And Now for Something Less Depressing: Sadness

Looking back over my blog posts, I realize I have fallen into a sort of serious rut, or a rut of seriousness, so I'm going to talk about a kid's movie: Inside Out.  I should begin by saying that when you combine this with Up, you have two of the most serious tear jerkers that I can think of short of Old Yeller, and Where the Red Fern Grows (movies where bad stuff happens to dogs are usually prime make a grown man cry territory).  This is especially interesting in the case of Inside Out because it is absolutely hilarious and emotionally poignant at the same time.  Up hit you with the montage about the little old man and his wife, and then it was all about the talking dogs.  Inside Out sort of tickles your emotions for a while with sweet little memories of how great life used to be contrasted with how it has really changed for the worse in the life of Riley the character in whose head most of the movie takes place.
Riley is an eleven year old girl, which was particularly important to me, as I currently attempt parenthood of an eleven year old male creature and will soon have an eleven year old female creature living in my house.  The female creature, now nine, has already demonstrated that no one, including her is the master of her emotions.  Riley has four different characters living in her brain: Joy (who was first), Sadness (second), Anger (third, voiced by Lewis Black and worth the price of admission), Fear and Disgust, who sort of work together to keep her safe.
You may have heard of the "Wheel of Feelings," which I like in a sort of tongue in cheek sort of way, but it is actually useful in deciphering the source of some complex feelings. So here it is again:

For the sake of the movie: Fear is purple, Sadness is blue and Anger is Red, Disgust is green and joy is golden (couldn't find a wheel with completely corresponding colors.  Each emotion colors certain memories, and for the most part, while Riley is little, Joy gives her memories a bias towards the golden and happy.  When the family moves from their comfortable home in Minnesota to San Francisco and stuff starts to get stressful, the other emotions start to over-rule Joy.  Sadness especially, an emotion that is sort of dumpy and depressed, who mostly just tries to stay out of the way of an irrepressible and overbearing Joy.  There are several scenes where sadness touches otherwise happy memories and they start to turn blue.

This is absolutely anathema to Joy and she becomes more and more oppressive to Sadness, at one point drawing a circle and telling her to stay in the "circle of sadness."  This leads to chaos, as one might imagine (though apparently not all actual adults realize this danger).  Joy and Sadness get thrown out of headquarters along with crucial core memories that make Riley who she is and help her cope with the world.  The longer Joy, Sadness and the core memories are lost, the worse Riley's ability to cope with life becomes.  The theme of the movie is that Joy needs to learn to let go and value the other emotions and their roles, especially the role of Sadness.

There is so much psychology sort of wedged into the movie that it kept me really paying attention and occasionally chuckling out loud, like the scene about the phases of abstract thought.  But what I was particularly interested in were a couple, possibly minor details.

First of all, there is the fact that most of the other characters in the movie have single gender emotions, while Riley has both male and female (Anger and Fear are male).  Her mother has all female emotions and her father has all male emotions.  Also, while Joy is the dominant emotion in Riley, her mother's dominant emotion is Sadness and Her father's is Anger.

I'm pretty sure these things were not an accident, and they kind of add an even greater amount of depth to a movie that's already pretty deep for a cartoon.

The Thing About Flags

Okay, so here is the disclaimer: I'm not against flags.  I will stand and say the pledge of allegiance, including the "under God" part.  I would never burn a flag. I even get a little choked up at funerals when the VFW guys do the folding and presentation of the flag to the family of the deceased veteran.  I understand that humans are wired for symbolism at a very deep level, and quite frankly it is because of the power of symbols that I feel like we need to have a talk about flags.
Let's start with the flag du jour, the "stars and bars," the battle flag of the Confederacy, the "Rebel" flag, which is still flown, worn and otherwise honored in much of the South, and on top of orange Dodge Challengers.  Some would tell you it's about being proud of where you come from, that it's about heritage and about holding on to home and family values and church and God, biscuits and sweet tea and fried chicken, and all the good things that make the South the South.  But others would tell you that it's a sign of a people who have never really given up an old grudge.  Maybe they're both right.

At this point in history though the Confederate flag means one thing that is absolutely and positively unavoidable: racism.  I know that the American Civil war was about a lot more than slavery, I have learned at least that much about history.  I know that the form of slavery that existed in the Antebellum era was going to die eventually and that the war was more about state's rights and taxation. I know that the Union was more or less telling the Confederacy that they just needed to pay their taxes and shut up. However, in the annals of history and perhaps more importantly, in the collective consciousness of our nation, the war was about ending the state sanctioned practice of slavery and making sure that we lived up to our creed of "all men" being created equal. That phrase continued to mean land owning white males long after the war was over, and to some extent is still true, but at least in theory we mean "all humans."

The Confederate Flag symbolizes a sort of uber-conservative mindset: leave us alone and let us do things our way, don't change because we like the way things are working out... at least for us and ours.  And so you still find it flying in many places, including South Carolina.

Don't you dare tell me that it's "just" a symbol, people kill and die for symbols all the time.  Symbols infect us in a way that we don't always fully understand.  Poor white people everywhere have been saturated with the notion that things have changed for the worse and those changes account for how crappy the world is for them.  They have been told that, once upon a time, the world was different for the likes of them, back in the good old days, when black folk knew their place and the benevolent white landowners made sure that things didn't fall apart.  Never mind that many of their ancestors were virtual slaves called sharecroppers, who were so poor and hungry that former slaves ended up regretting the emancipation proclamation when they found out how hard it was to feed your family the way the poor whites did.

The Confederacy was an idea that was conceived by and primarily benefited the wealthy landowning class.  They did everything within their power to convince the poor white folk they should buy in, and boy did they ever, and boy will they still buy in today.  They buy in to such an extent that it sort of confounds me on a nearly daily basis.  The Confederate mindset is alive and well in America today, and it has spread out of the South, and it has it's own TV shows and is all over talk radio.

Most white folks will whistle Dixie and view the idea as a sort of charming little cultural wrinkle.  Up until last week, I almost never heard anyone make a fuss about the Confederate flag flying in state capitols or being displayed in thousands of other public spaces.  Until we ask ourselves what it means, what is that symbol about?

Way back in the Hebrew Scriptures, God was always getting super cheesed off about idols.  "Have no other gods before me," it says in the Law of Moses, in fact, "don't even make pictures of other gods, or even of me, or angels or anything," because as soon as you do that you're tiptoeing towards idolatry.  Idols are tricky little blighters to say the least, they sort of sneak up on you.  Sure none of us have probably gone out to altar to Baal or Moloch recently, but I guarantee you we are not innocent of the idolatry thing.  It's because of our innate awareness and use of symbols, we give them power the very moment they start to mean something to us.

As you might imagine, this applies to any symbol, a flag, a swastika, a star of David, a picture of a dead president (money), or even a cross.  And so it behooves us to always consider the meaning of our symbols.  Where do they come from? What do they mean now?  Are our attitudes and allegiances to them consistently subordinate to our devotion to God?  In other words, what is more important: that we display a cross around our neck or in our home, or that we actually do what Jesus told us to do?  Is it more important that we pledge allegiance to the flag or that we truly seek to be a good and righteous nation "under God?"

Are we letting our idols get the better of us?

I'm not suggesting we stop being symbol using creatures, however, I am suggesting that we stop letting our symbols use us.

We Need to Have a Talk

Yesterday all I could come up with were words and phrases (sort of) strung together.  Today, well I think I'm losing it.  The tragedy at Emmanuel AME church in Charleston remains just that, a tragedy, an all too common sort of tragedy that's starting to become as predictable as your favorite character on Game of Thrones meeting with a sudden and brutal end.  This tragedy is rooted in three of the greatest flaws (one might say sins) of our national character.
First, this was undoubtedly about race.  The young man had been drinking a venomous cocktail of fear and propaganda.  He was drowning in it, and while a 21 year old is certainly a responsible adult, the pictures of the perpetrator don't show me a monster they show me a skinny, pale, unbalanced kid, who had come to believe that black people were his enemy, even the very people who welcomed him as a stranger into their prayer meeting, and I'm guessing were just super nice to him before he started murdering them.  I trust that, I trust that those people were busy being the church to this unstable and hate riddled young man, because I know church people, black, white or otherwise (that's important, but I'll come back to that).  This man was so filled with hate that love couldn't touch him, he was in hell, and like it or not we all helped put him there.
Because the second thing about our national character at the moment is that we allow hate and fear to run us.  I'm not going to pick on any particular group, because we are all guilty.  We have created a culture where being different is a sin and we cannot even talk about our differences without sinking into a morass of shame and enemy-making.  Fox News and MSNBC thrive on it, it seeps into all of our most important discussions, everyone's a victim, even the most privileged among us.  The government is out to get us (to be fair they give us some reason to actually believe that), the (insert name of feared group here) are leading to the downfall of our society, the media is biased and/or incompetent (again paranoia is often founded in some level of truth).  Any discussion, even about something silly like a man becoming a woman or a white woman pretending to be black and actually running a chapter of the NAACP, get so bogged down with discussions of who is even qualified to comment and how they/we/everyone-but-one-enlightened-commentator are missing the point that none of us can say anything.  When we do say something vaguely truthful, we're probably going to be trolled on some nuance that we probably didn't even think of, welcome to the blogosphere people, it's all opinions, all the time.
It's to the point where I almost prefer blatant ignorance and blind categorical statements, because at least then I know where we are.  When someone says something like, "Obama wants to take our guns," I know exactly where they are coming from, and I sort of appreciate that.  But let me say that the gun stuff is really rubbing me raw these days, not because I'm against guns, actually I kind of like them, but because of the way we approach them.  We think they're like magic.  We attach them to feelings of security when they're making our world much less safe.  We call them a right, when they should be considered a privilege, one that you should have to earn with more than just $200 and a quick background check.  A few months ago we hosted a guest from Italy, a pastor type, who was fascinated with the American attitude towards firearms.  In Italy, you are only allowed to own guns if you had or were serving in the military, or could demonstrate some actual need to have them (and yes hunting and personal security were on the list of actual needs).  Actually carrying a gun in public is almost unheard of unless you are a law enforcement type, and I think it probably goes without saying, stuff like Charleston doesn't happen that much in Italy.
Which, finally, brings me to the third thing: we're saturated in the idea that violence is the way to security.  I realized at some point that, sort of like in Die Hard, a lot of Europeans think Americans see themselves as cowboys walking around with six guns ready to blaze away at the bad guys.  Yes, that's a stereotype, but again, it has its foundation in truth.  Which leads me to the thing that has absolutely set my britches on fire with holy anger over the past 24 hours: on at least three different occasions (two of which were Fox News and the NRA, so I was at least not surprised) I have heard people suggest that church people ought to arm themselves, including the pastors of churches (ostensibly to protect their flock like a shepherd is supposed to, to which I say, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want").
At this point, I am moved to speak in a profane manner, but I will restrain myself.  I will, however, say that this line of thinking is absolutely the most non-christian, violence-loving, abhorrently evil thought mess that I have run across in quite some time.  I understand if some of my African American colleagues disagree, because their churches suffer violence a lot more often.  I cannot claim to understand fully the experience of being a truly persecuted minority.  I can only speak on being a follower of Jesus and a part of the Body of Christ, but here's what I think: I would rather be shot than climb into a pulpit to proclaim Christ crucified while carrying a gun.
The Apostle Paul says, "We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body." 2 Corinthians 4:10  And that is not an isolated proof text, he repeats a similar sentiment many times in various letters.  And it was a real possibility for Christians in that day to actually be martyred, and yet they kept on being the church, just like the Emmanuel AME church in Charleston.  Do not let fear get the best of you church, continue to set your eyes on Jesus and do what he did.  If we meet our end while being the church so be it, but do not let fear pull you away to an idol with Smith and Wesson inscribed on the barrel.
Look, I don't ever want to see someone come charging into my church with a gun, but I think a better way to prevent that is to speak kindness, love and mercy into a world that is filled with hate and fear.  I do understand that this idea puts me at odds with the principalities and powers, and that it may be dangerous, it certainly was for Jesus, but I'm pretty sure I want to be in the same boat as him (spoilers).

How Long?

Racism.
Guns.
Hate.
Fear.
No matter how you add it up, it amounts to the same thing.
People are dying.
How bad does it have to get before we admit we have a problem?
What is going to be our rock bottom?
A bunch of church people at a bible study.
A young man with a twisted heart.
And a dangerous weapon.
Exercising his "right" to bear arms.
He would have been dangerous enough without the gun.
We have built too much on a terrible foundation:
Racism, guns, hate, fear.
Why are we so angry?
What do we have to fear from a bunch of folks at a bible study?
They die, and their God does not protect them.
They are broken on the altar that we have built to violence and hatred.
They are given the gift that no one really wants:
A death like Jesus' death.
But I don't weep for them,
Because they believed,
As I do,
That they will have a life like his.
I weep for the broken world.
Where this sort of thing keeps happening
And we act like we have no idea what caused it.
But we know.
We know.
And we just aren't willing to do much about it.
Until that angry man walks into our church.
I've got news for you America, he just did.
Actually he's been here for a while,
Maybe as long as we have.
But we don't stop him.
Because he has rights,
And who are we to judge.
We're not racist.
We're just observers,
And realists,
and we know the problem is surely not with us,
Surely not us, O Lord.
Let's hold on to our hate and our fear,
Someday maybe they'll stop eating us alive.
Maybe,
Someday,
How long to sing this song?

The Agony of Defeat

The Golden State Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in six games to take the 2015 NBA championship home to Oakland.  Cleveland must endure yet another defeat despite having native son and best player on the planet Lebron James back home.  There is an awful lot of Lebron hating to go around, but after "taking his talents to South Beach," and winning a couple of titles, a boy became a man and came home.  He joins now the ranks of Elgin Baylor, Jerry West and Allen Iverson as players who were transcendent in terms of talent, but simply didn't have the team to win it all.
I remember Iverson, the 6 foot nothing, 175 pound ball of tattooed lightning.
Philadelphia loved Allen Iverson, they identified with his scrappy, shoot-em-up, style and his gruff, cranky personality.  Most of all though, they identified with the fact that he just never seemed to catch a break.  He was spectacular, but he was never surrounded by enough talent to win it all.  He dragged a sub-par team into the finals and ran into the Shaq and Kobe show.  I can't help but think about the way that felt, to get so close and then run into a brick wall.  There was no defeat in that though, it was just a simple case of being over-matched.  The Lakers were able to hinder Iverson just enough, with a second tier player named Tyron Lue, leaving Kobe and Shaq free to do their thing.  The Sixers had no other real bullets in their gun.  Iverson scored over 35 points a night and at one point was actually a leading rebounder (at 6'0"), and "he" still lost.  Because it really was him against a whole team.
Just like it was Lebron against the Golden State Warriors.
Lebron is by no means the underdog that Iverson was, he's 6'8" and usually the strongest, fastest and most talented guy on the floor (Iverson was just the fastest).  Lebron is his team's best scorer and best defender, he makes triple doubles look easy (they're not), but he can't win on his own.
I like Golden State, I  think Steph Curry is a really likable player, I like their approach and I think they truly are the best team, but the Philadelphia fan in me aches for Cleveland, because I wonder if, like it was with Iverson's Sixers, having the best player on the planet is not going to be enough.  Cleveland and Philly share a penchant for institutional stupidity, they can waste Jim Brown and Allen Iverson, and Donovan McNabb and maybe Lebron James, and never win it all.
But maybe in some cases you can't win.
Maybe in some cases you don't need to win.
Maybe trying your best really is enough and you should hold your head up.
Sometimes you're fighting something that's just too much.
Like Jesus (you knew I was going there at some point, and no, I'm not saying that basketball players are messianic figures).
In Jesus' confrontation of the powers and principalities of his age he was alone and confronting something that could not be beaten alone.  His disciples were not quite up to the challenge, but they could learn from his sacrifice, they could see a new way of being, a way that went through defeat but was not beaten.
I saw it in Iverson and I saw it in Lebron: they lost, but they were not beaten.  I see it in Philly and Cleveland every year: hope, irrational hope, but hope all the same.
I don't think I'm overstating things when I say that sports have taken over a lot of the territory that used to be covered by religion.  Religion struggles for a foothold, but football or futbol can weather scandals and kerfuffles galore.  FIFA has just been unmasked as corrupt to the highest levels and yet no fans will stop watching the games.  Baseball has been proven to be riddled with illegal performance enhancing drugs and yet parks still fill up and the coffers remain full.  American football players are videotaped in the act of domestic violence, charged with assault and even murder, ex players commit suicide because of damage done to their brains due to head trauma during games, and yet there is no hue and cry for and end to it all, just the need to clean things up.
It seems to me that the church has lost the benefit of the doubt and the second chances that are given to athletes and sports.  Now people just want to see us lose.
And we are.
We're not dying, which would be far less troubling for a people who are essentially about resurrection, rather we are becoming irrelevant and unimportant.  We are like Allen Iverson at the very end, he was no longer the fastest and now he was just a pitiable figure that nobody wanted anymore, riddled with his own demons and suffering for the sins of his past.  But we are still stumbling around trying to play for sympathy and pity.
Meanwhile sports provide people with the inspiration and the hope (not to mention entertainment) that they used to find in God.
So what do we do?
Well, I don't know exactly, but I do know it's not going to be a solo effort, one superstar is not going to win this series, and we have, I think been relying too much on our pastors, leaders and public faces to be too much and to do too much, and then jumping on the bandwagon of critics when they fail.
Our superstars play into to it sometimes, like Lebron referring to himself as the best player on the planet, everyone from Rob Bell, to Billy Graham, to Pope Francis, and even my beloved Richard Rohr are capable being named our great heroes.
They don't seize the crown, they may even protest a bit when it's placed on their head, but in the end, they'll take the adoration and admiration of the masses, "for the sake of the Gospel," or something like that.
It's really not their fault.  From the time of Moses the rather remarkable ability of humans to lapse into idolatry has been a bugaboo of the faith.  One of our real challenges in "competing" with sports for the souls of humanity is that sports doesn't have to apologize for idolatry, we can openly call Lebron, Messi, Manning and Ronaldo our sports idols and icons, we can go to vast assemblies of enthusiastic fans (derived from fanatics), and we can pour our time talent and treasure into the worship of those idols and they will never make us feel guilty, the worst they will do is lose, but there's always next year (right Cubs fans?)
But we can't compete with the idols, because our God seems absolutely okay with losing, getting crucified, and being among the least, and the outcast and the leftovers.  He always seems to have a team full of role players and no real superstars.
So what then?  What do we do?
I just don't know.
Only about three months until Football!

Clarity of Purpose

There were days, somewhere in the bulging middle of the Camino, where I was just at peace with - well - everything: up hill, down hill, wind, rain, sun, bad beds, pilgrim food, sore feet, tired legs.  It was an interesting, and all too fleeting time.  At the beginning it was all too new, at the end I just wanted to be done, but for a while, it just was what I was doing and I was able to just sort of rest in a very zen like sort of detachment as I walked.  I kept my own pace, and I was alone a lot of the time.  I would mostly keep Dad in sight, and periodically we would stop for a rest and a snack, but when we walked he preferred to move just a little faster, so we were usually about 50 meters apart.
But pace was important, when I tried to go faster than my pace, my feet started to ache more and there was this feeling that I was going to turn an ankle or pull a muscle, so I settled in, I thought about intentionally taking long strides and keeping my knees bent, especially on the descents.  I was slow on the uphills because, well they went up hill and I was slow on the downs because I was cautious and really didn't feel like tasting those rocky slopes with my face.  At some point I came to grips with the fact that I was the tortoise not the hare, and I think that fact kept me safe and healthy on the whole adventure: no blisters, no sprains, no injuries to speak of, slow and steady, one foot in front of the other.
All I had to do was walk.  And we did, day in and day out, without really taking a day off.  Maybe we should have taken a day here or there, but it felt too much like we would lose momentum.  As long as we had that clear purpose almost anything seemed bearable: get up, pack, walk, shower, rest, eat, sleep, repeat.  On such an amazing adventure, routine was still absolutely necessary.  There was a lot about the Camino that required flexibility and spontaneity and would push us out of the comfort zone, and in order to deal with those there needs to be a framework.
It doesn't have to be a rigid framework, but it does need to give you a general outline for what you do.  It occurred to me during this time that this was perhaps the real wisdom of the system of sabbath keeping that was so crucial to the identity of Israel.  If  you know that the seventh day is a day of rest, just as we knew the late afternoons were going to be on the Camino, you can deal with just about anything.  My nugget of wisdom from the Dutch Hospitalero in Villamayor: "Sooner or later, it will be evening."
Disciplines should give you that sense of boundary and framing.  The Camino does it daily, I think the biblical plan of sabbath (and the extended practice of jubilee) stretch that frame out a little.  If you know there's a limit to things, you deal better with what is.  This is counter-cultural in an age of rapid change and deeply camouflaged principalities and powers.  Often we don't even know what we're resting from, what cycle we're breaking or what boundary we are setting.
Sometimes the reflex is to neglect boundaries altogether.  Dad asked me towards the end if maybe we would have been better served to take days off.  We had built some sabbath time into the schedule and really the only thing we accomplished by pushing on was more downtime in Madrid before our flight home, so maybe we should have.  I'm still not really sure about the idea though, because I felt like every day was so finely balanced between work and rest, between routine and creative and intuitive problem solving, that I'm not sure we really needed to just sit still.  I understand though that this type of thinking would be dangerous in a longer term, but on the Camino any time I really considered sitting still for a day, it seemed like I would be falling into the opposite pit: creating false boundaries.
This is the hallmark of extreme conservatism, fundamentalism and reactive thinking: let's fight the barbarians at the gate, let's throw up our defenses with all sorts of rules and regulations, let's define the framework in the strongest possible terms.  Jesus' repeated conflicts with the Pharisees over sabbath keeping demonstrate how this works.  Their rules for keeping sabbath had become rigid to the point of being absurd.  Jesus never denigrates the idea of sabbath or says it's a bad idea, he basically just says, "be sensible about it people, it's there for your own good after all."
I think in the end, the pilgrimage as a whole was such a sabbath experience, away from everything that normally occupies my life, that it seemed silly to take a sabbath from a sabbath.  The experience of sitting still at the end of everything was nice for about a day or so, but then it started to become the norm again.
We met a fair number of people who were sort of fundamentalist about the Camino "rules," who looked down on private rooms or hotels as a betrayal, who sort of scoffed at people who used the baggage service or buses (I may have fallen into that pit a time or two).  There were people who felt that they had to make a certain number of kilometers per day, or had to get here or there by a certain time (also guilty of that occasionally).  At least for me though, this was self correcting on the Camino, it would humble you.  I wonder if life doesn't do that as well.
Maybe sometimes you don't really know the true importance of something until you walk away from it.

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.