Awake and determined- March 13, 2023

I should have seen it coming. 

While on the Multicultural Committee for the Topeka Public Schools, from the late 1980s through 2006, I helped to create a multicultural calendar for educational purposes.   Our committee was inter-religious and multi-ethnic, so the holidays listed included national holidays, observances connected with certain cultural groups represented among student/staff/parents, and major holidays of faith communities. 

  Yes, there was once a complaint from a parent - only one that I knew of - about the need for all those holidays listed, given how few people in the district observed those holidays.   It was a sign that some preferred only listing holidays of the majority (based on skin color and religion).   We acknowledged that with sadness and with determination to keep moving forward. 

   In a meeting with local faith leaders in Topeka in the mid-1990s,  we were discussing how we might come together for study or worship that would assemble a broad range of participants.   One local evangelical minister protested, saying he would not accept expressions of certain groups with which he disagreed, claiming, with disdain, “THAT’S PLURALISM!”  

   Well, yes.  It is.   

   God created a diverse world, and people developed, over the centuries, different ways of viewing the human community.    Some see the divine spark and image in everyone and everything.  Others would draw a restricted circle around only what and whom they accept as appropriate.    

   Being a believer in a religion that declared long ago that “the righteous of all nations will have a share in the world to come (whatever that world might be) could probably be defined as “woke,” given that, I am sure, some people who eschew “pluralism” would claim that only members of their group could be righteous in the eyes of the divine.  

    I prefer not to sleepwalk my way into submission to a narrow view of humanity and the world, but to keep my eyes open for new ideas, relationships and understandings.  

   Maybe there are more partners out there in doing just that than I might imagine.