Loving the differences

Michael Kirby is a minister emeritus in the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa in Kenton-on-Sea.

BY REV MIKE KIRBY

From our village on the south-east coast of the Eastern Province we get superb sightings of the stars, among which is the Southern Cross constellation. It is sometimes low on the horizon and sometimes high, but always it points due south. Sometimes it is obscured, but by now we know where due south is in relation to the position of our house and other landmarks. We know that it is there, pointing constantly since time immemorial over thousands of miles of ocean to the South Pole.

The Church of Christ was established to be such a beacon, to point humankind to the constancy and truth of God. Humankind being what it is, however, often seems to have made more of an issue over where we should be in the sky rather than concentrating on where we should be pointing.

My experience in the church over the past two decades has been markedly different from before, in that as a so-called white person I have been immersed in a so-called coloured church setting. My cultural location has changed. The position in the sky is different. Sometimes clouds seem to have obscured the Cross.

I have had to learn a new language, not the words so much as the pictures they evoke. I have had to learn new forms of worship, often noisier and more robust than I was used to. I have had to learn cultural nuances—when to be more direct and literal than I was used to, and when to seek for deeper symbols. And sometimes I have had to come to terms with simple outward manifestations of diversity, such as dress codes or how not to lose your place in the food queue or the funeral procession, as others with a different sense of personal space crowd in before you.

I have learnt that it is helpful to be mindful of the differences, and to use them to try to filter out the non-essential parts of my own preconceptions and prejudices and cultural bias, in order to keep the end-objective of the Cross more clearly before me—in short, to celebrate diversity.

There is a difference between our faith—our relationship with God in Christ and with others—and the structures we use to help carry and understand those relationships. Often enough those structures are culture-bound, which is surely in itself not a sin, but we do well to understand them for what they are, lest in their very human imperfection they obscure the really important.

Speak to people who have lost the sight of one eye, and you will learn that one of the most difficult adjustments they have had to make is adjudging distance. They have lost the depth of vision they had when they had the use of both eyes.

If we can truly accept the Pauline call to be thankful in everything, we can learn to celebrate our differences rather than try to justify them. We can learn to gain a depth perspective of our own selves through the eyes of caring people whose experiences have not been exactly the same as ours.

We start with our own perspectives: we learn to use the insights of the other to give depth to our vision. We will not feel we have to justify our own understandings, nor give up those things that help us, including the institutional structures we are comfortable with. Nor will we feel that we must change the perspectives and insights of others: although we may find we want to modify some or other stance or insight of our own.

We will be enabled to see what the essentials of our faith are and what merely the carriers of the precious cargo are. There is a distinction to be made between the cargo and the cargo-carrier.

If I am really interested in what you think, you cannot feel threatened. The essence of the discussion is to be non-judgmental. It is to inform our own understanding without feeling threatened—because we know we share the insight that God has given Christ the task of reconciling the world to him and us to one another, and we are all invited to join in that work.