Beyond Right and Wrong

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

and rightdoing there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

the world is too full to talk about. ~ Rumi

I have become convinced that one of the fundamental human distortions is binary thinking. We are always thinking that something must be one thing or the other. There is right and wrong, black and white, male and female, gay or straight, familiar and unfamiliar, good and evil....the varieties of binary thinking are endless. Most of us see the world always in binary terms, and along with that way of thinking comes judgment: if something must be one or the other, then one of those things is right/okay/acceptable, and the other is not.

Religious people often excel at binary thinking -- heaven or hell, anyone? -- and have a tendency to establish quite firm moral categories that are defined in a binary way.

There is a comfort in binary thinking, because it seems to provide clarity. If I can say clearly that something is right or wrong, if I can establish who is acceptable and who is not, then I seem to be standing on firm ground, and I can move forward with a moral compass that is absolutely clear. I can minimize, if not eliminate, ambiguity in my life.

Yet, in wrestling with so many of our human problems, we find if we are paying attention that the binary way of thinking often gets in our way. We run up against human messiness and complexity that cannot easily be dealt with in a binary way. We would like, for example, to look at a criminal and say, "That person is bad." Yet, if we were to get to know the criminal, we would discover that there is much more complexity to that person than meets the eye. We might learn his story, discover the things in his background or in his psyche that drove him to do whatever it is he did, and then it becomes less difficult to categorize him in a binary way.

Just as I have become convinced that binary thinking is a fundamental human distortion, so have I become convinced that the Christian tradition is seeking to move us beyond binary thinking, despite that fact that it has so often been coopted to reenforce binary thinking.

Take the Christian conception of God, for example. Christianity imagines God as Trinity -- three in one, one in three. While much ink has been spilled over the centuries attempting to understand this, it strikes me that the most obvious meaning of God as Trinity is to make clear that God transcends our binary ways. Our logic says that either something is three or it is one, but here is the idea of Trinity saying, "No, it's both -- and maybe neither." The Trinity is not so much a way of defining who God is as it is a way of securing the mystery of the divine from our human, binary logic.

Take the cross -- the very simple of the Christian tradition. Jesus is killed upon it, this form that has two axes that cross each other. Jesus is crucified upon a symbol of the binary -- binary thinking leads to the death of the Christ, because it prevents us from transcending the limitations of our human habits of thinking, judging, and acting.

Jesus himself is steadfast in his refusal to define people in binary ways. His teaching and his approach to people consistently show us that he understands the messy business of being human, that no one is hardly ever purely evil or purely good, that we all exist upon a spectrum in almost every way we can imagine. I would even go so far as to suggest that Jesus is seeking to move us beyond the idea of sin by nullifying it as a category into which a human being can fall. Jesus is always overturning the idea of sin, and its consequences, when he finds it. He is, as Rumi so beautifully put it in his poem, seeking to bring us out to a field of non-binary being, where we are all both sinners and saints simultaneously, all the time. He is calling us beyond condemnation and judgment into a field of knowing our own humanity, and the humanity of others, more intimately. It is perhaps part of loving ourselves and our neighbors -- to appreciate our own complexity and messiness and to realize that we are accepted and loved in all of it. It is, after all, only when we accept ourselves that anything about us can be transformed. Condemnation -- and its root, binary thinking -- ultimately closes us off to any kind of genuine transformation, because it locks us into fear and shame.

The coming out into the open these days of transgendered, non-binary people is really a huge gift for all of us, because -- difficult as it may be to understand for some -- it is pointing us toward a fuller appreciation of human complexity and being.

It was none other than St. Paul who pointed out that in Christ, binaries are dissolved: there is no more Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. And that is, indeed, part of what is at the heart of being in Christ or, put another way, of seeing with a divine perspective. Binary thinking dissolves, and we are left astounded, standing before the mystery of being. And once binary thinking is dissolved, we can let go of all the categorizing that separates us and move into really seeing ourselves and others, and get about the work of healing what needs to be healed.