Some more pickings from "A Passion for the Possible" by William Sloan Coffin.



The challenge today is to seek a unity that celebrates diversity, to unite the particular with the universal, to recognize the need for roots while insisting that the point of roots is to put forth branches. What is intolerable is for differences to become idolatry. When absolutized, nationalism and ethnicity, race, and gender are reactionary impulses. They become pseudoreligions, brittle and small, without the power to make people great. No human being's identity is exhausted by his or her gender, race, ethnic origin, or national loyalty.



How quickly we can be seduced into trusting in something that is particular to us. This happens to the oppressors and to the oppressed in our world. This is truly why we need to celebrate our diversity and attempt to keep ourselves fully immersed in a community in which there is diversity. It is within the conversations we have with those who are different from us that we to do battle with the grand temptation to secure our position or our kind or our way...as being the only way or the best way...or the one that must prevail over others. Every time we allow ourselves to be a part of a community that is open to the variety of people, it is like seeing another glimpse of the horizon that we have not yet seen and this new view make the whole horizon much more rich than what we were able to see previously.



Connection: Be patient. People who are different than us may drive us nuts - since our way - is so often - the way things are to be! Be patient and listen and question and become engaged so that our horizon of vision will open up and possibly surprise us all today.



Creator of this day and Creator of the many colors and textures of life around us, open our eyes again so that we may first see and then, by your grace, embrace...the gift of life you bring to us through those we encounter throughout the day. Amen.