While browsing my journal, I came across this post from March 24th. I liked how the juxtaposition of two ideas merged into a consciousness-raising thought.
----
Several things came together recently that has clarified my thinking about beings and how we see them.
I was reading in a booklet on the Disabilities Awareness Merit BAdge for Boy Scouts because I am holding a workshop this weekend on it to help boys in our troop earn it. The booklet explained about using first person language when discussing disabilities, or more importantly when discussing people with disabilities. It said that to call someone disabled or handicapped suggested that this was their identity, instead of merely a condition that they deal with. The difference is that someone isn’t their disability, they are a person with a disability. That seemingly small distinction is in fact huge in how we think about those around us.
The second thing that happened is that I came across a video on YouTube with Morgan Freeman talking about Black History month. It is only a minute long, a clip from 60 minutes where Wally Schaeffer asks Morgan Freeman why he doesn’t want there to be a Black History month. He says because American history is black history. He asks Wally is there a White History month? Wally was left speechless for a moment. Finally, he said in defense, I’m Jewish. So Morgan asked him when Jewish HIstory month was? He said, there isn’t one. “Do you want one?” asks Freeman. “No!” said Schaeffer. ah, of course. It only separates us from others. These distinctions. I agree with him wholeheartedly. Of course, the obvious first thought for me was Women’s History month. I realized that I don’t want one either.
So this morning I began putting two and two together. When someone looks at me and sees a woman first, they are limiting me in their thinking right off the bat. When I think of myself as a woman, or that person as a man, or that one over there as black or brown or blind or disabled, I am thinking first with my eyes….I am limiting in my thought their identity to a physical body.
So if I shouldn’t be first identifying people with their skin color, or their gender or their physical and mental abilities, then how should I identify people? The answer for me comes from the Bible, but it is the same in every religion and philosophy on earth. People are beings, first. I call them spiritual ideas, image of God, an expression of Life, wholly good. The Bible says it this way, “and God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”
This beingness isn’t relegated to what we call living organic beings. It includes all of creation--including those things that we call “things” or inanimate objects. If it exists, it is woven into this tapestry of being…each strand touching every other strand, making a single garment of being, whole, One.
Seeing everything as “being”. This keeps me in the moment, in the now, which really is the only place we exist, individually and collectively.
--
Blessings,
debra
