Last quarter, I read Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" for my American Literature survey. His poem rubbed some people the wrong way because he was talking about how he was united with everyone and, among others, this included black slaves and native americans. They felt that this was extremely arrogant and probably offensive. I thought it was pretty sweet. But, while their reactions came across like shitting on a loaf of banana bread after finding a lump of baking soda inside your slice, I do think they were on to something.
I was thinking the other day about how important it is to not disassociate myself from others, and how much I need to say "I am one of you, and I will not try to distance myself from you out of fear of who I will be associated with." The balance to me seems to be not attempting to claim understanding of what it means to be a group of people, or even one other person, but to not separate yourselves from them either. I was thinking about this especially with Christianity, where there is so much temptation to distance yourselves from those behaving in what is perceived to be an immoral fashion, or distance yourselves from those who are judging the immoral, distance yourself from Christian pop culture, distance yourself from the heretics. And, there are good reasons to do all those things, at certain times, but I think I'm coming to a place where I may not need to do that, not because I've become like the people I wanted to distance myself from, but because I see something that is more important.
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I've found myself doing that a lot this year. It's kind of a big slap in the face when I'm no longer a student at private christian university, living on campus with a bunch of close christian friends, working at the library surrounded by a bunch of christian books and christian employers and customers, eating, sleeping and breathing and living the christian culture. Working in a job where religion and faith aren't discussed, ever, makes me feel more closed off and vunerable. And that causes me to distance myself from people. And thinking about it, I don't seem to do anything to change that either. That's a major problem.
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