Did you ever find yourself preparing to meet "Doctor" Somebody, and registering surprise upon discovering that this doctor was female? Perhaps the very young among us are free from the expectation that the doctor must be male; my mind, however, seems to be locked into an inflexible habit in which I am telling myself what a "doctor" must look like.
When I was 13 years old and in eighth grade, my mind would not accept the idea that the African American woman playing the piano in the school gym could be the person who was going to lead a group of us in singing. I distinctly remember that I told myself that this woman was an assistant, not the leader. Our principal had told us that the leader was a new member of our parish, and I had never met an African American Catholic before. But apparently there was also something in my mind insisting that leadership and being African American did not go together.
Once, when I was in another country, I overheard an American couple, one of whom remarked, "There's a lady walking her dog," to which the other replied, "Other people walk their dogs." I overheard a drama I'd found acted out in my own mind: the startling discovery that people of other lands have lives as rich, complex, and ordinary as my own.
I have served for the past eight years as a member of an anti-racism team of the Illinois Conference of Churches, an ecumenical organization made up of representatives of various Christian communions. One might imagine that people on an anti-racism team are highly skilled in shaming people for their faulty thought patterns, such as those I've described. But what is the point of shaming? (Keep in mind that guilt is "I did something wrong" as opposed to shame, which is "I am something wrong." We are hopeful that all people can be set free from shame.)
The team members are, in fact, steeped in an awareness of the ironies of the workings of our own minds. Therefore we respond to the odd twists of a person's mind with recognition instead of judgment. We know that the failure to see all that a person can be is a common human trait. We know that we all must work against what is, ultimately, a sinful tendency in our society to look at a person and see less than what is in fact present before us.
The fact that we are an ecumenical team adds something to our work. We acknowledge our religious differences and the fragmentation of Christianity. We concede that our religious challenges are part of the mix of the ways in which human beings stress division and flee from the painful (and rewarding) effort to affirm our commonality.
As we draw near to the 50th anniversary of "I Have a Dream," we give thanks for the Christian origins of the effort to honor and to secure justice for human beings.
Let us be thankful as well that God's love for humanity, expressed completely in Jesus, draws us into a deeper appreciation of our own peculiarities.