Benedicamus Domino!
I may have used this subject-line in another entry, but it seems very applicable today. The line comes from a strange and interesting little meditation on life called Desiderata. It's by a man named Max Ehrmann, and I've always loved it. "Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there can be in silence!" I think I'm misquoting, but well, man! How can you go wrong with something like that? It contains many maxims which I have tried to take for my life. One of these is: "Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars." This is a great truth. I don't think it means that you should just let yourself be or not pay attention to what needs improvement, but rather, I think that it means that it is right to seek for healing, right to end old patterns and find more healthy ones perhaps, or to find new ways of dealing with old wounds. Sometimes, the old advice from our mothers is true: "For heaven's sake, don't pick at it!" Sometimes, letting the wound be a wound is best, and sometimes finding a good ointment or medicine is best. Whatever happens, doing the kindest thing for yourself must in the end result in a better self, a more well-developed and less broken self.
For me, the path to wholeness is with Christ. For others, it may lie elseware, and whether I believe your path leads to the same place to which the one I'm on leads doesn't really matter. Most of the time, no matter what we like to say in this age of tolerance and non-judgmentalism, differing paths do not end up at the same place. One only needs to look deeply into any philosophy or religion or worldview to know where it claims to lead, and while a lot of the outer trappings may be the same, a lot of the moral framework is there, the insides are fundamentally different in most cases, with Christianity perhaps being the most different of them all. It is radical to be a Christian. It is radical to believe that God, the Creator of the Universe, became a man, a true man, and truly died, and truly rose from the dead. The very idea is utterly incomprehensible to the human mind! However, does this mean that I can disparage someone else who doesn't know Christ or has chosen not to know Him? (To say "believe in" is just difficult here, so I'm saying something else to make it clearer.) No, I cannot do that. All I can do, all any of us can do, is speak our truths quietly and clearly. The other side of the coin is that we must also listen. We must also really hear, even if we don't want to hear what is said, even if we find what is said repugnant. We must be willing to set that aside, to listen, and then to speak in our turn. Only then can a true connection be made. Only then can true understanding emerge!
All this pussyfooting around, all this choosing just the right words to convey something so as not to offend someone else, it's just got to stop! Words in themselves should not be offensive! Words should not be loaded with baggage from the past. Of course they are, of course we live in a society filled with loaded words, but what if we all agreed to just put the baggage down? What would happen then? Might the barriers between "us" and "them" actually come down? Might we actually live in a society which truly gives us the right to free speech and free fellowship? There was a woman I knew who was fired from her job because she went against the job's policy of saying "happy holidays" and said "merry Christmas" to someone on the phone. The truly absurd thing about this is that the client on the phone had said "merry Christmas" first and the person in question was just returning the greeting! Has it really come to this?
I mean, if Christianity truly became the hegemony that everyone thinks it is, I still would have a problem with a policy which disallowed me to return someone's greeting using the wording of their choice. I'm not, for instance, going to tell a Jewish person who practices their faith "Merry Christmas." If they said it to me and if it was Chanukah, I'd wish them a happy one of those. If they said "merry Christmas" to me and it was not Chanukah, then I would likely say: "happy holidays," because presumably they'd be on holiday from their work or something. But all this watering down of things just has to stop! We are not all the same, we will never be all the same. We are all gloriously and wonderfully different, and it's time we all got to grips with that and stopped worrying so much about offending each other or being offended in turn!
So, there's my truth for the day, spoken perhaps loudly and opaquely, but there it is nonetheless. I refuse to allow the English language to be reduced to Orwellian Newspeak!
Deo Gratias!
No comments:
Post a Comment