By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez
The military repression of protests in support of immigrants in Los Angeles, the Israeli bombing of Gaza, and the murder of mothers and fathers searching for their families by criminal gangs in Mexico are lacerating wounds to the lost unity of humanity today.
While violence is as old as human memory, what has left us astonished in recent days is the rampant cynicism of the US government, which "justifies" police raids against undocumented migrants on the grounds of national security, when in reality it is a typical strategy of any dictatorship to control the population and militarize the country. The passivity of the masses subjected to the digital dictatorship of fake news disseminated by traditional media such as newspapers and television, which goes viral on social media in concentrated doses, strengthens the populist power that spreads across the world, crossing ideologies. From far-right fundamentalist groups in the United States, Israel, El Salvador, Argentina, and Italy promoting the "free world," to India, Russia, and Venezuela with identity-based nationalist ideologies, or even Brazil and Mexico with a supposedly leftist government that disregards indigenous peoples.
We are at the mercy of those media powers in the era of post-truth, which should better be called the age of unpunished liesWe are no longer surprised by the disqualification of victims by the powerful, nor by the abusive use of words to denigrate others that is spreading like a pandemic in public and private forums. Language has been perverted from its original purpose: instead of reflecting reality with creative imagination, it distorts, manipulates, and accommodates it to the petty interests of those who wield economic, social, or religious power.
Today, promoting the unity of humanity is irrelevant, as populist leaders emphasize the separation between "free citizens" and the surplus population, between "democratic" peoples and corrupt nations. This madness is now leading to the escalation of violence by Israel and its allies against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
It doesn't matter that modern science has confirmed the unity of the human race through DNA, providing genetic support for that intimate conviction of the unity of the human species that diverse cultures had expressed in the past through myths, stories, and powerful symbols to celebrate the beauty of the human condition in its ethnic and cultural diversity.
The search for the lost unit It has been the roadmap for humanity's wisdom and religious traditions. Through myths and rituals, these forms of knowledge have since ancient times explored the paths that guide peoples on their journey to build the communion that persists as a collective human desire. Sometimes we see this unity as a lost past, other times as a longed-for future that, in both cases, seems to slip through our fingers.
Religions were born to connect people with that source of unity The primordial faith that connects the human, the cosmic, and the divine. Faith in a single God was the challenge of monotheistic traditions to interpret the shared belonging of peoples and cultures to a transcendent source of life from which the unity of the cosmos and of humankind flows. More than a revelation from on high, this faith monotheistic expressed in its historical genesis a desire to recover lost unity.
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In this context of global mourning over the violence of the new empire of white supremacy and extractive capitalism, which is devastating everything in its path, it is worth reflecting on the unity of God, according to various religious grammars, for its impact on our way of recovering the longed-for lost unity.
Christian communities commemorate this weekend, the Sunday after Pentecost, the feast of the tri-unity of God. A belief that is a source of scandal for Hebrew and Islamic monotheisms, which confess the original unity of Yhwh or Allah as the sole merciful father of the universe. For two thousand years, the heart of the Christian faith has been confronted by these monotheistic traditions, considering it a heresy. It has also been a source of mutual interpellation among the three Abrahamic religions for failing to jointly bear witness to this unity of God, creation, and the human race. However, during brief periods of peaceful coexistence, such as during the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba in the 10th and 11th centuries of the Common Era, these differences were mediated by a mutual understanding of the root belief in a single living God and the diversity of interpretations of that divine unity as the source of the common union between the divine, human, and cosmic worlds.
Two thousand years later, Christianity continues to provocatively claim that God is both one and triune, triune Some theologians have said since Christian antiquity, highlighting the intimate communion of divine being. Communion in diversity is what theologies of today will say. queer/cuir to emphasize the communion of mutual hospitality in difference.
1700 years ago, in the year 325 of the common era, the first Council of Nicaea began to explore the mutuality of the loving being between Jesus of Nazareth and his Abba which opened up space for a third. Years later, the First Council of Constantinople in 381 included the Holy Spirit in this dynamic communion that is like a “divine circularity.” The famous perijoresis Trinitarian of the Cappadocian Fathers.
Following this legacy, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, as classics of ancient and medieval Christianity, sought to harmonize faith in one God with the Christian confession of the communion of divine persons. who share the same being in a loving relationshipWhat seemed in the letter a far-fetched theoretical debate, in reality put on the table the importance of considering divinity, not in an isolated celestial perfection, but in her intimate radical vulnerability which puts it in relation to itself as a mystery of communion and to the cosmos as a mystery of synergy.
Meister Eckhart, a Dominican of the Rhine in the 14th century, used to describe that divine circularity intimately affecting the human soul like a spiral of annihilation: “The Holy Spirit takes the soul and drags it to the purest and highest, to its origin which is the Son, and the Son continues dragging it to his origin, which is the Father, to the Depth, to the First, in which the Son has his being” “Adolescens, tibi dico: Surge”, Sermon 18, in Treatises and sermons, p. 236)
Recovering the lost unity of the human species in its communion with the cosmos and with God in times of rivalry and hatred is perhaps the best way to honor the ancient Trinitarian monotheism that Christianity offers as a glimmer of redemption to humanity, today fragmented by the violent spiral that repels all intimacy of life.
From the depths of Los Angeles raids, the ruins of Gaza, and the clandestine graves of Mexico—a cruel trinity of our times—emerges a cry for unity from today's victims and their survivors, calling us to delve into the bottomless depths of life that endures.
Perhaps there lies our compass to recover lost unity.
Mexico City and Johannesburg
June 14, 2025