2022-07-06-Inclusion

Session

Opening

Let us speak tonight on “Inclusion” – a timely topic. So much of today’s media coverage is a gloss on exclusion, the opposite of tonight’s subject. For inclusion is, while the most necessary thing under the sun, the most frightening concept in many people’s universe, a universe bereft then of the fruits of so powerful a tide as Inclusion.

Lesson

To include others, whether they are a known quantity or not, is the key to growth, to learning, to understanding the world as a world. When other parts of the globe can find a port in which to anchor, to explore its inhabitants and whose inhabitants may in turn explore them, we have the secret to a fulfilled life, a life worth living, for you [then] can see other lives that are in turn worth living.

No two people are the same, and yet no two peoples are so dissimilar as to be in-inhabitable with one another. Many habits, many traditions, are strange to those to whom they are strange, but all have their traditions, rituals, habits, and it is that very fact that aligns us all. This ritual may be strange to him; and that ritual may be strange to her, but they are all rituals. They all – as different as they may be culture to culture – serve the same need in all of the people. That is what makes Inclusion so obvious a choice.

Many fear ‘the other’ for economic reasons – “They – these others – if not excluded will take our jobs, our livelihood” – but the livelihood referred to is small potatoes compared to the rich rewards of Inclusion. The financial concerns can be dealt with, figured out, but those involved will find that ultimately keeping the status-quo by the life-draining implementation of exclusion is too great a price. Truly, man does not live by bread alone.

Inclusion in your changing world is a tide that is rising and will be faced one way or the other. You may unbar the door, meet your neighbor, put Christ’s precepts into action and benefit thereby; or you can pile up all the furniture you have against that door that is bending, bending, bending until it bursts open, sending you and all that fruitless furniture sprawling. Could not you and your new friends and neighbors have been made comfortable, cozy, on that furniture while you each told tales of your homelands and all you have to share and learn and laugh about? The world is hard enough to navigate, to keep the wolf from the door and “the birds from nesting in your hair” without the added aggravation of fearing your neighbor, your brother, your sister, all of which they are. Inclusion strikes the balance needed for the successful adjustment society to society, culture to culture; the healing embrace of the love borne within each of those destined to be included in the great epoch of mankind’s return to the harmony to which and for which it was born.

Closing

Include these thoughts in your considerations of this subject. It is an important – perhaps the important – subject of our times. There may – oh, there will! – be those [you meet] you don’t like, who will put you to the test. But how will you know if you don’t include them? Life is for learning. Extend your hand.