Many threads come together to form the social fabric we all know and love. The strands are interwoven into a rich tapestry we call our culture.
I’m about to pull at one of those threads, not to unravel or debase it, but to study its place as a component of the whole. When an object is taken apart so that a person can analyze how it was put together in the first place, it is being reverse engineered.
Some would argue that religion forms the backbone of our society, one of the pillars on which our nation was constructed. Indeed, we granted ourselves the freedom of religion and also freedom from religion. Not everyone needs or wants religion, but all should be invited to partake.
This brings me to the meat of what I really intended to write about today. In my youth, I was a social outcast. In the 1980s and 1990s, just as today, school revolved around cliques. Stereotypes can do interesting things to people by enforcing traits that we insist be associated with a person’s social group. I never subscribed to these stereotypes and as such, seldom fit in to the cliques.
The experiences of youth provide me with introspection more often than not. Always an unassuming, creative, and introverted one, I often grappled with who I really was—startlingly normal and spectacularly average—versus who I wanted to be. Life was a journey. A serial transition from here to there.
I later realized that, unbeknownst to me, I was born into an exclusive club. Either in car rides or over the kitchen table, when my family discussed acquaintances and friends of friends, we often did so solely through the lens of whether he or she was part of our religion. I didn’t understand the breadth of this revelation until much later, when several wonderful people befriended me at church, which I was attending for the first time in more than a decade.
Christians sometimes sing a well-known hymn titled “A Poor, Wayfaring Man of Grief,” which became my favorite church song. Without reciting the lyrics to any of its seven verses, I would like to discuss this hymn. It relates a first-person account of meeting a weary traveler. The subject of the song (I, me) provides water, comfort, and friendship to the man (the object) while learning a great deal about him- or herself. I had always known this song, but I never really knew it.
Who was the man of grief? As Christians, we always assume the wayfarer referred to Jesus Christ, and while that is a strong guess, the song itself is a metaphor—an allegory intended to teach us how we should greet others as Christians. In that respect, the man of grief is the outsider. The visitor. He is an immigrant and he is a refugee. He is the hungry, the sick, and the homeless. He is gay and he is transgender. He is Jewish and he is Muslim. He is “the least of these.”
“…Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matt. 25:40, KJV)
Jesus Christ welcomes us all to learn about Him and His truth. He encourages us to follow him, without chastising our fellow man or woman for some sin when we can scarcely reconcile our own. To welcome them amongst us without yelling at them to “come the right way” or lecture them about how we perceive their religion. We are to give without judging whether the recipient of our charity will use it to buy booze or drugs.
These are all simple tenets of Christianity and, I think in a larger view, many world religions. Most of us can identify with the subject of the song. Jesus exhorts us to empathize with the object of the song and to share our love for him or her without exception.
When religion works, it brings us together and engenders a sense of unity, a cohesion of parts into a beautiful whole.
In my next post, I want to take a deeper dive into this sphere of religion by speaking of a concept from the particular sect of Christianity to which I have always belonged.