Sharing - an indicator of a healthy life.
"Build your ghettos and wonder why they try to exterminate you. Build your castles and wonder why they turn their ploughshares into swords against you."
When I went to Melbourne recently, I noticed how some immigrant communities tended to seek out their own, and kind of huddle together, creating Little Wherevers according to their lands of origin. Certainly, there's honour in remembering your roots. And there's practical support to be had from mingling with people of like culture. But in the context of the larger culture - you need to be more outward facing.
In the bad old days of genocide (which are today, in some parts of the world, sadly), minority cultures have been exterminated by the dominant cultures surrounding them. (Which are not always larger in number; it's the strength of influence that matters.)
It's easier to destroy a class or a category of faceless persons. But it's harder to destroy people that you know. So people should not form ghettos, but they should seek to engage and enrich the larger society. Not out of fear of extermination, either, but because it is the divine spark within us than drives us to missional behaviour - to give, to share.
(Also in Melbourne, I visited the Jewish Holocaust Museum and was reminded again of the people who were forced into ghettos. That's a different story, of course - it was a path they did not choose.)
Then I was reminded of medieval lords - landowners who literally dominated the peasants. What could people do when the entire economy was built around farming a plot of land - and you owned no land but had to pay hefty taxes, in terms of money and human dignity, to the man whose land you happened to be born on? There were benevolent lords, of course - but you know human nature and the powerful temptation to oppress. (It's very much alive still.)
What's the natural, logical outcome of a tiny minority living fat and large in comfy castles while the teeming masses around them scratched an existence from the soil? Of course - revolt.
Sharing - it sounds so kindergarteny. It sounds contrived - but largely, I suspect, because we were forced to share as children; it was the "right" thing to do. But sharing is the normal mode of life. I don't think that the underclass or the upperclass should share out of a hope of avoiding violence done to them. I think that everyone should share because that is the natural thing to do. Revolts are just nature's thermometer telling us that the engine's blown.
Would you share a little something today? Would you give something that's yours to give? Even if it seems so common to you, it seems common only because you have so much of it. Someone outside of your circle of existence is dying for some. Let your gift find them.
