Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.9

All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy. And there is hardly anything unconnected with any other thing. For things have been coordinated, and they combine to form the same Universe.

For there is one Universe made up of all things, and one God who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one common reason in all intelligent animals, and one truth.

 So indeed there is also one perfection for all animals that are of the same stock and participate in the same reason.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7 (tr Long)

Everything is made to work together, within a whole and for a whole. It can feel maddening and saddening, therefore, when people embrace conflict and opposition. I must remember, however, that both the use and abuse of free will, itself a function of our rational nature, exist within the order of Providence. When we choose to get something wrong, proceeding from our ignorance, it is not grounds for despair. It is a challenge to learn to make it right. It is a call to freely and knowingly participate in unity.

We see the struggle in the big picture, when men wage wars for greed, when they engage in crooked politics for power, when they prey on the weak for profit, or when they pose and strut about for their vanity. We also see the struggle in the smaller picture, when we insult one another, gossip, deceive, or ignore our neighbors.

An example I notice quite often, from the youngest of children to the most important of adults, is what I simply call “the snub”. A colleague once refused to speak to me for months because I told him I didn’t prefer the use of PowerPoint in teaching. For no reason we could ever fathom, my whole family found themselves socially cast out at the school my children attended. The person I once considered as my best friend later moved in just down the street from my old family home, and will now look right past me whenever I’m back in the neighborhood.

I suspect this all stems from the mistaken assumption that we only become fully ourselves when we have enemies. Yet we are, of course, doing quite the opposite. When we separate and divide ourselves from others, and when we we deal in contempt and dismissal, we are diminishing both others and ourselves.

All of us live in the same world, are created for same end, and are made to work with one another. Some people find it hopelessly naïve and sentimental, but I will still insist that we are all made to love one another. In a certain sense, I will often say, love does indeed make the world go round, because the shared desire for the good, conscious or unconscious, is what moves all things.

People will insist that those in certain other groups, or creeds, or classes are surely evil, and that they must be cast out or destroyed. Yet dwelling upon particular differences ignores what is universally common, the essence of all of human nature within the harmony of all of Nature.

When someone tells me that my right and his right are at odds, or that my God and his God are not on speaking terms, or that my humanity and his humanity can never see eye to eye, he has only separated us by closing his eyes to what we share.

Someone once told me that we couldn’t be friends anymore, because we disagreed. All I could suggest was that true friends could always work at learning to agree on what mattered more, and were also quite willing to disagree on what mattered less. I often think of the old saying:

In essentials unity. In non-essentials liberty. In all things charity.

Written in 9/2007