I’m still enamored by Doug Muder’s suggestion earlier this year of a UU mission statement: becoming the people the world needs.
It leads to the question: who does the world need? Notice we’re not asking what the world needs; that too easily leads to an empty causism. The question is: who do we need to become?
The Bantu word ubuntu came onto the global scene during the fall of apartheid in South Africa. There are no hard and fast definitions, but I’m fond of “a person becomes human through other persons.”
We need other people. We’re radically dependent upon others from the day we’re born until the day we die. We hide from this basic, raw fact of life, fearing a loss of independence. But interdependence, not independence, is the root and stem of human life.
Who does the world need? The world needs people who practice ubuntu, intentionally and effectively.
Ubuntu is an active face-to-face humanity toward others. It isn’t directed primarily at humanity-in-general. (I still haven’t spotted one of those in the wild.) First and foremost, it’s directed at the humanity in front of us, the humanity that looks us in the eye, the humanity we can hear and smell. Taking a shortcut past the humanity in front us to humanity-in-general is not ubuntu.
The world has no shortage of liberal lovers of humanity-in-general offering ideological prescriptions for human harmony in its ten thousand flavors. Who it needs are lovers of the humanity that looks us in the eye. It needs folks who, seeking reconciliation, sit across the table from those they are out of sorts with (or worse). And it needs those who teach and encourage others to do the same.
We should ask of our actions: does this help us become the people who give the world ubuntu? Anything that furthers this mission is good. Anything that detracts from it should be dropped.
Chutney,
Thank you for this. I, too, think this is the key. I’ve known many, many people radically committed to changing the world “for the better” who were absolute ogres to the people around them or just thoughtlessly callous when a kind word was needed. I’m reminded of the line from the musica “Hair”: “Do you only care about the bleeding crowd? How about a needing friend?”
I had a conversation with a doctor a few days ago who was concerned because he didn’t “love people” anymore. I asked him if he still enjoyed the interaction he has with individuals in his care, whether he loves the person in front of him. Sure, of course. Well, then, you do love people, I said–in the way that matters.
It’s just when you round them all up in your mind, as an entity, that they become the ugly mob of rude and immature objects of “health care.” When the individual is in front of you, there’s always a way to find compassion for them, despite their rudeness and immaturity (or
because of it).
Next time I talk to him, I’ll have to mention the idea of ubuntu. I think that he’s in a context where it makes a great deal of sense.
So you’re saying we should get rid of Windows and Mac OS and put Linux on our computers? I’m fine with that. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution)
Yes, Yes Yes! I have been waiting for you to post this. It has been rolling around in your head for a while. Thank you for the lucid way that you frame it.
Now to the question of cultivating Ibuntu in service of the other and in terms of liturgy and spiritual discipline that keeps us grounded in practice that ponts toward the cultivation of Ubuntu.
This could scare the shit out of some folks. Cultivation of a community that lives this doesn’t begin with the knowledge that I am a good liberal therefore the world needs me. Instead, I think, it begins with the notion that I am a person therefore I have need of other people. Am I right about this?
Anyway, good post!
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Yes, STD, dead on. (What a delightful acronym you have!)
When we think about what the world needs, it is nearly always better to step back from the loftiest ideals and take a practical, everyday approach. It is certainly much more personalized when we target helping the person sitting across from us, versus the unseen millions on the other side of the planet.
Now that I am sitting down with the guy across from me. what is ‘it’ that he really needs? And who has the qualifications to actually deliver it?
Mark,
It isn’t what the world needs. It’s who. That guy across the table? He needs you. And, more to the point, you need him.
Ubuntu isn’t social work. And it isn’t community organizing either.
I agree… it’s all about the who.
Very nice.
[…] Still drawing from Schreiter’s book on Reconciliation, here are seven ways of looking at folks that prevent reconciliation and ubuntu. […]