Labels and the Beauty of Difference

The idea of "labels", their uses, abuses and limits, seems to me to point to the fundamental uses of language and the limit of words. 

Labels have there uses

Is the word the thing? Let's mention something like sexuality, just to catch everyone's attention! In a very real sense there is in nature an unbroken line of continuity between the world's most macho male and the world's most effeminate female, physically, psychologically. Each of us finds ourself somewhere on that line, each of us unique, valueable, irreplaceable. Yet our minds love to label and classify. We create fences, lines and divisions. Judgement follows. Often we even seem to like labeling ourselves and take great pride in doing so. And so our "becoming" and our possibilities can grind to a stop and we congeal.

When we look at and meet another, and we have heard they are "gay", or "Christian" - or whatever - we can easily see only our own experience and understanding of such words. Possibly our label meets theirs! We can miss the actual person altogether, including ourselves! All chance of genuine empathy and mutual understanding can just wither and die.

Don't mistake the finger that points for the moon itself

It seems to me that "reality" lies beyond words. Words have their uses, but also their limits.

 

Expanding on this a bit, it seems to me that "labels" always have their own context, and when the context is lost then things get out of focus. Our minds act like a microscope. Looking at Christianity, for instance, there is Catholocism, the Eastern Orthodox, the various Protestant varieties; adjusting the microscope, within Catholocism, "liberals" and "moderns" and "traditionalists"; Cistercians, Benedictines, Trappists; and mystics, ancient and modern. Then onto the individual hearts and minds experiencing the reality of their faith according to their own lives as lived and experienced themselves, as it has unfolded uniquely for them. It just seems that if we lose the context our minds can get out of focus, and we throw words and labels over something or somebody, losing empathy and communion with them, divided by assumed judgements.

And I would like to repeat that we can miss the actual person altogether, including ourselves. Giving a label to ourselves can create false parameters that eventually stifle all potential for empathy.

There is a relevant passage from the Journals of Thomas Merton regarding "labels" and whatnot. Merton tells of how he was visited by a good friend, Mark Van Doren, and they were watching the flight and activities of some birds together. Mark Van Doren remarked:- "The birds don't know they have names." Merton went on to write in his journal:-

.....no name and no word to identify the beauty and reality of those birds today is a gift of God to me in letting me see them. And that name - God - is not a name! It is like a letter X or Y. Yahweh is a better name - it finally means Nameless One.

Do the birds  know they have names?

All this involves for me what has been called the "beauty of difference". Often it seems that a different haircut, a lifestyle that varies from our own, a different type of clothing, leads not to rejoicing in the sheer diversity of our humanity, but instead can make us close up in a defensive ball, even a knot of fear. Which seems sad, and worse than sad when the fear evolves into persecution - and on a larger scale, wars, killing and Inquisitions.

The beauty of difference

For me, reality is non-dual; truth is One. This One is "The Hidden Ground of Love" that can have no explanation, that cannot be possessed, defined, but can only be shared in communion with others. As has been said in the east:- The Tao can be shared but not divided.

My own Pure Land path has its own symbolism, that of gold for the undifferentiated nature of ultimate reality, and the lotus flower for the individuality of each and every one of us, in fact of each and every "thing". So in depictions of the Pure Land there are fields of golden lotus flowers dancing in the breeze.

Difference need not divide

Thank you