Ultimately, are we individuals or people in community?  The easy answer is of course both.  But it's complicated.  A recently published, highly moving memoir, There was and There was Not, by Meline Toumani, seeks to come to grips with just how complicated it is.  Toumani has lived her most of her life in the United States, where, as an Armenian, she grew up constantly hearing talk of the Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.  The Armenians call it genocide, the Turkish government, to this day, seems to deny it ever happened.  As Toumani explored how this issue played itself out in the lives of her people, she came to conclude that they would not really realize life's fullness until they moved past it.  Although she did not wish for anyone to forget about it, she also wanted for people to fit it into a larger historical and cultural context.
     In the course of writing her book, Toumani lived in Turkey as well as Armenia.  While living in the former, she learned to speak Turkish fluently, traveled around the country and talked with many people, Turks and those of other ethnic groups, and did what she could to understand various standpoints on the issue of the Armenian genocide.  She did the same when she lived in Armenia (she already knew how to speak Armenian).
     In the closing pages of the book, Toumani asks a few probing questions.  "What does it mean to be Armenian, or Turkish, or anything else?  What does it give you, and what does it keep you from getting?"  And, "If we [Armenians] move on from genocide recognition, with or without Turkey's olive branch, what holds us together?"
     Her answer is that, "If there is no better answer to this question, maybe the answer is simply, nothing.  Nothing holds us together; we are no longer together at all.  Now all possibilities are available to us, and that is terrifying.  We become individuals."
     She makes a very good point.  Although we have been created uniquely, every one of us different from the other, if all we are is uniquely individual, then, yes, she is correct: we've created the most disconnected planet we possibly can.  No one is anything, really, for we are all of us alone.
     Yet we are made to live in community.  We are made to live together and not apart.  We therefore individuate with joy but with caution as well.
     Many years ago, a friend of mine sent me a poem.  It read, "I am a self who lives in a world of selves who live as self."  Indeed:  even God is not alone.