Wednesday, 10 March, 2004

We will continue to base the devotions on “God for a Secular Culture” by Jurgen Moltmann.



This week we will be looking at how knowledge of the ‘other’ leads to community in diversity.

But how do we perceive this other? Not through its correspondence but through its contradiction. We might say, in general terms, that we perceive things first through their contrast to the things they are not. We perceive the other with what is opposite in us ourselves. It is through dissonance, not consonance, that we become alive to the new. To take up Anaxagoras’s imagery: ‘the darker it is in us, the more we sense the holiness of light.’ The colder we are, the more intensely we feel a fire’s warmth. When we are among people who are black, we notice that we are white. Among people who are white we see that we are black.



Today’s piece made me think of those instances in our lives when our heads turn…or our eyes are drawn from that which we are watching to something else that has come into our view. Friday evening I was driving to dinner and as I was at a stop light, a bunch of people were crossing the street. With bags in hand, they were obviously coming from the “Arnold” fitness expo at the Convention Center. So as you would expect, there was quite a bit of muscle passing in front of me…as would be expected. But it was a woman in a sleeveless shirt that caught my attention. Now…I know what you’re thinking so let’s just continue. Her arms were more muscular than most men – certainly more than this man. She had a tank top on as it swooped down in the front; her large pectoral muscles (not breasts) were very visible to me. Noticing that which is different and other and strange to my experience, there I was dumbfounded…but visually attentive!



Connection: Sometime during the day our heads will turn to see something or someone. What is it that turns our head (even if it is simply a mental ‘turning’)? What does ‘different’ mean for you and how do you respond to something ‘other’?



Within the strangeness of your creation, O God, help us to understand that we too are a part of that strangeness that we often let limit our lives. Open our hearts to the wonderful beauty that is present within the odd and strange world around us that may indeed be us. Amen