Reentry

w/ some thoughts about Ubuntu

Hey, y’all, it’s been a minute.

I don’t remember the last time I posted on here. A big update, though! I got married on August 2nd to my lovely wife, Hannah :)

Sadly, I’ve missed reading the posts of my favorite publications on here for almost half a year, and thinking about trying to catch up is hella intimidating.

I’m attempting to rework my writing-for-fun muscles. This reentry into writing (probably my 10th one, lol) feels scarier than it ever has. There’s so much going on that it’s hard to feel the value and ease of sharing my observations.

Where I find myself recently is returning to the message of the African Philosophy, Ubuntu. My first and only wedding I’ve officiated was my sister-in-law's, and I chose to center the homily on Colossians 3:14-15, “And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity,” which connects well with Ubuntu as a way of life.

Our humanity is corroding. Efforts to do our unhoused, immigrant, and disabled neighbors (and so many more) justice face the predictable retrenchment of nationalism and bigotry. Discouragement over empire’s formidability is crushing and sometimes convincing enough to lay aside our resolve to humanize all our neighbors.

Ubuntu fundamentally sees humanity as an interconnected reality. A famous phrase in the Zulu language, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” means a person is only a person through other persons. The late great Archbishop Desmond Tutu commonly explained this dang near untranslateable idea by saying, “My humanity is inextricably linked to yours,” and vice versa.

When we approach our species and the non-human world through this framework of mutuality and interconnectedness, it’s not hard to imagine the dream of a world that awaits us. However, practicing Ubuntu is not conducive to the world of production and consumption that controls our interactions. As an ideal, Ubuntu registers as beautiful. As a practice, it asks for sacrifice and self-examination so that we always precedes I, ironically creating a true pathway to discovering our true selves.

I wish Ubuntu were a reflex for us, but money and status aren’t guaranteed when we commit to communal wellness over self-aggrandizement. Aren’t status and recognition what we’ve been conditioned to pursue at the expense of social consciousness and action? Even creating awareness on social media has exposed some of our greatest “social justice” advocates as phonies. How can Ubuntu enter a world where so much human integrity has been compromised by the systems that have us participating in sin unwittingly every day?

It starts within.

Ubuntu found me in a place of great frustration. I’m a person who is constantly in spaces that predominate people who are physically unable to develop an expansive understanding of the universe and human expressions. Conversations can quickly get ugly and awkward when I’m just tryna mind my own business. Quick assumptions are made about me being an apostate, rather than the view I’ve become more enamored with Jesus and his followers, wanting more for us as we exist in a natural and familial ecosystem more grand and beautiful than we could ever have imagined.

This confusion and frustration, because of tension within my community, is where Ubuntu met me and changed me. In a way I don’t always like, I’m dependent on the survival and flourishing of the ones who feel betrayed by my theological shifts. Their wellness is my joy, and in ways I probably don’t understand, my wellness is theirs too. Being in the same room together may not always be the place where we recognize the fulfillment of Ubuntu because the relational separation caused by harmful ideas is not something Ubuntu can extinguish. It can, though, cyclically enter, exit, and reenter the presence of those whom we’ve hurt and been hurt by, as needed, until love predominates.

We must embrace the disappointment that comes with learning to imagine and enjoy the fullness of a person’s humanity that may not recognize ours. We ain’t gotta be buddies, but we do need to create structures that promote, and conversely protest any ideology that destroys, Ubuntu becoming our reflex.

As a Jesus follower, Ubuntu is the humanist philosophy I see as incredibly compatible with the vision of the Messiah. Not just propositionally but imaginatively. Dr. Michael Battle, mentee of Desmond Tutu, writes and speaks of Ubuntu as atonement theology, the means by which we can be reunited with God. What might usher in the realm and reign of God as powerfully as holding communal personhood as our collective vision for our world today and coming generations?

For I am because We are.