This is part of an ongoing series of article reprints from the Friends Bulletin/Western Friend archives. They are selected at random from the boxes in the editor’s garage. The theme for this issue was, “The Hurt of One is the Hurt of All.”

The Permanence of Matter
by Sally Bryan, San Juan Worship Group

“What perplexes the world is the disparity between the swiftness of the spirit, and the immense unwieldiness, sluggishness, inertia, the permanence of matter. “-Thomas Marm

In our reflective moments, most of us are only too willing to acknowledge that we are involved with mankind. We have believed poets who say we are lessened if a clod washes into the sea, and we have read physicists who say that a butterfly that moves its wings in Japan will affect forces, unknown though many may be, in Chicago. In a few tender and near-incommunicable moments, we may have experienced this all-inclusive relatedness. Truly we know that we are participants in a participatory universe.

But we are human animals—bone and gut and gristle. When I am electric with pain from a broken femur, there is no place left for the realization that another in Oklahoma or Bosnia is in equal (or greater) pain. Neither can I believe that the careful, concerned, competent E.M.T. bending over me experiences one iota of my pain. This seems to me to be a basic, primary, experienced fact. We are matter. This matters.

There is another constraint on our moment-by-moment realization that “the hurt of one is the hurt of all.” As we are encased in our biological matter, we are entwined in our cultural precursors. These move in overlapping circles from those general to the whole of humanity, to those that increasingly focus on the single individual. Civilized by the tribe, family, and associations, each is a uniquely complex, uniquely encultured human being. Brought together into this moment (and each succeeding moment) are all these assumptions, approved ideas, “right” ways of seeing and doing. And out of all this welter of possibility, our being, our spirit, our consciousness, plummets every moment at the center of the about-to-be-actualized event. The strength of the bonds of habit vary from time to time and from person to person. But to be human is to be encultured by all that has produced us.

Matter we are, but it is possible to believe that we are something more. Perhaps there is that of God in us, an inner Light. Perhaps we are ineluctably physical matter, and free will exists only in our capacity to delay a response, allowing events around us to shift while less strongly programmed ideas and actions arise in us.

Whatever reason we ascribe to it, we are aware that as we face each other (as I hold fingers over the keys), possible words tingle on the threshold. Yet, some are chosen to emerge into the air, onto the paper. It is exhausting to realize that each second carries both the movement of the habitual and the possibility of its deflection. Recognized or not, both initiation and response hold the flick of new potentiality.

It is most comfortable to speak from and to a culture with a shared canon. Thus at ease, we need not remember the assumptions that create congruence. We can be safe with the habits that spring easily to us.

We ask how we can teach that bigotry is wrong when we cannot confront bigotry that faces us. A bigot is a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his/her own belief or opinion. So can one call another a bigot without being one? In Friendly circles there are approved ways of thinking about multicultural neighborhoods and affirmative action, but are they right because they are shared? And are those who argue for the demise of affirmative action, who favor cultural grouping of homes, “wrong,” and bigots if they argue too passionately?

This is the nub of the problem. Each of us is comfortable when we are with those who share our significant and deeply held beliefs. Adrenaline pumps when a serious challenge is raised. Fight or flight, that’s our animal heri-tage; it is one of the sluggish and permanent features of matter.
It is possible to seek out those who hold opinions that contradict our own. Indeed, Friends work harder than most people at extending the comfort zones of familiarity. But understanding develops slowly and most often affection follows. Shared space is essential. The more contrary the views, the more alert each must be to private assumptions so that challenge does not immediately leap to reification and the attack of labeling. Exchange means that each is willing to hold lightly even the most deeply-rooted principles and ideas. If I am passionately right, and I identify you as a bigot, no growth in understanding is possible. Indeed, no meeting is possible. “All real living is meeting,” Martin Buber says. We need divine assistance, moment by moment, as we face each other, ready now to change and to be changed. This continued seeking is the essence. We cannot rest on the belief that for all time divine accord has been given.

The greatest challenge comes from those who do not place a high value on tolerance. It requires strong faith and deep will to continue to move into encounters with them. Despite repeated failures, each moment is a new instant of potentiality, despite all previous failure.

Most, however, have tolerance somewhere on their personal value scale. Meeting is possible when Friends are simply and immediately present in the moment, holding strong beliefs while knowing deep down that they could be partial or mistaken, bearing the pain that contradiction always brings. The mutuality of this willingness to accept or to inflict hurt impregnates the moment with the possibility of change. Hiding hurt, avoiding hurt, is a strategy for missed meeting, for assuring
that past assumptions pour forth unmitigated, shaping the future.

In the general sense, we know that “the hurt of one is the hurt of all.” But few generalizations are empowering over personal pain, over challenges that aim at the solar plexus. Saints (and poets, Thorton Wilder says in Our Town) may hold suffering lightly. But most of us are imprisoned by it. Our sluggish, unwieldy, and permanent physical matter and cultural past whirl us into howling out our pain and defending our personal beliefs. Again and again, all-inclusive relatedness is submerged in the frenzy of personal crisis. But when it subsides, when we approach the still center again, we know. Our human selves have raged forth, loosed from our spiritual understanding. But there will be another time. We can try again. Perhaps T.S. Eliot is right; “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. “