Belonging

This picks up where yesterday left off, so if you didn't read yesterday, scroll down.
The thing that really scares most people off from really living the sort of life that is open and generous and full of love is fear of getting hurt.  There are two very strong instincts present in almost all self-aware animals: self-preservation and reproduction.  Human beings are odd ducks in the scheme of things, because we occupy a place in the natural order of things that puts us on a par with apex predators: lions, tigers, bears, oh my.  However, as you will notice, we are not naturally as well armed as our peers, nor are we as fast and twitchy as most prey animals.  What we have instead is an abnormally large brain and thumbs, there are days when I would gladly trade those things for some big old fangs and lion claws, but unless evolution starts going all X-men on us, it's probably not going to happen.  What did happen to allow our particular strain of (relatively) hairless primates to become the dominate species on the planet is quite simply our ability to communicate and cooperate.
Sure, wolves, lions and even certain sharks communicate and cooperate, but not anything like humans, and we're not even as good at those two things as we could be.
If we were able to exhibit the sort of communication and cooperation of say an ant colony or a beehive, we would probably be out among the stars destroying and polluting many solar systems. So our Creator, in her wisdom, has not seen fit to link us together in an almost telepathic hive mind, but rather forced us to use words, which are always open to interpretation, and has placed in us this pervasive sense of individualism that practically guarantees we will never fully trust one another. (See Genesis 11 for mythological proof of concept)
We have ten thousand years of anthropological evidence that proves to us that community is the way we are going to survive and flourish.  We have spiritual evidence that we are made for relationship.  Every religion that makes any sort of sense tells us that we are created to be with others, and often that we are created to be with an ultimate Other.
And yet...
Yet we still manage to make everything about us.  We still labor under the often destructive illusion that we can love without risking a broken heart.  The story of Scripture tells us that God is love, and that God repeatedly gets his heart broken.  The good news is that a broken heart does not stop God from loving, never, ever, no matter how bad you break it, even if you crucify his greatest gift, you aren't going to stop the love.
I think the reason we find Jesus so easy to admire (maybe even love) and so hard to follow is that we recognize what love God has for us, but we're just not quite ready to give it back.  In the sin of our individual pride, we see people who love unconditionally as weak and pathetic, the boy who carries a torch for the girl who rejected him, the wife who bears with an emotionally distant (possibly even abusive) husband, swearing to all her friends that "he's really sweet underneath it all."  We can give people like this sympathy, but not empathy, unless we have suffered what they have suffered.
Why would God suffer a broken heart?
Is it because he wants to understand us?
Or is it because we are made in God's image, and because God's heart can be broken, therefore so can ours.  Is it God's way of showing us that it's worth the pain?
Incarnational theology tells us that, somehow, someway, God is in this with us. It necessitates togetherness, because if God is in this with us, God is in it with all of us, and we are all in it together, and as long as we deny or violate that togetherness, we're just never going to get anywhere, except maybe the Hell that we make for ourselves and others.