I went to a Baptist church for a few weeks. They were nice people. They preach an ultimate reality who is alive with love for them. But they also teach a reality peopled with hateful and wicked neighbors.

If they are right, they are also not right enough. Their insufficiency is not in what they affirm, but in what they oppose: those who they are not. 

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When I was young I was a left-liberal who thought all conservatives were stupid and mean. Then I met some smart, nice conservatives who helped me see how liberals opposed themselves to only the stupidest and meanest conservatives, and how they did this to justify their own flavor of mean stupidity. Years later I found some even smarter, even nicer liberals, and saw how my conservative friends were ignoring the best liberals, in order to elevate themselves above liberalism in general. And then I looked up into heaven and imagined alternating layers of better and better conservatisms and liberalisms, each trying to be more right and less wrong, and maybe at some rarefied altitude starting to crave justice for who they are not.

*

Perhaps morality consists not in who we are, but rather in who we aren’t. 

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“And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.'”