“The world today is closer together and adherents of non-Christian religions live among us. In this situation, for the sake of understanding and peaceful coexistence, it is necessary to take a look over the fence of our own cultural context into the world of religions. In the process, we ascertain that compassion and beneficence are not restricted to our cultural context, but rather are universal human and primordial religious phenomena.”
― Cardinal Walter Kasper, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life
It is not always easy to embrace other cultures and religions. Prejudice, the habit of stereotyping segments of society, or other religions and cultures is not just easy to overcome. It is something we do without thinking. Which is the problem, I believe. I have quite a few prejudices and actually don’t know I have them until something comes up, and well, there they are. The world is smaller; space and time aren’t what they used to be. Instant access to information is almost instant. You would think that with all of the knowledge that is available on the World Wide Web, that prejudices would lessen, however that does not seem to be the case. Knowledge and understanding of others weakens our tendency to pre-judgment.
Online ghettos are very common. Like minded people refusing to look over the fence at anyone else and what they actually believe, or who they really are, or if they do, they will use sources that actually agree with them. In doing this compassion is often lost, swallowed up by fear.
As a Catholic, I know what it is like to be stereotyped by people who should know better. However I don’t get too upset, since I do it myself. I guess all that we can do is to understand it for what it is and work with it.
I believe that a basic human longing is to be simply seen and understood. However it may not be so easy to show that in return to others who are different, but have the same basic desire. People can often live out from the stereotype that is projected upon them.or again, we see what agrees with our world view and reject the rest, or find ways to argue it out of existence..we say this one person is an exception, thereby freeing ourselves of the hard work of looking deeper and freeing ourselves and others from defining them too narrowly.
Sometimes we need to sit with an experience, be it one of joy or otherwise and really understand our reactions and then to universalize it over the rest of humanity. No one likes to be stereotyped; it is a form of cruelty that happens because a basic human compassion is missing. If we do not go inward and learn from ourselves and then understand that this self-knowledge helps us to understand others, then over the long haul people are only liked as long as they are useful, we objective one another, stripping away our humanity.
I am still a bundle of unconscious promptings. I believe it is my faith in God and my seeking to live out the teaching of Jesus that keeps me from being sucked in and by allowing that to happen, make myself into a stereotype, it lessen my potential to become more human…which I believe is what Christians and all peoples are called to become. The problem is, we are for the most part, primates, intelligent ones, but driven by forces that we don’t understand and fail to comprehend very often. So we are out of control much of the time I believe. I know many will not agree with me, but for me the study of history and the daily news seems to bring that out to be true.
Br. Mark Dohle, OCSO
Holy Spirit Monastery
