Journey Toward Nonviolence 1: Encountering Our Fear of "The Other"
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 12:20AM | in Fear, Journey Toward Nonviolence, Prejudice This post is part of a larger series. To learn more, click here.
The first journal entry I wrote this year in my commitment to studying nonviolence and peacemaking was like a moment of declaration. Scribbled hastily into a travel-sized Moleskine notebook on a plane ride back from Philadelphia — I’d just devoured the first few chapters of John Dear’s book A Persistent Peace — it was a moment of looking back at so many inherent beliefs or fears or prejudices that I have carried at different times in my life and beginning to defiantly say, “No more.”
Here’s what I wrote:
In my life, I’ve often encountered a deep fear and suspicion of “the other” — people who are different, theologies that are liberal, interpretations of history that are radical and subversive because they bring to light the darker sides of those people and stories we’ve always heralded.
Now I find myself asking: on what basis, this fear?
On what basis, this suspicion and emboldened rejection?
If Jesus is real, then God is for all people.
— 18 January 2009, My Year with Gandhi Journal
For instance, I remember taking an AP Prep course for US History in tenth grade. The instructor gave us Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
It was the first time I learned that the first settlers didn’t necessarily treat well the Native American people who were living here before they arrived. In fact, it was the first time I ever thought about how the experience might have been for the Native Americans at all.
Those are the kind of moments I was remembering when I wrote that first journal entry.
What about you: Can you recall a moment when you faced an inherent fear or suspicion of “the other” in your life?
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Reader Comments (10)
Hmm . . . I don't know if it's quite the same thing, but I think of the first time I went to Spain, how I spent more than three weeks in total culture shock, trying to figure out how in the world things worked here. I don't remember being afraid so much as being in sort of a bewildered haze, though, like I couldn't see enough to be afraid.
That's a great story, Sarah, and it made me think some more. Perhaps it was an experience of being broadened, your understanding of the world and other people and cultures getting tumbled around like a snow globe ... only to find that when the snow settled, several new villages had been added to the little scene that was sitting there before you shook it up.
When I was in India. I was with a large group of people most of the time, but there was about 2 hours I was unknowingly and certainly unwillingly taken away from the security of the group. Imagine a large white guy in the midst of a noisy and dusty market where all of a sudden you realize that everyone is staring right at you. All your security is gone and all of a sudden you are very vulnerable. After a few minutes of heart felt prayer I realized that these people are just like me, beloved of God, willing to help and just as curious as me. I made it back to the hotel after I just relaxed and let God put the right people in the right places.
One of the biggest shifts I can think of occurred for me in my relationships with friends and co-workers who are homosexual. I don't maintain the same levels of friendship with all of them, but I remember a deep (and admittedly shameful) fear lurking in me that came from the tension between my understanding of the natural order God created and the fact that their lifestyles reflected something completely other.
But as I encountered men and women of homosexual persuasion who were kind, altruistic, and altogether human, I came to understand that they, like me, had stories of strife and struggle, of fears and conquering those fears. I understood them as three-dimensionally human and not the cardboard caricatures that some people might make them out to be. This freed me to exchange stories with these friends, and with that heart, it was amazing the honesty that flowed back and forth between us.
Wow, Carl, that must have been quite an experience! I love what you said about realizing they, too, were beloved of God and just as curious and willing to help as you. What a humanizing moment. It's the contemplative in you that was able to realize this, I am sure.
Kirsten, I loved reading what you shared here. It's so truly you. And I appreciate so much what you said about discovering these individuals to be three-dimensionally human who also had stories of strife and struggle, just like you. It's such a release, I think, to encounter in others the same struggles and humanness that we encounter daily in ourselves. It keeps us human, in touch with our own realities as well. Thanks for sharing, friend, and for being who you are.
Wow. Christianne this post REALLY made me think. I suppose one of the most notable encounters in my life that really challenged my thinking (or more honestly, my snobbery) was living in a very low income neighborhood. I called it the hood or the ghetto. That was a major adjustment for me because some of the local alcoholics that were living practically on my doorstep were crude and disrespectful and they would say some really crude remarks to me when I would pass by.
Months had passed and I would not even acknowledge these small group of men that were always lurking around. One day I decided to stop being afraid of them and stop ignoring them and love them. There were a few things that I felt in my heart that God really led me to do and it changed them and it changed me forever. I really got to know these people at this point. I sat with them and listened to the hardships that they had endured and what led them to that neighborhood and ultimately to being hooked on drugs and alcohol.
It was shocking to me to listen to one man in particular who had been successful and quiet wealthy at one point in his life. This really proved to me that people are not as they seem and when we listen we find beauty in everyone if we search for it. That incident changed my life forever.
Also I can't wrap this up without mentioning David and all the clients that I came to love at the agency I worked for. There is just no way to put into words what those encounters did for me. They totally took me out of my comfort zone and into a beautiful place. Before I started working for that company I would not even acknowledge a mentally handicap person. I would run from them because they scared me. But, they opened up a whole new world to me and I will always be grateful to David and many others that became my friend.
Christianne I love your thoughts because when you open up yourself like this you really have something to say. I cherish that. You challenge me and you really make me take a second look at life.
One major thing that I love about you is that you have a mission to restore dignity to humanity in a world that makes itself busy stripping it away. There is no greater calling than that in my eyes because that is exactly what love does. It gives those who feel worthless a sense of value and that is powerful.
Response from Christianne: Tammy, this is what I love about you. You live the examined life. You lived in that neighborhood and noticed what it made you think and feel. You considered whether you wanted to keep thinking and feeling that way. You did something about it ... and then you had your life totally flipped upside down for it. Same thing goes for what happened with David and the other clients. You are amazing, Tammy. You have a heart so big and wide. I love the way you love people and desire to truly see them for who they are, a human being. So glad to be your friend.
Good lord Christianne my comment was a post.
No problem on the length of the comment, Tammy. So easy to read, and a joy to hear your stories.
If you'll notice, I am trying something new in the way I respond to individual comments. I am going to add a bold-faced note to the end of them. (Bold-faced so you can see something new has been added to your original.) I tried it on your comment above for the first time. What do you think? Is it weird to get responses that way?
I was raised in the South by two parents who experienced and even resisted segregation. I really never had African American friends and I was a freshman in college when I saw one of my suite mates using a curling iron on her hair. I flipped out and was like, "what are you doing? aren't you going to burn your hair?" She looks at me with total disbelief and said "Curling irons were made for black people. It's you white people that took it from us." Well that just totally turned my world upside down and made me really begin to undo some of the things I was taught.
Second thing that I remember is my new friend took me to meet her mom & her mom's "roommate". After a fun filled, fantastic weekend this friend admitted to me that her mom was gay. It was the first time she ever said the words out loud to someone and as she anxiously awaited my response my mind reeled and the first thing that came out of my mouth was "well, I guess I can't hate gay people any more."
These two little instances opened up a whole new world to me.
@MamaFeelgood: Wow, MamaFeelgood, those are two incredible stories. I can't help but think that your friend's decision to say out loud for the first time to you that her mother was gay shows the great amount of trust she had in you. And I love your response about not being able to hate gay people anymore. When it becomes personal, everything changes, doesn't it?
Thanks for sharing, and thanks for stopping by. Have a wonderful holiday!