Since the beginning of recorded history, humanity has warred among itself. In general, war can be taken as a consequence of the failure to hold, front and center, a view of everyone—that is, all people, regardless of their life-choices and resultant character—as unique and unrepeatable gifts. This is a sacred and ontological, as opposed to a merely utilitarian view of human beings. So long as such gift remains out of view at the center of human consciousness, humans continue to commit deplorable acts of deception, manipulation and violence toward and upon one another. This can be taken as a failure to understand and incorporate love into our lives as the very heart—both the reason and the aim—of our existence. The Christian tradition can primarily be taken as one marked by the quest to incorporate love, through the collaborative interest of God, into all aspects of our lives to such an extent that no person is ever mistreated again. This will be so because, at last, no person will ever be interested in mistreating another person again. Jesus’ teachings in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount stand as instructional high points in human history on these matters. We are quite obviously still learning how to implement his teaching into careful application into life at all levels in these regards. His admonition still rings out, inviting each of us to examine our internal worlds and submit them into his care so that we can be ‘washed’ of that which contaminates us and our communities,

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence.  You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may also become clean. (Matt 23:25)

Ultimate transformation of the created order through the inner transformation of humans is the Telos to which the life of Jesus and the scriptures that attest to him, point—not, as is popularly understood, to some disembodied and (somehow) blissful ‘heaven’, but to an entirely transformed reality inside of which the Kingdom of Heaven and earth are conjoined—a new heavens and new earth realized. This is looked to in the Grand Narrative of Christian faith and life as the final reckoning of God’s loving interests, the incorporation of His Kingdom—understood here as the “range of His effective will” into every bit of existence, whether physical or spiritual. 

Such a Telos can be claimed only when every person recognizes and comes to cherish the dignity, inherent worth and intrinsic value of every one of their human neighbours. This is so because until all human life is first transformed through the renewal of our individual and collective minds and hearts, creation will remain corrupted through whichever of our faculties and interests have not been brought under the governance of human will submitted to Love. 

Of all the creatures in the known universe, humans are the most complex. In the same way that all blackbirds are birds but not all birds are blackbirds, humanity itself has a nature that is distinct from the nature of the persons who populate the whole. We are distinguishable as a race from the rest of the created order in the moral weight that we bear, the burden of choice spoken to in other of our worldview convictions as well. The weight of this burden is added to by the fractal dynamics of personality that exist among us, each one a beautiful revelation of the nature of the God whose divine image we bear out into the world. 

This burden therefore comes to its most critical and consequential effects as it regards human beings in relation to one another. Corruptio optimi pessima, “the corruption of the best is the worst.” Failure to uphold and be guided by such an ethic blinds us to the inherent dignity and intrinsic value of our human neighbours. The extent to which we are willing to mistreat one another is always a direct revelation about the condition of our own inner world; about the degree to which we are either the slave to sin or the willing subject to Love. C.S. Lewis famously expressed the heart of this matter along these lines:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself is truly hidden. 

It is a rare person who looks upon a brand-new infant and feels for them even a hint of contempt—anything short of deep reverence for and an interest in protecting the little being whom they behold in that moment. Most people will admit being ‘taken’ by the sense of the sacred that overcomes them in mere nearness to such a life. Somewhere along the way, through the certain encroachment of sin and its beleaguering effects in our lives, our view of one another becomes deformed. Our view of one another’s Origin Story—that we each enter the world (and this, regardless of circumstance) as a sacred human life—is eroded and our behaviour toward one another proves just how far from that Story we have ventured on our own. 

The arrangement of these dynamics in us will either support or interfere with our individual path toward salvation, here understood as the appropriation of God’s life into our own; as much for our time ‘here’ as for what comes beyond. The incorporation of our personality, the character we amass as that personality is progressively submitted into the loving interests of God with distinction, and our engagement of that dynamic in us with the world that surrounds us, can be defined as our vocation; as our received ‘summons’ or our ‘calling’. By use of the term ‘calling’ we understand that we each possess a responsibility—both human (collective) and personal (individual)—to offer our lives with wise intention and loving interest into the needs of the world around us. We will turn to this subject (the subject of personal calling) in Worldview Conviction number 5.