When I was a kid, we visited my Polish Grandma regularly. My Dad wasn’t always with us but when he was, he would make a Polish joke, as in how dumb they were or something like that. He had a rotating list of choices, and we could tell, every time, that my Grandma hated it. Hated it. I think my Dad knew that too.
Whenever that happened my Mother would turn to whichever of her children were present and say, you know why they call those Christmas lights Italian lights (my Dad was Italian), and we were expected as part of the drama, to say no, why? And she would say, they aren’t too bright. We knew my Dad could hear that but he never acknowledged it.
Every family has their banter. Every family knows what buttons to push and how to irritate each other. But there is a deeper lesson here that I am only recently aware of, a socialization of behavior that is hard to pinpoint if you aren’t looking. We were being asked to choose. To pick what part of our heritage was better. We were being taught that there was a better choice and that there was a certain power and reward behind making it.
The immediate power as a child was recognizing which parent to side with in the moment. Who could make our life easier and who could make it harder? Do you side with the victor or the underdog? There are consequences to both.
But long term, we learn to see ourselves as good, powerful, better than others. We learn to be individuals, successfully crafted into an ideal. We learn that others are not like us, and that makes them less than us, and sometimes a threat. Us and them. Good and bad. We create a binary world where there isn’t a lot of neutral, not a lot of gray.
I think this is the root of a lot of our social problems. We don’t know how to create a world where everyone is good, welcome and equal. We are afraid to be less than the best, less than perfect, and so we need people who can be less than us. We don’t know how to build community where everyone is regarded for who they are and not expected to become something, This binary world of winners isn’t real. But it is killing us. Please pray about how we can heal from this false learning and become a Body of Christ that values all its parts as beloved.