Confessions of a Bully

She never saw it coming, and then there was peanut butter everywhere. Her new khaki pants were ruined, the whole classroom burst out laughing, and she didn’t come back to school for the rest of the day. She was my best friend, we were 13, and it was all my fault.

Earlier that day I decided it would be funny to smear the tan paste all over the seat of her wooden desk chair. The mess was hidden so well that I barely held back giggles as I tiptoed away from her chair and waited from across the room. The moment she sat down I felt a twinge of regret, but the cheers from my classmates almost immediately filled my ears. I had managed to make everyone laugh and only one person cry.

None of us is our finest self at 13, but that particular memory is not one of which I am very fond. Much worse, the peanut butter incident is not the only instance of its kind. My junior high years saw other practical jokes and public humiliations, which unfortunately won me a sort of feared popularity. I eventually snapped out of it (probably around the time puberty concluded), but even at 25 I still find myself holding sadness around what I did at 13. At least for a time in my life, I was a bully.

Though I did not bully on the explicit basis of sexual orientation, race, religious affiliation, or gender, my bullying did stem from a similar place: a need to distance myself from the other. I recognized that if I could find a way to draw public attention to the ways in which a classmate was different from me, I could confirm my own normalcy and acceptability. By humiliating the other, I tried to find affirmation in community. What I actually found was disunity, brokenness, and ultimate self-rejection.

On some level we all know that bullying is wrong. We don’t need the Golden Rule or complex systematic theological arguments to convince us of this fact, but we do need them to help us hold each other accountable. That, I believe, is the wonderful task of a good theologian: to remind us of that which we already know, give us the courage to pursue the higher path, and encourage us to ask for forgiveness when we are not our finest selves.

One of my favorite theologians on the subject of otherness is Eastern Orthodox metropolitan John Zizioulas. In his book Communion and Otherness, Zizioulas argues that while it is in our nature to define ourselves against the other (or in my case, to seek affirmation by humiliating difference), the nature of the triune God calls us into a different model of self-understanding. As God exists and finds unity within a mutual acceptance of three distinct persons, so are we to find unity among one another. In other words, the Trinity models for us what we are to strive for in our communities: true and free love that comes only from allowing otherness.

What might this mean in a little less abstract terms? Zizioulas in a way affirms my own experience at 13: community, love, and true acceptance never comes from suppressing or bullying difference. Though I was popular for a time, the social cohesion brought on by bullying was an illusion loosely knit together by fear, anxiety, and misery.

Furthermore, I had not only rejected my friend as other, but I had also rejected the otherness in myself. In bullying my friend I presented to the class a version of myself that I thought was acceptable – a version of self that denied whole parts of me. While looking for group acceptance, I found self-rejection. In sum, bullying sucks.

If suppression of difference does not build community or foster unity, what does? How can we work to love and accept otherness? Zizioulas’ argument is incredibly challenging in that he recognizes that only God has accomplished what God calls us to do. I suspect we are simply not capable of achieving the sort of perfect unity that is professed in Trinitarian theology, but that is not to say we should stop striving for it. This is hardly a zero sum equation – we either achieve perfect unity or fail.

Instead, I suspect that we live in countless moments where the opportunity for unity and freedom in love can exist. When we, as Zizioulas says, “love the other not only in spite of his or her being different from us but because he or she is different from us” then we both live and love in freedom and joy. Though it may only last for a moment, when we love the other and the otherness in ourselves, we are privileged with a glimpse at the remarkable creativity of our Creator and our own baffling, precious part of creation. And so may we all strive to love as we have been loved by the Author of diversity.

Originally published on State of Formation on February 11, 2011.