Embracing Diversity

Sometimes I don’t even know why I read what I do.  I am sure often it is because I am in a trusted journal or reading an author I simply assume will have something interesting or useful for me to know.  Other times I am sure it is because I am attracted to a particular issue or maybe it is little more than an inviting title. Recently I was thumbing through (or I guess, technologically we should say, scrolling through when it is online) the journal.  I spied a title that read, “Gas stations, garages and God.”  Now who can resist that one!

It turns out it was written by a Benedictine nun in North Dakota, Sister Hannah Vanorny.  I do not know her, but I do know about the monastery where she lives.  She describes her fascination with places like convenience stores, rummage sales and the like.  I really don’t have the same fascination, except for a convenience store if I need something.  But I wanted to know what a nun finds attractive, so I started reading the article.  It was interesting to get her perspective, but nothing jumped out at me.  

She talked about finding some stuff on Catholic saints at one place.  This led her to talk about the very helpful people and messages she has found in the zoom-world during the pandemic.  She cited Jewish singing from New York City, a Baha’i visit she once made and some of her closer colleagues from the Protestant world.  I like her conclusion to this section.  She confesses, “Choices, diversity and variety are not bad things, even in religion.  I am Catholic, but I know that God is bigger than one particular Christian religion.”  I want to say, “Amen, sister!”

She refers to Jesus and notes that he “did not go around in the Gospels claiming to be one religion or another; he was about compassion and kindness and tolerance---as we all should be.”  This is an important theme for me.  And I am sure it is a very important theme for our own time.  After the 2020 summer of racial unrest and pandemic problems, it surely is a time for compassion, kindness and tolerance.  And even more, I would add, it is a time for love of all sorts.  We must all respect choice, diversity and variety.

Diversity and variety are what we find in convenience stores and rummage sales.  Who knows what we will find?  The same goes with people.  People who frequent garage sales are up for any kind of surprise.  They have an eagerness of spirit and a willingness to be open to whatever might appear.  Why should this not be similar to our approach to the people of the world?  Again, Sister Hannah puts it well with her statement, “Our lives can be so much richer if we are willing to look beyond our own surroundings, our own beliefs and our own expectations.”

I could not agree more.  I personally have learned so much, not only from traveling the world, but even traveling within our own United States.  Growing up on an Indiana farm, my world was quite provincial.  That is a fancy word for narrow!  Diversity in that narrow world is quite insignificant.  No doubt, technology makes it more difficult to be that narrowly provincial today.  We are so easily connected to the entire world, if we want.  

But to be technologically connected does not mean we embrace diversity.  In fact, our own contemporary time seems to be more polarized than recent decades.  Rather than welcoming the stranger, we are wary or dismissive.  Hannah Vanorny shares my sentiment.  She quips, “Today, many people seem closed off to ideas and people that seem different or ‘other’ to them.”  I join her and the saints as she pleads with us.  “Instead of becoming more polarized, let us try to find and celebrate the beautiful diversity in each of us.”

Choose to see diversity and variety as expressions of God’s creative will.  Surely evolution rewards variety.  Life has a much better chance of surviving and thriving in such environments.  All farmers know the peril in inbreeding and homogeneity.  Perhaps it is the same way with the human community.  As the good sister would say, maybe we are more like convenience stores and garages than we might have imagined!

Then she says, “The time we spend looking at product choices at gas station stores and garage sales should also be spent looking at people and ideas in our lives to see what makes them most unique and special.”  Maybe I am apples and you are oranges.  And maybe others are in the candy section and gloves.  I just hope I am not ice!  That seems so lifeless with hardly any lasting function.  Put me at room temperature and my ice life is over.

Finally, I think the Benedictine North Dakotan sister is expressing her hope that we learn to embrace diversity.  I join her in this hope.  Whatever the kingdom means, as Jesus proclaimed it, I am confident it meant inclusiveness and diversity.  Love is usually embracing and inclusive.  Even if you fall in love and marry someone, it does not mean you never love anyone else again.  We are love created by a God who is love.  Our mission is love and that should be our message.