I like to feel that strange life beating up against me. I like to realize forms of life utterly unlike mine. When my own life feels small, and I am oppressed with it, I like to crush [it] together, and see it in a picture - a medieval monk with his string of beads pacing the quiet orchard, and looking up from the grass at his feet to the heavy fruit trees; little Malay boys playing naked on a shining sea-beach; a Hindu philosopher alone under his banyan tree, thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may lose himself; a troop of Bacchanalians dressed in white, with crowns of vine-leaves, dancing among the Roman streets; a martyr on the night of his death looking through the narrow window to the sky and feeling that he already has the wings that shall bear him up; an epicurean discoursing at a Roman bath to a knot of his disciples on the nature of happiness; a Kaffir witch-doctor, seeking for herbs by moonlight, while from the huts on the hill-side come the sound of dogs barking, and the voices of women and children; a mother giving bread and milk to her children in little wooden basins and singing the evening song. I like to see it all: I feel it run through me - that life belongs to me; it makes my life a little larger; it breaks down the narrow walls that shut me in.
*The Story of an African Farm. In Howard Thurman. The Luminous Darkness.
* * *
The first sentence struck me when opening Thurman's book. I exclaimed to a friend of how enchanting were the words: "I like to feel that strange life beating against me."
I drove out of a parking lot, and she drove by me into the parking lot. She was in her twenties. Part of her head was bald, the other part dyed bright orange. The hair looked like a mop. I thought, "I've never seen hair look like that." What I meant was not the color, but the mop-look. I recalled how a deceased family member, when seeing persons with such dyed hair, would complain of it.
I certainly did not favor this young woman's hair-design. Yet, the feeling was that it was okay, though strange to me. I could affirm the strangeness without preferring it, without seeing it as a cause for objection.
We can celebrate in others what we do not choose ourselves. We might not favor a strangeness, but we can welcome it to brush up against us.
Anyway, we are all strange, hence exceptional ~ Are we not? We are the norm in being unusual, for unusual is the norm.
* * *
I walked to the counter to receive my coffee. She, a lovely, young lady, with a sweet smile, saw the Rudraksha prayer garland, or mala, on my neck - a form of beaded necklace in Buddhism and Hinduism. She told me she liked it.
I was wearing two prayer necklaces; I made sure she was referring to the Rudraksha mala. She confirmed. I told her what the mala is made from and where - Nepal. She was interested, smiling.
She asked about the other rosary, which she had not mentioned before. I held it in my hand. I explained the rosary, or prayer rope, is Greek Christian. Then, I told her the Rudraksha is a rosary for prayer, meditation, and chanting. I began to share about how Buddhists chant with the mala; she, abruptly, referred back to the Greek Orthodox rosary. She liked it. She showed no more interest in the Rudraksha one. So, I ceased sharing about it, honoring her preference.
I sensed her admiration and approval of the Rudraksha mala had vanished in hearing "Buddhism." I jokingly said to her, smiling, "So, you're not ready to be a Buddhist?" She rejoined with a lovely smile, "No," shaking her head. I smiled, in reply, and left.
I was not upset, as I once might have been, when I might have judged her as close-minded. I knew our spirits are always ahead of our minds. Spirit sees and receives the beautiful sacredness in the otherness, yes, including the strangeness, we have been taught to turn from, rather than welcome. Turning from must run its course, for us to celebrate the strange differences. This happens as love and wisdom melts the fear of otherness.
* * *
Spirit appears in the most amazing, kaleidoscopic array. When a youth, I read of a person seeing the front of a tapestry. When moving to the front, she beheld a beautiful image of Mary holding the baby Jesus. On the back, disarray. On the front, order. We see what appears as the disarray of diversity, and often we can get focused on the disorder, even encouraged to focus there - media is full of this promotion of disorder. Yet, order is already inherent in the disorder. And we tend to become, to feel, to act from, what we give attention to.
And socially, when the world around us looks like mayhem - and often, if not always, it does - can we trust, amid it, an order emergent, so becoming, an arrangement to arise out of the disorder itself? Will we choose to limit giving attention to the bad news and celebrate the ever-present good news? We can.
* * *
So, in welcoming otherness, we welcome the otherness we are. Otherness welcomes otherness and finds each the mirror of the other. The strangeness of everyone is the strangeness we each are.
* * *
To see more gracefully is to see beauty where others cannot see beauty, to invite beauty into our being where others refuse to host beauty. Prejudice is a curtain of darkness thrown over the Heart. Yet, the Heart still sees. And a joy of transcending prejudice is to see the Grace and Loveliness we had never seen before. This means we see ourselves as we could not before, by opening ourselves to the other, welcoming the other into ourselves, where they have been all along. Indeed, in the otherness of the other, we find the Splendor of Grace smiling back at us, receiving us with hospitality, saying, "Welcome, Home!" In the deepest sense, we are Home and, therefore, we are Home for we cannot not be already together in how the True Self adorns itself through each of us. This being true, our differences only appear to divide what cannot be divided, and we come to know that there is this here.
* * *
What is the result of not honoring our heterogeneity? Not including those who appear different, or even unusual, to us? Howard Thurman, in The Luminous Darkness:
The son of a prominent white businessman, while studying abroad ..., met a Negro who was president of a college in his home town. The student wrote letters to his father about his new and wonderful friend - an educated [and] refined gentleman who reminded him very much of his father. After much correspondence ..., the son succeeded in getting his father to agree to invite the Negro college president to his home for dinner. Elaborate protections were provided; the dinner was scheduled for nine o'clock in the evening: the Negro servants were given the night off so they would not know what was going on. What must have been the agony of conflict in the bosom of that father who wanted to be true to the image which his son had of him, to be true to his own sense of integrity in encounter with a man of equal stature, and at the same time to do nothing that would disturb the pattern of segregation which was a part of his very peace of mind! The cost was the corrosion of the spirit, which is slow and imperceptible - but its effect is sure and relentless.
* * *
To the degree I deny the other the right to be different from me and choose not to reverence the other, I refuse that same to myself. Through dishonoring the other, one chips away at themselves. With disrespect of the otherness of the other, one becomes, thereby, a little less human - as Thurman writes: corrosion of the spirit.
Yet, the good news is, we can receive the other into ourselves, welcome their strangenesses, and feel it run through us. Then, our lives become a little larger. We are not reduced. We do not lose. We find ourselves more out in the open, freer to breathe the Common Air, a human among humans, a spirit among spirits.
