Unity

“Brothers and sisters: I, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through Love, striving to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of  peace: one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” - [ Ephesians 3:1-6].

If anyone of us believes in one God, or a Higher Power, we believe that we were all created by God. And as we were created by God, a little bit of God is in all of us. God as our Creator, presides over all of us. And God, our Creator works through all of us.

My parents did the minimum to raise me as Christian. I was baptized, received my First Communion and was Confirmed in the Church. Then, we were done. I was not allowed to go to church any longer.

It took marrying my husband for me to find another church and return to attending Sunday services. My parents were furious that I returned to church. But I have to be grateful that they introduced me to God at a young age. By the time they took church away, it was “too late”: I was already a believer.

My parents were socio-Christians - I.e., they could not at all identify as Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, etc. They believed that Christianity taught right from wrong, and enabled you to meet “the right kind of people”. They were Christians of a certain race and class, in the same way that you would belong to a social club.

I don’t know why I understood at a young age that, since we were all created by God, we all possess inherent dignity. Maybe I developed this understanding, by the power of the Spirit.

And because I knew that we all possess inherent dignity, then it hurt me deeply when my father would yell at people from the driver’s seat of the family car, heaping racist indignities on other drivers. If a driver in front of him drove too slowly for him, or started through a green light a bit too late, he would label the other driver with ethnic sobriquets - even if he had no idea whether the person really was Indian, Italian, Polish, Jewish or whatever.

My father’s racism assumed that we ought to all be the same. . . that if someone were not white and well-off, then there was something wrong with them; that the “non-conforming” person needed to either change, or failing that, get out of the way.

Somehow, I figured out that since we all came from God, since God moves “ over all, and through all and in all”, that I needed to work on approaching others “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with others with Love. . . striving to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.”

That is why, the belief today that being equal should mean “being the same”, hurts my feelings just as much as my father’s racist rants. Young people today find it abhorrent to even acknowledge that someone is female, or is a person of color, or comes from an under-developed country. I find unity in celebrating people’s differences, loving others BECAUSE of their differences, not DESPITE of their differences.

God is in all of us, and works through all of us, no matter who we are, where we come from or what we look like. That is the source of humility, patience, Love, gentleness, peace - and ultimately, of Unity. Truly, there can be nothing more beautiful than that. . .

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