Chocolate for Lent by Hilary Brand

Week Four

Getting Real - The Power of Acceptance

To Start Your Reflection

Accepting Difference

There was a time when North America was mostly Christian. By that I don’t mean that everyone was moral and pious and worshipped regularly. Rather, if someone was moral, pious, and worshipful, it was most likely within a Christian framework. Whether you lived within its boundaries or without, Christianity was the most prevalent religion.

Now it is different. There are substantial numbers of people in our countries who believe quite different things from us. We cannot share the same cities without respecting them. And we can, and often do, fly off to other continents and find ourselves immersed in societies utterly different from us in their beliefs, their customs, and their attitudes.

The result? We have made the “shocking discovery” that it is possible to be moral, pious, and worshipful without being Christian! Not only are we exposed to other religions, but to those who embrace beliefs, practices, and spirituality outside the framework of any organized religion at all. A myriad of remedies, therapies, and cosmologies are on offer, and Christians are sharply divided in their reactions to them. There are those who feel that anything that comes labeled as an “alternative spirituality” must be demonic. Others believe that at worst these alternatives are misguided and at best helpful tools in the Christian quest for the spiritual.

Recently I visited Kuala Lumpur. In the middle of this teeming, cosmopolitan Muslim capital was something very odd—a row of mock-Tudor villas surrounding a cricket green. It was, of course, where the British lived and ruled back in colonial days, and you can find similar “outposts of the British empire” all around the globe. You may also find more contemporary variants in places like Spain’s Costa del Sol with its “Red Lion pubs” and fish-and-chip shops. This is one way of living with difference, albeit detrimental: retreating into your own tight “expatriate” community, clinging to your traditions and becoming an “us” carefully insulated from “them.”

To be a minority is threatening. And to be a minority in matters of belief is even more threatening. Belief is fragile by nature. It deals with things that cannot be seen or touched or proven. And it is precious and personal, at the center of our being. We would be strange believers, then, if we never felt threatened by those whose beliefs were different from ours. To feel threatened by difference is a natural reaction. It is what we do with those threatened feelings that matters.

Dealing with difference is never easy. But deal with it we must, or the Church will gradually retreat into a world of unreality. (There are some who say this has already happened!) It is doubly difficult where issues of faith are concerned, because they have to be dealt with on two levels. On one level there is the objective evaluation of the belief or practice itself. Is it untrue, or simply a different way of saying the same thing? Is it harmful, or just familiar?

And on another level there is the need to deal with our threatened feelings. How can I evaluate a belief or practice objectively when it raises so many uncomfortable questions within me? Even if I believe this practice is wrong, how am I going to love and respect the person who practices it?

At root perhaps, the question revolves not around what we believe in, but whom. If we have learned to trust a loving God, who not only made but infuses the whole of life, if we have learned to follow in the footsteps of a humble, forgiving Christ—then very little can threaten us. (And in those moments when we still feel intimidated, we have someone to help us through it.) Secure in our own faith commitment, we can begin to celebrate and explore difference rather than fear it. We can embrace those of other faiths without losing our own.

Pause for Reflection

Read John 4:4-26.

Jesus was not afraid to talk to someone from a different ethnic and religious group—and a woman of dubious morals, to boot! When He started getting too close for comfort on personal matters, she was quick to divert Him onto more general religious controversy (a common technique). Jesus did not ignore the controversy or give way on His belief, but He was quick to turn it around to the essence of the matter: what was important was not where you worshipped or what you did, but how you did it.

Pause for Thought

Of those from other faith traditions whom you have met, whom have you found the most threatening and why?