The Forces That Move Us

A woman in Baghdad just can’t leave home. Abstinence-only programs are failing. People still worship, centuries after the Age of Reason.

What’s happening here?

A story in Tuesday’s newspapers recounts the life—and ultimately, the flight—of an Iraqi journalist. She tells of getting married a year ago, having a daughter, decorating a home of her own on a suburban Baghdad street. Slowly but surely, Iraq’s pervasive violence crept closer to her neighborhood. She and her husband moved temporarily to her in-laws’ home for safety reasons. And then,

Two days later, a car bomb exploded on our street. It blew out every window in our home. A chunk of the bomber’s car landed in our garage. And still we returned to our home.

And still we returned to our home.

South Africa, according to a monk at Mariya uMama weThemba, is deeply ambivalent about the issue of sex. On the one hand, the country’s AIDS rate is the highest in the world. On the other, pregnancy for young women is often celebrated as a sign of fertility—a trait our forebears have honored for millennia.

Home. Sex. Child bearing. In our highly mobile, “reasonable” Western world, I think we underestimate just how overwhelming—how tidal—these drives are. We also forget that they’re essentially good. The pull toward home perpetuates community. The hunger for sex binds us together while keeping the species alive. Child bearing (and rearing) preserves our sense of family.

The other side of being human, of course, is that we don’t always follow those drives indiscriminately. Ideally, we channel them toward the greater good. But their sheer force means that those who try to thwart them simplistically—think abstinence-only policies—may well doom their efforts to failure.

Then there’s the hunger for God. Two centuries after the Enlightenment, you might think reason would have driven religion to extinction. And yet billions of us will not, cannot, endure life without worship.

As you may have noticed, all the aforementioned drives hover around one even more fundamental imperative: connection—to home, family, neighbor. It is the connection at the very heart of God: the whole idea of the Trinity (and, perhaps, its complement in Hinduism) speaks directly to connection, to community. And as it does, it reflects the connection that, from Genesis to Revelation to 2006, God so ardently desires with all of us.