Finding God in all human pers pectives
God seeks to reveal himself to us – each six billion of us – whether we are Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, on and on regardless or our traditions of religion, culture, and background. Weather or not we get the message depends on so many things in our lives, but first we must want God to reveal Himself to us. Then we must remain open to whatever range of possibilities He presents us.
It is only with an open mind and heart that we may proceed if we want God’s grace in our lives and our world. Any plan for our future must include God, or it would be as St. Paul says simply “as the banging of a gong.”
Part of that openness to God means openness to new ideas or ideas that are divergent from our own. With six billion folk on the planet, God will reveal himself in different ways. We should not discount another’s perspective solely because it differs from our own. We don’t have to believe the exact things they do; nor do we necessarily need to take on their belief structure. In the absence of harm, they can both exist. In fact, this initiative in part, dedicates itself to advancing the belief that taking in all perspectives is essential to moving our world forward morally.
To us, the most obvious thing about our world that will never change but fundamentally we have never as a whole come to accept is the simple fact that we are different. We are going to remain different in many, many ways. We look different, we act differently, we think differently, we pray differently, and God reveals himself differently to us. We have let these differences divide us on every level of our lives and societies. We hesitate so often in our struggle to celebrate our diversity because celebrating it, as prejudice does, points out that we are different. Different doesn’t have to mean better, worse, strange or wrong. We must put aside the notion that we can all be the same and simply accept the fact we are different on a fundamental level. Then we can begin to learn to embrace some of those differences.
It merits retelling the Indian story of the blind men who happen upon an elephant. Each takes a different part of the elephant in his hands and begins to describe the elephant based on his own limited observations. The one who holds the tail says an elephant is like a rope. The one who feels its side says it is like a wall. The one who touches its leg says no you are both wrong, an elephant is like a tree, and so on. In many ways we have been like these blind men. We miss the whole and argue among ourselves based solely upon our limited understanding instead of first listening and pooling our experiences, recognizing them all as valid.
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