And we find that this is true. Divisions of race are unclear, genetically. They are vague, they are messy. They show our history, our adjustments and adaptations to a particular time and place. But they are quick to fade, quick to change, and quick to be mixed and remixed into something new. They are like personalities, individuals formed from a particular confluence of birth, circumstances, physical and mental potential, innate human structures, innate variety. They vary just as individual people vary. But, like all individual people, they can come together to produce something new out of both. Like all people, we all come from one man and one woman. From one man and one one God created, nay, even today creates, all nations.

However you wish to interpret this idea: literally, symbolically, archetypally, psychologically, or as a generalization of biological and genetic concepts, it hold true, and it teaches us the same thing across all of them. Every individual, no matter how different they may be, is the product of one man and one woman. From one and one woman God made all people of all nations. That is a fundamental racial truth of humanity. We all come from the same origin. The same fundamental union. The same structure. The same unity of differences. And we can make new generations across any division of individual personality or cultural or historical or genetic personality. We can unite one man and one woman, and by it all nations become one. We are mixed one with another, we bring together our individual differences and histories, and we recreate, we share together.

Are differences of race real? Of course they are, as real as the differences between individuals. Differences of how you or I look, our family history, our personal history and experiences, our differences in how and where we grew up, our differences in ability and inclination, our temperament, our tastes, our language, our stories and concepts, even the different scars we carry. But we share our nature, our deep nature. We are all of the same stuff. We are all human, we are all made from one man and one woman, and so we also share that structure, and we all share that freedom. To choose to unite those differences within our kind and create anew.

Race isn’t unreal any more than individual persons are unreal. But just as individuals of many kinds are still united by a common nature and origin, just as they come together to create and birth the whole of the world’s people, just as my brother and sister and mother and father together make up my individual family, so too do the races make up the family of mankind. We are all cousins to one another. We all draw from the same wellspring, however different each of us may be. And we can all return to it. The differences are beautiful and exist at the most basic, most individual level, that of a single life. But the things that unite us exist across time and space between all of us, and we can always find room to reach out and find one another or bring another in. Both the differences and the unity are real, but in different ways. The differences are relative, individual, particular, in the material. The unity is transcendent, natural (in the nature), objective, in the plan and the meaning rather than the material, available to all and belonging to none.

Both are quite real in their own, different ways. And where we mistake is when we cannot keep them straight. Imagining differences of material to be absolute, imagining differences of the transcendent to be relative. We take the wrong lessons from each. We fail to learn the lessons of the other. We seek freedom where there should be unity and unity where there should be freedom. We try to reduce the world and ourselves down to a single category. We wish to be all individual or all species. We make the individual everything or we make it nothing. We make race everything or we make it nothing.

We must have an idea that unites of from our individuality through to our racial consciousness that spans across time and space. From one man and one woman (from differing, paired individuals) God (the ultimate, transcendent power of creation and organization) made all nations (the collective plethora of unique individuals and histories and societies, spread across all time, the many that is made of the ones that is itself one). We are the one race made of many nations, which are made of many individuals who come from one origin. We are the one who are many and the many who are one.

That is our heritage, our privilege. Our opportunity. We are all as flawed and gifted and unique in our races and nations as we are in ourselves. And we are all as unified and similar and have a shared value and power as we all posses as members of humanity. We are all equal in our essence, we are all diverse in our individuality. We are not diverse in our essence, nor equal in our individuality.

Our essence and our individuality and our power to combine them are implicit in the two becoming one. In the power of male and female to produce a new being. From one man and one woman all are made. That’s a universal truth about our species. Two, united in essence, different in individuality, are able to unite by means of both their shared essence and unique differences. And by the necessary and sufficient power of both, new creation is born and the story of our species goes on. Neither one it’s own is sufficient to produce life. We cannot be all alone, all unique and individual, an isolated island of reality, with no shared structure or essence. A being of no kind finds no mate with whom to continue their kind. Neither can we be a sea of kind alone, with no tokens. We cannot split ourselves like flatworms and so perpetuate our essence, with no need to confront the difference of another.

Both the uniqueness of male and female gametes are required, each split to be half of the story of our kind, half of the book that tells our individual and species-wide tale, united in their difference, to make a new and unique individual of our kind. The story of the life of every human tells the same tale in its DNA. Humanity. The shared genetic legacy of our species, the shared characteristics of our species. And within that vast, shared heritage, we see also the shape of two unique individuals, their lives, their essential and necesssey differences, that came together in halves to make this one. Both difference of individual and unity of essence are required.

And that is the heart of what I have arguing. It is not about unity vs diversity or individuality vs uniformity (or principle, or nature, or however you wish to label it). It is not relativity vs absolutes or objectivity vs perspective. We are not merely individuals, nor are we merely nations or races. We are not merely singular nor merely a web of connection. We inhabit all and are inhabited through all. We are unity and we are diversity. We are different and we are of a kind. We are I and we are us. We touch the universal and the particular.

And because we are both, we often confuse one for the other or expect them to be the same across all levels of reality. We try to either carve them up or smoosh them all together. We seek to find in one what can only be found in the other. We contradict and we complement, we unite and and we are often terrified. We fear to lose our freedom and we fear to lose our identity, we fear to become lost and alone, and we fear to become lost in the flood.

Where, then, does our identity rest secure? In our commonality or in our individuality? In our shared structure or our relative differences? And how do we tell which is which? Is it when we are rest, alone, or when we leap into the tide and race ahead together? In what curious, circular world can we lose our lives by finding them and by losing them, find them? What is this eternal realm where all things by becoming one with God become more themselves? Neither eradicated in unity nor isolated in individuality. Neither the end of ego in subsummation, nor its ultimate triumph in solipsism and subsuming all.

Jesus says that it is when we do it “for his sake” that the two stop working against one another and begin working together. It is when the unified and the divided both serve the incarnation of ultimate good, ultimate truth, and ultimate beauty, that all divisions unite and all unity divides. He is the firstborn because he is both incarnation, particularity, individuality, and eternity, purpose, unity, transcendence. He is a picture of the gap we seek to bridge. Whether you believe he bridged it is up to you to decide. But it is certain that he correctly identifies and confronts the crux of the problem that faces–and has always faced–all mankind, in their very persons. How can we be of both worlds? How do we bridge them, how do we resolve their struggle? How can I be I in this vast world of others? How can we be we in this disperate sea of individuals? How does eternity not eradicate the moment or the moment not disperse eternity? How do man and God meet?

This, then, makes some sense of why Christian theology and art places the cross at the heart of all human reality. It is a crux, a crossing, a coming together. Is it merely chance that it should be so symbolically apt? That warring concepts like sin and grace, duty and freedom, suffering and glory, pain and redemption, all come together in one moment, to war at last no more and be resolved? That contradiction finds at last on the cross the unity of division and creates resolution? Is it merely a coincidence that it presents such a perfect picture? The cross is a historical fact, not only an artifice or illustration. If it is coincidence, then it is a fortuitous one, that neatly captures the problems we all face and the idea of facing them and triumphing over them in surrender. In acknowledging all claims, surrendering to all, taking on the burdens of God and man, Jesus buys his death, and so purchases life for every woman and man.

Or so he claims. It is easier to offer such a gift than it is to accept it. One that has the power to give it by nature knows no limits. But our own limits to take hold of it are far greater. We have to surrender ourselves, like him, admit the claims, suffer our most terrifying loss and insecurity. And for many of us, what part of life we have is to precious to risk for the sake of obtaining more. And who knows if it truly awaits us? Surely my bit of individuality or my bit of the species is worth too much to risk losing either for some promised renewal I may never be able to live up to. What proof do I have that the door we all seek has been opened for any of us, or ever can be? Maybe it is only a picture of something we seek, and the picture hides the tragedy that only death and catastrophe await any who try to take it into the real world. Maybe it is just a dream of who we wish we could be but never can. Maybe chasing such a dream is more precious than whatever fractured reality we are acrsuooy consigned to. And how absurd is the world if that is so.