If it's all the same to you ...

If the flowers of a garden were all of one color, the effect would be monotonous to the eye; but if the colors are variegated, it is most pleasing and wonderful. The difference in adornment of color and capacity of reflection among the flowers gives the garden its beauty and charm. Therefore, although we are of different individualities, different in ideas and of various fragrances, let us strive like flowers of the same divine garden to live together in harmony.

That quotation comes from one of the many speeches given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his 1911-12 travels in the United States. He was talking about unity in diversity, a central teaching of the Bahá'í Faith. I like his analogy. It’s easy to picture a garden where all the flowers are, say, red and picture another garden where the flowers are red and purple and blue and yellow and white and orange, and to know that most of us would rather look at the second garden.

Or would we?

The idea for this week’s blog came from two sources: a novel I finished last week, and Thanksgiving. The novel is A Walk Through Fire, William Cobb’s fictional portrayal of the backstory to the ragged beginnings of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement that challenged legal racism and eventually led to the election of a dark skinned president with an African name, an event that was beyond unimaginable in 1960.

I was intrigued by the reasoning of the book’s White characters who believe that anything, even murder, is totally justified when necessary to “protect our way of life.” It’s easy to see these characters’ thinking as evil or stupid but the way they see it is simply self-defense against the threat of change. Throughout the novel many of Cobb’s characters, both Black and White, argue about or warn against or in some other way reject the developing move toward legal equality out of fear that it will take away what they already have and give them something different that they either know or fear they will not like.

Without trying to oversimplify an extremely complex subject, at the moment I’m interested in only one question: why are people so attracted to sameness? Why do we so often want to do things the same way as they’ve been done before? Why do so many of us on this small planet find such security in sameness that we completely reject others who are unlike us? Why does this fear of difference or love of sameness or whatever it is afflict humankind throughout history in every part of the world?

OK, I guess those were four questions if you want to get technical about it. And they are certainly not new or unique questions, they just happen to be what was on my mind this week.

So where does Thanksgiving come in? Right here.

“Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof would be a good theme song for the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s part of our calendar, because so much homage is paid to preserving old patterns of celebration, returning to former times, and keeping everything the same, as if sameness were the key to harmony and love and faith. I don’t believe it is. Neither is constant change, of course, that would be chaos, but an appreciation for the value of change needs to balance the prevailing wisdom that a good holiday is a traditional holiday. Change, after all, is the pre-eminent condition of life.

This phenomenal world will not remain in an unchanging condition even for a short while. Second after second it undergoes change and transformation. Every foundation will finally become collapsed; every glory and splendor will at last vanish and disappear, but the Kingdom of God is eternal and the heavenly sovereignty and majesty will stand firm, everlasting. Hence in the estimation of a wise man the mat in the Kingdom of God is preferable to the throne of the government of the world.

That thought also came from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. And again at the risk of sounding simplistic, I see this principle operating even in something as mundane as a Thanksgiving dinner. In this case, it was the dinner I enjoyed at my daughter’s home. About the only tradition that we honored was the fact that we came together to eat food.

It was a potluck meal that included two kinds of chili, Korean rice noodles with vegetables, homemade Chinese dumplings, corn muffins, fruit, rice, veggies, and an experimental mushroom-pineapple concoction. No sweet potatoes. No cranberries. No stuffing. No mashed potatoes or gravy. No Cool Whip-Jello mold. And turkey (ground, not carved) only made an appearance in one of the chili recipes. The group included family and friends, young and old, American and Asian, people who were already well acquainted and others who first met that day, a truck driver, a one-man-band performer, a composer, College of Education doctoral students, a home schooling mom. We played Uno, learned about African drumming, discussed educational issues, spent an inordinate amount of time and brain power deciphering a complicated logic puzzle, and sometimes laughed till we cried “uncle.”

Nobody watched a football game on TV. The only pumpkins in the house were painted ones, compliments of my grandsons. We plopped the food on the kitchen table in no particular order and sat down to eat on any chair or piece of floor we could find. Sameness, 0. Unity in diversity, definitely a 10. Maybe even a little piece of the Kingdom of God.

Really, an altogether lovely afternoon that --

Wait a minute. Did I say there was no stuffing? No? Stuffing? NO STUFFING???? Now that’s going too far. There are some things that should never change!

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