Salvation by Separation or Celebration?

The Philippines is a land of celebration and a land of Community. The experience of being part of popular celebrations such as Sinulog in January has set me thinking. Here are some ideas which may or may not make sense. I apologise that this is a little long!

The Human identity is, and always has been, a marriage between two opposing facets of our humanness. We all need spontaneity, impulse and energy; we need life to have excitement and newness. Yet we are also drawn towards order, organisation and logic. As humans we have an impulse to try to make order out of chaos.

What goes for the individual also goes for the collective. Our identities are found in relationships with others. Communities also have a deep need for both Spontaneity and energy, and at the same time for order and reason.

In the western world (which I realise is a generalisation) we have tended to believe that it is necessary for order and reason to be in place before spontaneity and creativity can flourish. We assert order and reason in the public sphere in the belief that this will create a space for spontaneity and creativity in the private sphere. Society exists as an organising structure which avoids chaos and thereby allows the space for the individual to be creative.

Some people grasp this freedom created by a sense of social order and are able to live lives full of energy and creativity. Yet it seems to me that very often this arrangement is not serving us well.

Without a real sense of communal spontaneity we have become a society which does not have source of life around which to gather, we are an atomised people who, like toddlers, engage in parallel play rather than shared celebrations. Without real community many people are unable to properly define who they are. We often live lives of fear and unattained potential. So many people seem to continually lament what they lack rather than celebrate what they already have, or to talk about what they once were rather than what they aspire to be.

The communities we do have are associations of mutual interest concerned only with the parochial concerns of their own constituencies. We lack communities which are able to look beyond the petty concerns of their own members. We lack communities which really celebrate with energy and spontaneity. We also lack the ability to dialogue in a way that is creative; too often we descend into contests as to which of two entrenched opinions will win out.

In the west we allow reason to constrict our potential. Unable to embrace our potential we too often become like crabs hiding away in our own little shells.

Participating in popular celebrations has thrown a light, for me, onto what is missing from western society. I have been able, from outside, to see more clearly something I had previous not been able to see.

As human beings we can only be fully alive and fully fulfilled in the midst of a loving, supportive, and (crucially) outward looking community. We are happiest and most fulfilled when we cooperation not when we compete.

Communities of this kind have a need for organisation and order, but if order and reason are able to rule everything then all we are left with is a dead law. Real community life is nourished by spontaneity, energy and the courage to take the risks inherent in loving others. We need to be open to being surprised and excited by each other.

It is in community that we become fully our individual selves, and in becoming embracing fully ourselves as individuals we are driven towards community.

Often in the western world we celebrate the freedom of the individual. Yet the very fact that we, in the west, live such disparate and atomised live is testament to our failure to grasp real individuality, or to understand our true natural as communal beings.

Salvation by separation is, perhaps, one of the dominant false idols of our age?