughter of immigrants to occupy that office (1), she has a complicated hisory with tough on crime bills that helped bloat the prison system and contributed to whole generations of absentee fathers (1), is pro-choice (1), could be a shoe-in for president should Biden be a one-term president or (God forbid) die while in office (1) = First female vice president (4). This week I briefly celebrated Harris’s historic vice-presidency before removing my post because I thought more about the complexity of disintegration (dismembering the whole).
Both Harris and Trump are the sums of their parts, but they are also the parts of their sums. We are at the same time complex people and whole people. Meaning, we cannot separate our minds from our bodies from our hearts from our spirits, while at the same time, our specific mind is what it is because of our heart because of our bodies because of our spirits. We are inextricably tied to the specifics of who we are and also we are who we are because of the whole of who we are (For further reading, Who God Says You Are, by Klyne Snodgrass).
If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. It is a great mystery. And part of the problem of the past four years, part of the dissonance that many Christians feel, is that this mystery is a mystery. It doesn’t completely make sense or fit into a neat box, it is not easily explained or parsed. It is not black or white or inside the lines of what just makes sense. It is, in a word, nonsensical. It does not make sense.
As I’ve watched folks I respect and love defend their support of Trump over the past four years, I’ve just felt incredulous. I cannot describe to you the feeling in my body when Christian leaders came out in support of him. It felt like dissonance. That’s the only word I can use to describe how it felt to see all these people championing a man like that based on one aspect of his platform. I felt internally fractured, like my mind couldn’t comprehend what my heart was seeing and my body couldn’t make my spirit agree. It didn’t stop, as time went on, I only grew more and more confused. Even as recently as two weeks ago when I saw someone else come out in support of him right before the election, that same feeling I woke up with on November 9, 2016, was just as palpable, just as present. (For further reading, The Liturgy of Politics, by Kaitlyn Schiess)
I’ve thought a lot over the past four years about the complexity of the human experience, partially because I was writing a book on only one aspect of the human experience (the body). And the more I tried to separate and sequester the body’s experience from the heart, mind, and spirit, the flatter my writing fell. It wasn’t until I changed my thesis that Handle With Care began to really coalesce in my mind: We are not just the parts of our sum. We are the sum of our parts. Who we are, as a whole, is a whole, and cannot be divided from one another. If we merely try to heal the body, but not the spirit, we have not done our full work.
It coalesced for me even more when last winter, in the midst of a panicked state over a specific attack against our family, I saw a therapist (mind) who recommended EMDR for me (body) around the same time a friend came over and prayed over me and our home for hours (spirit), and another friend spent hours, hours, listening to me simply pour out my heart (heart). Within the span of one month, with the synergy of these beautifully complex pieces of my wholeness coming together, my anxiety over this specific issue disappeared. I had lived with it for five years and in one month, it was gone. Why? Because I’d been trying to treat the parts and not the sum. When I began to seek help for the sum, the parts began to heal.
I hope you’re following with me here because I think there is a lesson in here for all of us (regardless of who we voted for). I think politics are sick right now and our country is sick. We cannot work for “a more perfect union” as long as we are only working for one of the union, or one platform of our party, or one party, or one issue. We have to begin to work for the whole.
When I think about abortion these days I see the line so clearly between mass incarceration and abortion, access to healthcare and abortion, equal pay and parental leave and abortion, student loan debt and abortion, the breakdown of community, the family, and the church and abortion, fatherlessness and abortion, economic poverty and abortion. I cannot unsee the parts from their whole now, and I think the most ineffective way to fight for the union of the whole is to continue working for only one part. I think it’s actually making us sicker, because, like my continuing personal anxiety last year, I keep blaming and cursing the other parts of my sum for not being able to get her %$#& together. Not until I stepped back and gave equal attention to the whole, did the whole heal.
This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about Philippians 2:2, “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” What does it mean to be of the same mind? What does it mean as Christians in the divisive times we’re in, to be of one mind? To be of Christ’s mind? How do we share the mind of Christ when we are so diametrically opposed to another’s way of doing or seeing something? If my Red friends cannot even assume the best about me for voting the way I did, and if my Blue friends cannot even assume the best about those who vote the way they did, can we be of one mind in Christ at all? Are we headed for a more fractured union instead of a more perfect one? And are Christians, in particular, contributing to this further fracturing by refusing to see that other Christians are exercising the mind of Christ when they cast their vote — regardless of which way they chose?
I don’t have an answer here, nor do I feel like I need one. For me this is an ongoing conversation, both in my head and with a few other trusted conversation partners who are wrestling with the same questions. But I do think these are things we need to be thinking about before writing off fellow Christians, unfollowing those who disagree, or ousting ourselves from the company of others.
We are the parts of our sum, but we are also (and I think I’m going to argue more importantly) the sum of our parts. And we will not have the mind of Christ unless we can agree on this. Christ, God in flesh, knew that humans needed a God who understood the whole and complex human experience. Of course God already did, after all, he’s God, he created the human experience. But humans needed to see God being human. Christ became flesh for us, not for himself. He came to show us he was body and mind and spirit and heart, that he had emotions and was wounded and wept and taught. He came to say, “You are not merely a body or mostly a heart or only a spirit or primarily your mind. You are all of it because I am all of it. See? Here I am. All of it.” (For further reading, Sensing Jesus, by Zack Eswine)
And this is essential to our gospel, this incarnation, this immenseness of being that God descended to. And therefore it is essential to our being too, our existing, our living, our growing and our thriving. We are not merely becoming “a more perfect union” because we are Americans and live in America, but because we are humans and God loves us and wants to be with us and wants us to be with one another. And I think, I think, I think, this is the only thing that will change our country and our politics.
(Some have asked why I’m sharing these on Medium and not Sayable. It’s not because I’m embarrassed or afraid of losing readers, as was suggested, but because I really respect my regular readers and I did not want to enter their inboxes with just one more political blog. My aim was — and is — not to sway anyone’s vote, it is simply to share my journey regarding politics. I consider it to be a way of inviting you to read my story…or not. If you are not a regular reader to Sayable and would like to be, subscribe here!)
