A zillion different colours

A rainbow cross made for me
by my new friend.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting really tired of this black and white world that so many of us are living in. You know, good versus evil, liberal versus conservative, gay versus straight, believer versus non-believer, east versus west, and any other seemingly opposing viewpoints you care to pit against one another. Dividing ourselves into camps is never a good idea for human beings. It's the antithesis of inclusion, of openness to others, and about as far from God's plan for the world as we can get. God includes everything, if we look around for a minute. It's just we humans who divide the world into opposing categories.

At the L'Arche Emmaus retreat in Montreal two weeks ago, I was blessed to journey with a young assistant who had recently come out as a gay man. He is a really beautiful person with many gifts, including a deep intelligence, compassion, understanding, warmth, openness, honesty, and a wonderful sense of humour. He gave me my best belly laugh of the week! Thankfully, his family, friends, and L'Arche community are supportive of him, and he is able to honour and celebrate the way God made him to be. We spent a lot of time talking about his hopes and his dreams, and it was a joy to listen to a man who knows and loves himself and wants to share his gifts with others, including someone to love.

But there are so many people in his position who feel that that they have no choice but to pretend to be what they are not, to deny their sexuality in places where its spectrum is not understood or honoured. In sexuality, as in most things, there is so much more than the black and white, this-versus-that perspective. The full colour spectrum is made of zillions of different colours, each of them important and necessary to the whole.

God sees all of the people he and she has created as important and necessary to the whole, too, or she and he wouldn't have created us! It's long past time for us to stop worrying about human-made categories in our ideologies, spiritualities, nationalities, sexualities, and simply live in the inclusive reality that is God.