Does the world have room for one more blog? Hasn’t everything been said that could be said?
While there are generalities about this being human, the unique position, place and timing of individuals will result in a unique perspective on personhood, community, nationhood, and planetary stewardship. Therefore, each person with whom we speak has a story and perspective that will enrich and enlarge us.
If you are from North America, you would understand my assertion that as school age children we feared being different. We were desperate to “fit in.” No matter what clothes you were able to afford, how much money you could throw at a birthday party to have clowns and pony rides, in the end most of us lived life on the outer edges of school yard society. I was a first generation Canadian, from a devout Christian family and wore my hair in braids and thick stockings on my legs. No matter how much teachers encouraged us to let our unique lights shine, I craved uniformity and absorption into the collective.
As an adult I have come to embrace my upbringing and family history as the space that permits me to make surprising connections between what happened in the past with current happenings. This idea reached its apex in a course I took for my Master of Divinity (MDiv’17), Cultural Formation of the Clinician. Our assignment was to make a genogram, which is basically a family tree on steroids. Extra details were added to the genogram each week as we discussed how sexism, gender bias, financial stratification, addiction, religious identity, racism, ableism, mental health and intellectual bias, etc. impacted us and formed us into people who judged others.
My genogram became an incredible pattern of colour and symbol so that the picture of my history gave me a Eureka moment in understanding why I do what I do. This biggest impact on my life is that of historical immigration. My children are the fifth continuous generation who will live out their lives in a land not of their birth. These five generations are part of a seven-generation migration story. My Oma (grandmother) introduces our history with the phrase, “Hungary needed more people to work the land, so they called out for people to come live and work there. Our family responded and moved from Germany to Hungary in the early 1800’s.”
Here is the beginning of my understanding of who I am, where I came from, and where I am going. It all starts with a change in location, a change in perspective, a change of mind, a change of heart. At some point I realized that I am a special snowflake… as is everyone else. Special snowflakes do talk, and I have something to say.
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