OK, so here is my vent. I fully realize that it is in our human nature to label and define and fragment just about everything into tidy boxes so we can then pass judgment, create an “in” and an “out”, an us and them. But just because I get it does not mean I like it. In fact, I even hate it when I see it surfacing in me. The fruit of such efforts usually creates a polarizing and dis-unifying “we’re good, you’re evil” mentality and “false” reality. It allows us to sit smugly back in our thrones casting everyone else into the shadows of our light. It REALLY makes me sick—and when I see it in myself, I feel sicker.

As one who appreciates and participates in the emerging dialogue and friendship, I often get labeled and boxed into a certain corner based on the label given me. As an example, there are a couple diagrams created by Michael Patton, which represent his certain opinion, floating around and generating quite a bit of buzz. Michael also posted 20 signs (and I get his humor, but behind it is a stab of denouncement) that you are moving from emerging to Emergent:

Michael’s complete post

Top Twenty Signs you are moving from emerging to Emergent!

20. You only curse around fundamentalists.
19. You leave your church because the sermon was not obscure enough.
18. You refer to your local assembly as “church,” “synagogue,” or “mosque” depending on who you are talking to.
17. Your blog is a rant about how everyone else rants too much.
16. You brag that you have never been pinned down theologically on any issue.
15. The only thing you are sure of is that others cannot be sure of anything.
14. You bring your own wine to communion.
13. You are offended when someone says they are going to “Preach the Gospel” or “Teach the truth” believing they should just “Tell a story.”
12. Instead of a tract, you carry a can of Play-doh in you back pocket.
11. Your website links to Green Peace and the Democratic National Convention just because conservatives are against it.
10. You start a Christian blog, but leave it blank, fearing that you might offend someone.
9. You are not any good at art, yet you continue to present the Gospel by painting stick figures on recycled paper.
8. When you present the Gospel, Heaven is renamed The Matrix and you call Christ Neo.
7. Your church caters from Whole Foods.
6. Every sermon illustration begins with “The other night I was drinking a beer and . . .”
5. You have yet to read the book of Romans believing Paul was too modern in his thinking.
4. Your car has a bumper sticker that reads “I think my boss is a Jewish carpenter but I can’t know for certain.”
3. You don’t worship on Sundays because everyone else does.
2. You evaluate truth by asking how many people hold to it. If it is too popular, then it is wrong.
1. When someone calls out your name you get angry saying, “Don’t label me.”

I really do not see either the list or the diagrams as being helpful at all—quite the opposite. I have been reading through a book called Dialogue (by William Isaacs) and some of what he says really resonates with me about this whole inherent human need to label. What happens is we label something—give it a distinction, an image—and then we come to believe that these divisions are real, rather than simply our man-made boxings.

Isaacs notes that when a Syrian astronaut saw the earth from space the first time he said, ‘”From space I saw Earth—indescribably beautiful—with the scars of national boundaries gone.” The dividing lines disappear when you get enough perspective. The lines were made in the minds of human beings, in many cases drawn in the boardrooms of Europe and applied to places like Africa and South Asia. Yet now these lines have significant reality to them: Institutions have formed around them, identities are invested in them. The fragmentation on earth remains pervasive. [...] we make divisions like these all the time and then forget that WE have done so. [...] As a result, our social fabric is deeply fragmented. This fragmentation pervades the way human beings talk and think, in families, between friends, in business, in communities [politics, religion...]. It is a reflection of the divisive forces that we have inherited and usually take for granted [...] and so produces relationships based in the fiction of isolation. [...] Whatever image (or label) our minds make up is NOT the thing imagined. It is always both more and less.”

What Isaacs suggests next floored me with its complex-simplicity and possible beauty: That we might “practice the art of looking at something without needing to have a name in our heads for what we are looking at.” Imagine that? When we see something, or someone, or some movement, or—whatever—we resist the need to name it or label it. When we see a pregnant teenager with tatoos wearing all black we don’t label her, instead, we go deeper. We simply look at her and when a label comes to mind, we shuck it and keep looking until we see HER—as she really is—not a label. This enables us to view her and ourselves as participants of each other, instead of judges and labelers of each other. Empathy begins to surface. Then, perhaps, we might be at the place to begin a dialogue and friendship where we can really try to see them as God sees them, to love them as God loves them. We begin to see ourselves as participants with everything and everyone (with all of creation), acknowledging that we are really no different then the thing we are tempted to label.

So instead of asking and feeling the need to determine, “Where does this belong?” may we slow down and practice the art of looking at something without feeling the need to name it…whatever “it” is. Perhaps, like me, the labeling-alternative is making you sick. To that I suggest that perhaps from God’s perspective (which is more than enough) our labels and lines and fragmentations and names and boxes really don’t exist and they are simply images that we have created and worshiped…