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March 5th.
2008
NOT EASY BEING ME
After I was ordained one of the
biggest life changes for me was how people treated me. Folks slip and
say a “bad word” and then immediately apologized to me. Likewise,
people began to associate me with the opinions and theologies of
everybody from Jerry Fallwell to the Pope. I am blessed to have a good
circle of “non-church” friends, and yet even at times the teasing I get
from them almost always are church or religious jokes.
I have a number of friends and colleagues who through the years have
expressed similar experiences on how people respond to them based on
their “particularities.” Specifically, I have associates who are people
of color and they share awful stories of shabby treatment based on what
they believe is because of their race. Also, I have served with a number
of women who have detailed for me how they believe people have responded
to them based solely on their gender. As well, I have had a number of
conversations with young folks and those in their “senior years” who
have described mistreatment because of their age.
In my experience the reality is that certain folks are going to only
view you, and consequently respond to you, through a very small lens. If
you are a clergy person, a person of color, a woman, at one end of the
chronological continuum and frankly countless other “boxes” some people
are going to react to you in a certain way.
The other reality, the one we have control over, is how we respond to
others perspective toward us. To this end, I am reminded of one of the
wisest statements I have ever heard, “I am a child of God. God created
me this way. God has given me gifts to use for his purposes. It is not
about me. It is about God shinning through me. If a person is challenged
by the way God created me. That's between God and that person. All I can
be is the person God created me to be.”
So do you think it was a woman, a person of color, a senior citizen, a
clergy person or combination of all of them who made this statement? It
doesn't matter. What matters is that it was a child of God.
Blessings,
The Rev. Brian N. Prior, Rector
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