IT’S NOT EITHER OR

    To be honest I’m getting tired of the Red-Blue stuff: the Red State-Blue State , Liberal-Conservative, Black-White division that is being propagated by those who will benefit from the division. I am tired of it because it’s all a lie. Iowa , to my blue-liberal chagrin, turned out to be a Red State , but only by a small margin and without about 40% of the non-voters weighing in.

    So is Iowa or Wyoming really Red, all Red, and nothing but Red? Of course not, and neither is New York or California all Blue or even close to being such. There is a lot of Red mixed in with my Blue as well as a lot of the colors in between. Some of us may lean one way or the other but no one of us is a pure Blueblood or Redblood. So let’s not think we are, act as if we are, or even worse, God forbid, wish we were.

    I need those who think differently than I, see with a different set of lenses than I, come from a different background than I to help me think and see and understand what I could not and cannot all on my own. For left to myself, I will surely be blind and deaf and unfeeling to all too many others. But with others to help me see what I otherwise would not, to hear what I otherwise could not, understand what I otherwise would find impossible, I can grow as a person.

    That was and is one of the reasons why God made us all different even as we possess 97% of the same DNA. We need one another to complete who we are as a person, to make us a better person. The problem, of course, is that 3% can be maddening and, even worse, frightening. Our children are even more that 97% alike but they have sometimes acted as if they came from different sets of parents. With so much in common, why did they treat each other so badly? Why do we as a society and as a world still treat one another so badly when we have so much in common?

    Why? Probably because that 3% also frightens us. We are afraid of what we do not know or see or understand. And so we stand fast in what we do know and see and understand and so vote for and support those like us while, at the same time, putting more distance between us and those not like us. Doing that does no one any good and only makes any bad situation worse.

    One of my favorite readings is from John’s Gospel where Jesus reminds us that there are many rooms in God’s house. If all rooms were the same, maybe we would have no need to enter any other. But they are not. I need to enter your room, whatever its color; and you need to enter mine and we both need to check out the rooms down the hall. It will sometimes be a maddening experience, like it is when we have to listen to our children’s music – or they, ours. But it should not be frightening.

    This is not an either-or world and we dare not attempt to make it such, assert that it is or act as if it were. Doing so will only make matters worse. As Christians we are called to create a better world. We can only do so together, because of our differences and not in spite of them. First we must accept those God-created differences and learn from them.                                                               WJP