2014 Review:
Diverse Persons and Perspectives
Written By Dan McDonald
In late 2012 I joined Facebook. By
the middle of 2013 I was on Twitter. In between I had started to blog. I was a
late participant in social media. Social media brought me into contact with a
growing diversity of persons and perspectives. As I look back on 2014 this
diversity of persons and perspectives has had its impact on my life. At times diversity
seemed to overwhelm, confuse and challenge me. Sometimes I didn’t handle it
well. But overall it has resulted less in changing my core values as it has in
reshaping my understanding of how I should connect my core values to the world
around me.
There were times when I found myself
faltering between competing perspectives. My Facebook world was composed
primarily of people who had been a part of my earlier Christian development.
They were mostly conservative, almost exclusively white, but if they had flaws
as we all do, I had learned to grow in God’s grace with these people. My
Twitter world was a place where I had discovered progressives, often young
people, and more diversity. Many of the people I came to know on Twitter had
felt like outcastes in the very movements with which I had been associated. As
much as I wanted to say they should not reject what I was a part of, I had been
a part of enough church splits in my Evangelical world to know that our
churches can be a hostile world if one gets on the wrong side in one of our
little squabbles. So I do understand that one handles only so much of that sort
of stuff before making the exit whether to a better place or just a place outside
of the storm.
For a time this tug of war between
my conservative Facebook world and my progressive Twitter world created in me a
tendency to have different persona on the two platforms. I could hear a Boy
George and Culture Club song
playing in my head. Blogging presented to me the possibility to attempt to
reconcile my two influences into a perspective which I could express with a
sense of integrity. I discovered the truth of what some writer had said. I don’t
remember who the writer was but they said something like “We write in order to
type out our words on a piece of paper until we at last recognize what it is we
believe and feel.” So if my blog had only a handful of readers, it allowed me
the opportunity to recognize what it was I believed and felt. In addition every
once in a while it did speak to someone else.
An important change began taking
place in my view of the world around me. In my Conservative world, even though
we probably didn’t mean to, we too often conveyed the feeling that unless you
became a person with the right politics, the right view of economics and the
right approach to doing schooling you probably didn’t belong. But I discovered that
our world wasn’t limited to our people groups. I am also sure that Christ didn’t
come into the world to walk only in the midst of such people. The song, Left of Center, by
Suzanne Vega seemed to speak to me about people living in this world left out
by my former approach. She sang of how she was here if you wanted to find her,
in that place left of center, in the outskirts, on the fringes and off the main
strip. Her song spoke to me of people we were inclined to leave out as we built
our understanding of the world we wanted to see replace the world in which we
lived.
As the year progressed I began to
resolve at least temporarily some of the struggles in my thinking. I was
resolved to listen to both Progressives and Conservatives and others without
abandoning my core principles. I don’t believe I will ever be free to simply
dismiss the words of Scripture that I sometimes see people feeling quite
capable of jettisoning. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate or take
seriously their issues. How does one deal with an Old Testament passage which
commands people to destroy a nation of people; men, women and children? Today
we call that genocide. Today we read over such a passage with easy explanations
while trying to challenge our world regarding the current ease with which the
unborn are aborted prior to birth. I begin to wonder if such a passage is
rightly dealt with if we haven’t struggled emotionally with the issue of how
blatantly out of character that is with a God of mercy and compassion. Perhaps
we are meant to bristle with questions as we read such a passage. Maybe we are
meant to cry out like mediators and ask “Why God, why will you not show mercy?”
Or perhaps we are reminded that we are not in charge, we are not the ones who
are sovereign who get to domesticate our God and teach him to do tricks at our
command. But this I tend to be discovering. If we do not treat these passages
with questioning then we will likely be led into the errors of our forefathers
who found themselves able to use the Bible to defend enslaving people who were
a different skin color than themselves, or exterminating a race of natives who
didn’t fit into the ideas of manifest destiny in a new world, or of business
being conducted with little regard for labor. Perhaps some passages cannot be
treated properly without our being driven to ask difficult questions. Perhaps
the Scriptures aren’t given to always suggest a quiet moment in a Thomas
Kincaid painting. Perhaps God sometimes wants us to rise up and say “NO! God, I
protest and plead for something better from you.” Maybe he withholds his mercy
to engage us to passionately yearn for his mercy. Maybe he invokes judgment to
move us to plead for mercy because his desire is not for us to be enslaved
robots, but rather to be freely acting men and women liberated to live
passionately in the day of God’s power. Maybe we are meant to find it in
ourselves to stand against injustice even if it that seeming lack of mercy seems
to be the act of God. Abraham, Moses, Job and Jesus never took the apparent
judgment of God at face value. They asked God for something better than he was indicating. They became mediators seeking mercy.
In the process I have discovered new
friends, even if sometimes from a distance with a variety of perspectives. I am
sure that I am only in the beginning of my journey into being impacted by
listening to the diversity of humanity. On the last day of 2014 I had an
internet experience that tells me I have only begun. Last summer, when warfare
broke out between Israel and the Palestinians I began to intentionally follow a
handful of Palestinians, on Twitter, to see what they were saying. I was not
trying to figure out how peace should be created, but simply trying to hear human
voices struggling in their actual situation. I learned that life in Gaza and on
the West Bank was difficult and frustrating. On many days there is electricity
for only a couple of hours a day. Internal checkpoints between towns to protect
Israeli settlements in the disputed occupied territories make movement of
ordinary goods and services almost impossible, contributing to a broken economy. Border security makes an Amazon shipment of books into Gaza
potentially a several month long process instead of only a few days. Life is
frustrating and yet you read tweets of people finding bits of joy in a life in a
land where almost nothing is normal.
On the last day of the year, one of
the Palestinians I followed on Twitter commented about how it was already New
Year’s Day in New Zealand. She had never followed me on Twitter but in response
to her comment I expressed my hopes for her to have a happy New Year, and
almost immediately she followed me on Twitter. That led to a direct message and
we soon had an exchange of greetings that deeply moved me. I discovered that
she responded to my simple act of wishing her a Happy New Year with a beautifully
warm and kind response of gratitude in addition to expressing kindness. This is
the story of diversity that I want to impress on your heart as you finish
reading my words today. There is a lot of history between my culture and her
culture, my religion and her religion. I have no ambition to try to compare and
argue about our religions. It seems to me that the times for such discussions
will be far more fruitful when there are no occupying forces making life
miserable, no terrorists strikes making others think only force can bring
peace, and no drones and bombers blowing up people in the name of peace
keeping. Perhaps at such times the best thing we can do is to offer our
friendship with someone and go with it. But something happened as this Palestinian
and I greeted one another. If we have different religions we are still fellow
human beings created in God’s image. That is something very important that we
do share. I am now, hopefully forever changed by this experience. The next time
I find myself in a room where someone is speaking about Palestinians from the
perspective of stereotyped prejudices, I will hopefully not allow myself to sit
idly by. Rather I will speak of someone as human as you or me who was moved by
a simple New Year’s greeting to respond with gratitude and kindness.
Peacemaking begins with a refusal to cooperate in defining someone else as less
than human.
No comments:
Post a Comment