Difference is the gift that unlikeness brings us. Because of our openness to differences we learn to be in the world in new and exciting ways. We learn that there is more than one kind of way to go through life and do it morally, artistically, happily. We discover that other foods are equally as good for us as anything we have become accustomed to eating. If not better. We begin to understand history and economics and even religion differently.

Differences bring us out of ourselves into a newer, fuller way of being human. We see other models of family life and begin to reexamine our own in the light of them. We begin to recognize likenesses among us that enlarge our understanding of what it means to be human beings together.

Finally, we begin to realize in blazing new ways that no particular people have a monopoly on goodness or a corner on criminal character, an option on God or an ascendancy on godlessness. We come to own that we are all simply human beings together with a great deal to learn from one another if we are ever going to be fully developed, deeply sensitive and wholly human adults. We gift the world with a new definition of home as a union of hearts rather than a union of types.

To be citizens of the world in a world that has itself become a global village, we must all allow ourselves to be called to life by the unknown. Then, perhaps, stunned by the sameness in us, we will no longer lose sleep worrying about the danger of immigration, the danger of strange religions, the danger that comes clothed in other colors, other accents, other ways to marry and bury and pray and be alive, all of it in the name of humanity.

Most of all, we will all come to understand that the human race has a great deal more in common than it has difference.

—from Between the Dark and the Daylight by Joan Chittister (Image)