If I Claim to Be a Wise Man, It Surely Means that I Don't Know*

As much as I tell myself it's important, necessary even, for THE CHURCH to be a people open to difference, I wonder what the exceptions are. I wonder if the fact that I think there may be exceptions reveals a problematic position to begin with. Well, I confess that I do more than wonder.

Yesterday, one of our younger members (not capitalized) shared what she had been discovering about herself and others as she has been led to love people very different from her- different in that "they are projects and loving them is a matter of condescension" way. She was discovering what it means to really love someone so that "they" becomes "us"- that way in which silence is not awkward or empty, but a mark of intimacy and a bond that transcends even the division implied by articulating the possibility of one loving an other.

There are those easily kept outside the walls of our church communities. Some are kept so deliberately but there's also the accidental exclusion found in our sense of what it means to serve and love others. Those others can serve as a self-affirming negative contrast. We are who we are (good) because of how we treat others who we acknowledge don't deserve that sort of treatment or allow us in some other way to demonstrate our understanding of goodness.

That's not where she was though. She expressed that at one point she was- that she had a relation to a certain group of people that suggested she was serving them in some way, but through a process of growing and learning she came to be with them. In short, she explained that she was discovering what it means to be in the same boat.

Of course as I relate this I might be putting more words in her mouth than she intended. But I think I understood her, and this is what I think I understand. It's what the Qweenbean seemed to understand as well- she leaned over to me and in a humbled, confessional tone, said, " I didn't realize that until I was in college."

I think what this young person said was good and true, but... The but is not in anything she said, the but is me. This morning a group that rents part of our facilities is hosting a "Creationism" seminar, and, boy, am I not open to that. I think it's wrongheaded, dangerous, and lends itself to a narrow dogmatic aggression incommensurate with features necessary to living in belief.

I'm probably conflating things here, but that openness that I want, that openness that this young person shared seems to require that the Creationist and I share the same space and I don't know how to that.

*Kansas! Really?! Will this otherness never end?