Coca Cola And A New Humanity: Drawing Circles Instead of Lines

Did you see this Coca Cola advertisement during the Super Bowl this year? It was definitely one of my favorites! "Coca Cola Border" tells the story of two soldiers from rival nations who are able to put aside their differences and, for the briefest of moments, see each other as individuals as they share an ice-cold bottle of Coke. Check it out. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-STkFCCrus]

The primary intent of the ad obviously is to promote Coke as a great tool to "open happiness" as the ending tag line says. Drink and share Coke to bring people together. I love the sentiment, even though I'm not a super Coke fan.

But the part of the ad that visually depicts the strongest message, in my opinion, is when the one soldier is trying to find a way to give an extra Coke bottle to his thirsty enemy without crossing the boundary between them. It appears that there's just no way to bridge this boundary without violating their national military and political rules and causing an international incident. Until the soldier, in a moment of creative desire to cross the gap, puts the bottle of Coke on the ground next to the boundary, takes his sword and redraws the line to encompass the Coke bottle within his enemy's territory. Mission accomplished. Cokes can now be enjoyed by both parties.

This powerful ad painfully reminds us how real life is filled with many boundaries that separate people, boundaries that keep people afraid of or wary of or angry with others and deprived of mutual blessings. These boundaries produce a kind of "I'm better than you" attitude or "You're not as good as me" belief or "You might contaminate me if I let you into my world" paradigm" or "I need to teach you what I know so you can be as spiritual and holy as I am" philosophy or "Giving to you might diminish me" fear. We draw lots of different kinds of boundaries to make sure the world is easy to define for us - there's an inside and an outside that helps us label people and behaviors and morals. It produces a check list religion so that we can chart our and other people's progress more easily, aids to making quick judgments about ourselves and others, ways to compartmentalize life so we can understand it more clearly.  And so, as the ad depicts, by George, if some of your trash floats into my space, I'm obligated to hurl it right back at you where it belongs!  I don't want your mess messing up my world!

But the sad truth is that living life by drawing clear lines in the sand separates us from others. It often keeps us from sharing what we have with others in life-giving ways. It denies our common humanity.  We can end up spending our whole lives like these two soldiers, walking back and forth beside the boundary between each other, guarding our side and never even acknowledging the other person meaningfully. Their only identity to us is "enemy."

Until one person finally gets the courage to change the "rules." The soldier stops his marching because he's thirsty. He starts drinking his Coke. And then he feels the gaze of the enemy on him, looks up, and notices the expression of extreme thirst and desire on his counterpart's face. So he takes courageous action by finding a way to share what he's enjoying with the Other. How? By drawing new lines that include rather than exclude.

I'm reminded of the powerful poem by Edwin Markham: "He drew a circle that shut me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout; But love and I had the wit to win; We drew a circle that took him in."

True spirituality is about drawing circles of inclusion rather than exclusion. That was Jesus' approach, wasn't it? He courageously chose to confront the religious and political systems of his day by speaking and practicing a radical mission of inclusion into the Kingdom of God. Those who had been deemed "outsiders" (unholy sinners not worthy of equal life within the religious community; the poor and disadvantaged left behind by an empire of power and riches) Jesus deliberately encircled and blessed as special to God. Jesus redrew the lines, broke the accepted rules, turned the pyramid of righteousness upside down, and gave drinks of the water of Life to all who were thirsty.

Paul, the author of many of the books in the Christian testament, codified this radical theology by writing, "Messiah has erased the line that was used to designate insiders and outsiders and made us all one. He tore down the wall we used to keep each other at a distance. He started over. Instead of continuing with two groups of people separated by centuries of animosity and suspicion, he created a new kind of human being, a fresh start for everybody." (Ephesians 2:14-15)

A new kind of humanity where we first and foremost embrace and acknowledge our common humanity with all others.  And then we use our differences to enhance our experience of each other rather than to separate and divide.

So what are the lines and boundaries you tend to use to separate people from your acceptance? What labels for people who are different from you do you use to keep them at a safe distance? Do you have the courage to draw circles instead of lines, circles of inclusion rather than lines of separation?

Sadly, the "Coca Cola Border" ad ends once the soldiers have enjoyed a short Coke reprieve together by the soldiers redrawing the original lines and going on with life as usual.  Jesus calls us to a higher standard of love than that.  After all, once you've had a Coke together, you can't go back to the way it's always been!  We must keep drawing the lines into bigger and bigger circles until everyone is included on the inside.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Spiritual Transformation: Liquify Or Petrify

[If you enjoy this blog, please SHARE it with your friends and others who might be interested.  You can click in the column to the right and choose how you want to share this.] As we talked about in last week's post, the butterfly's metamorphosis process is quite a profound metaphor for spiritual transformation and life development.  At the end of the post, I listed several lessons we can learn from those stages.  Let me comment on one of them that is particularly challenging for many of us.  I hear from people I work with all the time about this issue.  And having gone through a major transition in my own life, I can relate to this stage quite well.

One of the staggering things that takes place in stage three of the caterpillar's metamorphosis to becoming a butterfly is that once a caterpillar goes into its cocoon, it literally liquifies—completely changing itself all the way to the molecular level before it can recreate itself into a butterfly.  It basically loses everything, not just shedding its outer layer but a profound internal transformation - a complete disintegration of the old in order to take on the new original design for its ultimate purpose, a butterfly.

Dr. Martha Beck, a monthly columnist for O Magazine and the author of several international bestsellers, recently at a large women's conference, talked about this life transformation process and put it this way, "In a very real sense, when we begin a cycle of transformation, we have to experience the disintegration of our old self before real change can take place. The meltdown can take many forms, but often it has to be cataclysmic—break up of a marriage, loss of a job, or a deep physical crisis like a diagnosis of cancer or a very sick child. For many of us personal shock sends us into the cocoon."

We end up forming a cocoon in order to feel safe during these crisis or difficult times.  The cocoon experience often is like circling the wagons - trying to construct a safe place against the threatening forces around us and sometimes even in us.  We need to come to some clarity about what all this chaos means to our lives.  We need to figure out what our next steps are.

But there's a simultaneous danger from a huge temptation within.  Dr. Astrid Sheil, who blogged about Martha Beck's presentation at the women's conference, commented, “Here in square one, we have a tendency to want to become bigger caterpillars. In other words, we try to hold onto the status quo as  long as possible. Maybe if we just work 80 hours a week instead of 75, we won’t get fired. Maybe if we subsume our needs, we can keep a failing marriage from coming apart at the seams. But of course, we are just fooling ourselves. When it is time to begin the transformation process, there is no capitulation or compromise that can divert the process. However, transformation can be delayed if we are unwilling to accept ourselves the way we are. The key to beginning the process is to 'totally' accept ourselves and the reality of our situation. We must surrender to the truth—the old way doesn’t work anymore, we can’t go back, and the future is unclear and unknown."

I can relate to that temptation to simply want to become a bigger caterpillar.  The radical metamorphosis into the butterfly, which involves the complete disintegration of our selves, is too painful, too risky, to uncertain of the ultimate outcome.  Status quo is so much safer, or so we try to deceive ourselves into believing.  But the reality is, if the caterpillar remained inside the cocoon without its meltdown (its internal transformation), it would never end up fulfilling its ultimate destiny - flying and soaring as an adult butterfly.

My personal struggle of trying to figure out who I was as a professional outside the religious organization I had spent 25 years serving within was painful and challenging.  I  had dreams regularly of being back leading spiritual communities where I had been before.  I would wake up and be tempted to think, "That must be a message to me that I need to go back somehow.  I need to simply be a bigger caterpillar.  Stay inside the cocoon where I was so safe all my life."  I would wake up from those dreams with feelings of fear, forboding, insecurity, uncertainty, a sense of doom.  In that paradigm, growth and transformation were simply within the cocoon rather than from cocoon to the outside world.  The emerging was too scary a thought.  But ironically and counter-intuitively, that paradigm was not in harmony with my ultimate purpose.

Dr. Sheil described it this way:  "We have all experienced these dreaded feelings. Limbo is scary. Not knowing is exhausting. Loss of identity can lead to depression. Why would anyone choose to go through the process of transformation? According to Beck, we have no choice. This is a cyclical process and we all go through it at different times and for different reasons. But like the caterpillar, when we get through the four stages of (1) crash and burn, (2) expansive imagining, (3) this is harder than I thought, and (4) the promise land—we are forever changed and expanded."

On a spiritual note, I'm reminded of how Jesus referred to the radical nature of this transformation experience.  Talking to a religious leader who came in the darkness of night to interview him, Jesus said to this man who of all people would have been considered to be living the "butterfly" life (surely he had already "emerged" to occupy the top of the religious-social totem pole, the pinnacle of the significance pyramid):  "Unless you are born again, you cannot enter the kingdom of God."  (John 3:3)

Now that's a shocking message to a person who thought he'd already arrived.  But in essence, Jesus was informing him that he was simply still a caterpillar who was trying to be a bigger, more fancy caterpillar - he thought being a caterpillar was enough - and that of all the caterpillars, he certainly was the biggest and best.

But being a caterpillar isn't enough.  Because the caterpillar is suppose to become a butterfly.  But if it wants to become a butterfly, it has to allow itself a radical, complete transformation inside its cocoon.  It has to let go completely of itself, allow whatever needs to disintegrate to disintegrate, in order to finally re-form and emerge as the intended butterfly.

You must be reborn, Jesus said.  You have to allow yourself to let go and become a new person - be re-formed inside the spiritual womb in order to be reborn into the person you've been designed all along to become.  There's certainly nothing wrong with being a caterpillar.  After all, that's one of the important stages of the metamorphosis process.  But we can't stay caterpillars because it's not in alignment with our ultimate destiny.  And the caterpillar that stays inside the cocoon ultimately dies, turning into a shriveled up, petrified skeleton.

We have to allow ourselves to go through the painful ordeal and struggle of letting go of whatever it is that might keep us from transitioning adequately to the next stage.  Often times these are limiting beliefs that if held onto disempower us from forward movement.  Some times they are relationships that are dragging us down or disempowering us spiritually or personally or emotionally and unless those relationships themselves are transformed or ultimately let go of, they continue holding us like heavy weights from running the race.  Most of the time, they are self-identities that are false or limiting or not accurate - we have become accustomed to connecting our sense of self with our productivity, or our accomplishments, or our connection to an organization, or our reputation with others, or our status in society - so that when those external circumstances change, we lose our sense of self and get side-lined and side-tracked and disillusioned.

Jesus said to that religious leader, if you want to enjoy life in the kingdom of God, you have to go through a radical transformation process that involves developing a whole new identity - a rediscovery of your true identity as a child of God who has inherent value, not based on your associations or accomplishments or reputations, but based upon who you truly are as that divine child.  Only then will you emerge from the cocoon, not as a bigger caterpillar, but as a beautiful, unique butterfly ready to lift off and soar into the skies of your ultimate God-given, God-designed purpose and destiny.  So maybe one of the most significant steps of being a caterpillar inside the cocoon is to learn how to embrace ourselves with love and compassion and acceptance for who we really are!

Our choice in life is to liquify or petrify.  Pretty starkly stated.  But clear.  It's okay to feel lost in the cocoon stage, to feel disoriented, to lose a sense of direction and purpose, to feel afraid and uncertain.  I certainly have in my times of radical transition and change.  But the good news is, that's all in preparation for the next stage.  As long as we don't let ourselves stay in status quo inside the cocoon - as long as we end up using that time to rethink, replan, reassess, refocus, restore, and embrace ourselves in the process - we'll be ready to emerge, not as bigger or different caterpillars, but as magnificent flying butterflies.  I'm all for that!