Dear Friends,
Diversity is an interesting thing. A couple of weeks ago I spent time in Louisiana, about an hour north of New Orleans, where I ate alligator sausage for dinner and grits for breakfast. Plus there was okra, and gumbo, and coffee with chicory. Out in the pine forest where we were staying I saw oyster shell fossils and spiders as big as saucers, hanging on massive webs under which I had to duck as I explored the trails around the Episcopalian retreat center where I was staying.
I was with a gathering of 20 other clergy types from around the United States. We ranged in age from thirty-ish to pushing sixty, we were evangelical and progressive, we were men and women. We served in tiny congregations and tall steeple churches, and it was wonderful. I will treasure my time in Louisiana for as long as I can recall it, and part of what made it great was the fact that we weren’t all the same. I hesitate to say we were a “diverse” group because only one of the participants wasn’t white and no one self-identified as anything but straight, but still, there were a lot of differences to explore around pastoral experience and theological opinion and political proclivity.
But difference can be difficult. As part of my observation of a part of the country I’d not yet visited, I saw “David Duke for Senate” signs up along the road, north of Lake Pontchartrain. I struggle with feeling inclusive when I see evidence of such overt racism; overt signs of support for a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan don’t make me feel like celebrating the widest possible spectrum of human diversity.
This is the challenge of living in Donald Trump’s America. I want to cling to the beautiful variety of human expression and experience indigenous to the United States. I want to live surrounded by people of every race and religion, orientation and national origin. I even want to know and learn from those with whom I have political, philosophical and religious disagreements. But there are limits. I don’t think I can celebrate David Duke. I cannot rejoice in the increasing likelihood that the next administration will be filled with racists, climate change-deniers, and warmongers.
I’m not sure how to work out my desire to celebrate a diversity while excluding certain segments of the human family, except to say that I have a hard time celebrating the inclusion of those who don’t celebrate inclusion. Or, to quote a line from the Saint Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s play Henry V:
“We would not die in that man’s company That fears his fellowship to die with us.”
I won’t celebrate a diversity that includes David Duke (or, for that matter, those Americans whose votes in the recent election were motivated by hate). I will however continue to rejoice in those differences that make the human family beautiful because by celebrating positive diversity–by speaking a wide variety of languages, by eating local foods and by learning the dance steps of various cultures–we bring credibility to the refusal to include and celebrate hate. By making explicit the joy we derive from new experiences we are able to demonstrate that our rejection of nastiness is not “reverse-provincialism” or mere elitism. Rather, it bears witness to the Kingdom of God and expresses the confidence that is ours by faith, that all God’s children are beloved.
So the next time you are traveling, eat the local food (even if it comes from the tail of a non-extinct, and hardly-evolved dinosaur), dance a little zydeco (if it’s available to you), talk about the amazing differences you find among the saints, and speak out with prophetic intensity against the hate that seeks to divide us.
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
God’s Peace,
Ben