My most disturbing premonition, by virtue of the fact I was a Christian minister, led me to strongly suspect the intimacy experienced in profound single encounters with strangers might be triggered by an inborn drive possibly separate from one’s belief patterns and cultural influences. Nature has left us with an innate source of pure compassion that may work best between total strangers. It’s likely the only way to overcome the indifference we feel toward our neighbors and masses of alien motorists we pass daily. Countries, family units and faith communities may be generating empathy that winds up denying what belongs to outsiders. The Insula is a cranial organ that is located at the top of our heads where we sense love and hate, appreciation and bitterness, self-confidence and humiliation, trust and distrust, empathy and scorn, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, punishment and guilt. It emerged from darkness approximately 15 years ago by Antonio Demasio, a neuroscientist. He claimed the organ plays a starring role in our behavior. Faith members need to somehow find a way to examine and compare the compassion that emerges out of congregations for the sake of the world with that which is innately lodged in the crania of all beings. Maybe religious orders have been working too hard at attempting to implant collective love as opposed to engaging with what’s already in us and out there. I’ve come to believe in my old age that we meet outsiders, whether religious or faithless, an active compassionate source that might out-love believers at times and we need to be prepared to honor that compassion. That complicates it for us Christians. I always thought Jesus’ love had a slight edge over any other kind of empathy. However, I can’t imagine the prophet being all that greedy by comparison to the composition of compassion we rely upon to love our neighbors. Can faith compassion trigger, enhance, inhibit or override innate empathy? And are the INSULA emissions capable of exerting the same forces on in-coming love? Maybe there is not enough love out there among religious orders to get the neighbor-loving and structure-sensitizing done and the sacred efforts need to be complemented by the built-in source. What I’ve begun to wonder about is this: Was Jesus born with a unique INSULA or was it like any other and he just managed to actualize it like no other? Did he detect the congenital capabilities in those whom he encountered and had a hunch it would take all the compassionate prowess they possessed to love their neighbors and enemies? Is it possible that humans have not evolved to that point? Maybe Jesus discerned that the urge to love a neighbor or enemy, once, and on the spot, is triggered by an innate tendency to bond. He didn’t model family life or much extended communal bonding, for that matter, so perhaps he was conveying how we can risk bonding unconditionally with strangers in first meetings. Did Jesus advise his followers to rely upon temple communities to develop the kind of compassion he was advocating or did he convey that they had it in them to get the job done as individuals? Loving unreservedly an enemy, ah, that’s another matter. There may not be many around who’ve tried it and lived to tell about it Hey, help me understand this stuff, I’m thinking of loving a couple of neighbors, and at least one enemy before I’m too old to attempt it.
