KING AND THE NEW MILLENNIUM

In 1991 when I went to the Philippines, to visit our Unitarian Universalist congregations on the island of Negros, I went sight unseen: while making my arrangements I realized that I had never been there and I didn't know anyone. Eventually, after making contact with my hosts, giving them my arrival time (which later I learned was a "no-brainer" since there was only one daily flight in and out), I said to them: "Maybe I should be wearing a baseball cap or have something distinguishing about me." Why was that they wanted to know. "So you can pick me out at the airport." To which they responded: "That won't be a problem."

When I boarded the plane from Manila to Dumaguete City last February, I smiled remembering this conversation from nine years earlier. Not only was I about 4-5 inches taller than anyone else on the plane, but my skin color was considerably lighter than the lightest passenger. When I walked down the steps, over the tarmac and entered the crowded and chaotic terminal (about the size of this sanctuary), I wasn't hard to pick out. I was a stranger, and everyone knew it.

That first visit to Negros was just for two weeks. I didn't mind being a stranger - I was a visitor, a tourist really, it was no big deal. I'd been to other places as a visitor and I approached that trip much in the same way. But last year it was different. The visit was for two months. And after the jet-lag wore off, once I settled into a routine, when I knew my way around and I thought I knew what to expect (which I never really did!), then something different happened. I became a stranger, and what was more is that I didn't want to be. But I was. And I hope I will never forget.

This isn't to say that I wasn't liked, taken care of, tolerated or respected. As far as I know, all of these applied. And I was a stranger. It's the first time - and maybe the only time - that I knew and really felt that I was out of place, and to feel "in place" would require quite a few transformations that neither I nor my friends wouldn't or couldn't make.

I was a stranger. Or was I? Here's a story

Our beliefs, ideas, preconceived notions - and all the experiences that shape and root these - everyday we project them out and onto things and people. Whether or not our projections are accurate and true, groundless or irrelevant, doesn't matter. Whether the object of our projections is real, fantasy or illusion doesn't matter because it still happens. So when I wonder if I was really a stranger, this story makes me question to what degree my feelings were based on projections of my own fears, insecurities, misperceptions. In what way was being the stranger simply part of the difference and diversity that makes for life? Let me step back a moment, reframing the portrait I've just drawn by using some broader strokes.

The depth and breadth of diversity within which we live is amazing. People and plants, creatures and colors, seas and stars, feelings and fortunes, blessings and bickerings, weather and

whatever you name - the diversity that composes our cosmos is absolutely amazing. As Diana Eck relates (in the reading I shared), this diversity - this wide variety of differences within which we move and have our life - it simply is. To say that these differences don't exist, that there is no such diversity, is simply an untruth. I can't imagine anyone, especially today, denying the reality of diversity. 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, before the births of Jesus or Buddha, those people knew of diversity too - they too just had to look around them to see all the differences. While today our understanding and awareness of diversity might be broader than ever before, this doesn't change the fact that difference is integral to our universe and has been from its beginning.

Now this is not going to be a biology or a zoology lesson (after all I got "C's" in biology and the only reason my college zoology professor didn't fail me is because he said he never wanted to see me again!). I just want us all to understand and be clear that the depth and breadth of diversity is a given. What cannot be taken for granted is the way we try to understand diversity as it relates to us. Right now, this morning, I'm talking specifically about people differences: let's put aside all the other differences and just look at the differences among people - differences in culture and color, which for the most part covers it all. How do you explain

these, what do you do with these differences? When you observe, hear about or experience these differences, how do you make sense of them? What do you tell yourself? There are at least three contexts that we use to recognize diversity among people; there are at least three ways to live among the differences that shape daily coming and going.

First, diversity in the setting of inequality. In a context of inequality among people, differences are used to justify why there is no equality. This is far less complicated than it might sound and is easy to understand, in part because most of us have observed and maybe even participated in this context. For example, the racism, chauvinism and discrimination that I grew up with was rooted in this model, which held that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) male was the standard bearer. Anything other than this was judged as lesser-than: by definition it could not be equal to. Therefore, anyone different from a WASP man could not be equal. This didn't deny the fact of diversity, this frame of mind simply said that within diversity there is a rank ordering and White Men are at the top.

With the emergence of the Civil Rights agenda in the mid-1960's, then Feminism in the 70's, and then a host of "liberation" movements in the 80's, as a reaction to the WASP model and setting, many urged that the fact of differences and diversity be downplayed: what we need, it was suggested, is to look past our differences, to become "color blind," to recognize the bonds that unite us and not the ones that make us different.

This context was shaped by the idea that setting aside color, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and all the myriad of ways that make up for human difference, aside from all of these and underneath it all we are basically the same - that is, we are human beings.

I'm sure that there are many of us who agree with this - this is the truth, we tell ourselves, we all are human beings and that is what's important. And this is not enough because while I believe that there is a constellation of qualities that we all share no matter who we are, one of those qualities is diversity - the fact that we are not all the same and no matter how much we try to allow for our sameness it's just not the way it is.

Let me look at all of this another way, by asking a question: Why do we all have to be the same? Why is there this desire, this need to recognize a basic, quintessential, kernel of shared meaning and living? I say this while also acknowledging that a part of my faith is the belief that there is an essential "Something" that is shared by all living things - and it's this shared "Something" that makes all life sacred. Yet at the same time, I feel this lets us off the hook - it's just too easy to respond to the questions and issues raised by human difference by saying, "Well, in the final analysis were all the same, were all human beings so, like Rodney King remarked,

"Why can't we all just get along?" While there is some truth to this, while this might in fact be our wish, this ignores a social history of profound abuse and inequality that is now systemic to our way of life as well as to say nothing the reality of diversity.

In 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this tension and challenge when he wrote that "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the Color Line." He was right, in so many ways he was right. Paraphrasing Du Bois, I say the challenge of twenty-first century is the Diversity Line. Diversity everywhere. The truth of human diversity is now as close as our computer keyboard or the family television, the local airport or a simple car ride, a visit to your local public school, library or bookstore. And with the increased awareness of diversity comes the growing recognition of difference - that there are people who look, think, talk, value and believe in ways that are dramatically different from you. While underneath it all they too are just human beings, it's going to take a lot to get to that kernel of shared meaning and living because they are a stranger to you and you are a stranger to them. And in this way being a stranger and being different are synonymous - in many ways, they always have been the same. What I experienced in the Philippines, of feeling like the stranger, was a recognition of this fact of diversity: it's one thing to drive outside of my neighborhood or to visit Annapolis High or travel abroad; it's quite another thing to visit jungle villages where children run from me because they've never seen a white person, or to be stared at and followed because I'm different, or to be left out not because of ill-will but simply not understanding. Now, having returned from that experience and actually eager to go back, I don't want to sleep through it all, to sleep through this moment in history-making and transformation; I don't want, as King suggested, to see that the signs have been changed and not understand what happened or why. And above all, let me remember what it feels like to be a stranger for I was there. Let me understand that at times we are all strangers, we are all different - this is part of our nature, and it's okay, it's okay to be different, diversity is alright, diversity is the nature of things.

There is a context in which diversity and difference can and will work. Equality amidst diversity: acknowledging differences without ranking them. It would be like ordering different food from the same menu, then sharing the same table and enjoying each other's company. Simply accepting each other for what we are.

Confronted with the facts of diversity, there are at least three responses. The exclusivist way is not just the right way, it's the only way. In terms of religious faith, the exclusivist approach is most often identified with fundamentalist Christians, like the Southern Baptists who have been evangelizing virtually every major faith community in recent years telling them that the only way to find the Truth and achieve salvation is to abandon their tradition and repent and become a Southern Baptist! Probably most faith traditions have an exclusivist version, and so does Unitarian Universalism: UU exclusivists claim that ours is a modern faith for modern people in a modern world, and while other traditions might claim a path that leads to the truth that's okay, it's just that theirs is illogical and irrational. In this way, then, UUs have a corner on the truth after all who wants to be accused of being illogical or irrational.

The inclusivist response is broader: the inclusivist says that my way is the culmination of all that came before it. Therefore, its "shoulders" are very broad and strong, and you are welcome to join my way. Both Christianity and Islam are basically inclusivist religions - each builds and incorporates what came before with Islam being the final distillation of western religious belief and theology. As a Muslim, you recognize the value of Judaism and Christianity, but you follow Islam. In an even more inclusivist style, Bahai recognizes the truths and teachings from many of the world's religions. Many UUs believe this about our faith - they see our faith community as a syncretistic one, a blending or melting pot; inclusivist UUs remind us of how our Principles and Purposes name all the different sources from which our beliefs are shaped. Perhaps you too have seen all the church logos - even jewelry you can purchase - that displays in a circle the symbols for each of the world's religions and then in the center is the flaming chalice (the painting in the front hall suggests this inclusivist frame of mind) The UU inclusivist message is that our liberal faith is the culmination of all the others, that anyone, whatever they practice, could be a UU. But, the inclusivist expects the membership and practice to be done on UU terms, not on the terms and beliefs as set by the other faith tradition.

Finally, there is the pluralist response. I'm unaware of any western faith tradition that is pluralist, which claims that Truth is not an exclusive or inclusive possession, that there can be versions of the Truth without one being the "right" version. This just doesn't seem to be part of the western traditions' faith code. Only liberal Buddhists and Hindus have versions that I understand as pluralist but even there you've got to look carefully. Unitarian Universalism has the potential to be a pluralist faith. But what gets in the way is that so many of us come from other faith traditions and our energy is spent justifying our leaps in faiths. As a result, arriving in a truly open and embracing pluralist posture is difficult if not impossible because we are never really completely comfortable with this version of our faith. Besides this, western education has taught us well - we've been schooled as dualistic thinkers, that is we've been taught to see just one or two answers to most questions. To view life not as a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived within which there is not a right way and a wrong way but a myriad of ways - this is

not how we've been schooled; to think and believe in this way would involve both de-schooling and re-schooling, yet this is the way of the pluralist.

I believe that pluralism is the only way to recognize, engage, embrace and live with diversity (and of course, this is an oxymoron - just like saying that there is only one absolute and that is change). With pluralism we admit to the diversity of life and try to live with it, letting it flourish. It's hard, real hard, because it means stepping outside of ourselves and seeing through another's eyes.

The challenge King was making to us - and his words are as powerful today as they were in 1967 - is not to close our eyes to this diversity, not to fall asleep and doze through history being made. To keep our eyes wide open, to look through the stranger's eyes for we too have been strangers - this is the nature of diversity, of difference.

Like the balloons, our world is one of diversity - this is a given. But how we respond to that diversity, how we live in it, is shaped by us. Will we close our eyes to it, falling asleep? Will we keep it at a distance, as an unknown, the stranger? Or can we recognize and know that we are part of that diversity, that we too are a "stranger." Let us begin today in shaping the new millennium, by acknowledging that we won't fall asleep, that because of our diversity there is room for each person to soar, that "we will love the stranger, for we too were a stranger."

© the Rev. Fredric J. Muir
January 16, 2000

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