I am currently reading a book called Einstein’s Monsters by the astronomer Chris Impey. The book is ostensibly about black holes but the author deliberately chose not to have that be his title (although it is in the subtitle) because of the baggage that the term carries in our day and age, where people use black hole to define something with the characteristic of a bottomless pit. Anyway this hesitancy about using a correct term got me to thinking not about black holes but words that carry baggage and convey things that we may not really wish to convey.
When I was in high school and early college my religious views ranged somewhere between solipsism and a sort of narcissistic home brewed religion. I had of course been raised in a Christian household but turned on that. In order to maintain my views I had a strong need to define Christianity in a way to make it easily refutable. To do this I often watched late night evangelists; the guys in shiny suits who promised for a donation of $50 to send you a handkerchief that they had prayed over. It was a pretty easy Christianity to dismiss, full of hucksterism and shallowness. To keep my comfortable and smug worldview I needed to define any competition in very unthreatening ways. It worked for a while but eventually I found myself embracing Christianity and being ordained.
There is an old mantra in finance, which says I will loan you any amount of money you want as long as I get to define the terms. The idea being that by defining terms we can make the act of giving away money advantageous for us – it is the basic principle of credit card companies. I bring all of this up to the question of how do we define terms about others and how do they define terms about us? Meaning do we relate to people as they actually are or do we relate to them in ways that are convenient for us? I would argue that we deal more and more with people in ways that we want to define them rather than as they actually are. Like the famous statement wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
With the rise of the Internet it has probably become easier to define who others are largely because we can always find a person or group who look at the world in the same way that we do. As a result we can have our self-defined terms reinforced and begin to believe that there are no other opinions about which to be concerned. And this is really too bad, this sort of self-selection that technology has allowed to happen.
I had an uncle who was retired Air Force and staunchly right wing. When he was older he moved into a retirement home and one of his best friends was a retired college professor who was staunchly left wing. They, of course, debated and made fun of each other but they also liked and respected each other. They realized that underneath their opinions there was something deeper, something that they really enjoyed.
When we define others we can miss the more important things. If we define someone by their views on how healthcare is distributed how much in taxes should be collected we can miss that like us, they are also created in the image of God. May we as Christians look first to the image of God and all things that unite and not the things that separate, be they real or imagined.