This week, Chaplain Rabia Harris has written a reflection for us! Chaplain Harris is a PA IPL board member and a speaker, writer, activist, and chaplain specializing in the interface between spirituality and politics. Rabia launched the Muslim Peace Fellowship for the theory and practice of Islamic nonviolence, was the founding president of the Association of Muslim Chaplains, and one of four co-founders of the Community of Living Traditions, a multireligious residential experiment in peace, justice, and care of the earth. She currently serves as editor of Fellowship, the semiannual magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
“I’m not seen as having a disability at the moment, but I’m getting older all the time, and it’s not hard to imagine that one of these days I will be moving from the category of “not disabled” to the category of “disabled.” If so, I might have to make some new arrangements for living my life, but it’s the categories themselves that will probably cause the biggest problems. They usually do. One of the (many) odd things about human beings is that we often have a hard time grasping that we easily could be different than we currently are — or believe we are. It’s hard for the young to think of themselves as old, for the righteous to think of themselves as sinful, for the rich to think of themselves as poor, for the healthy to think of themselves as sick. The list of categories unthinkable for me to inhabit goes on and on. But they all come down to the overarching binary of binaries, “stigmatized” versus “not stigmatized.” How we fear that stigma! And it is always a social thing. So if I find myself one day soon in a stigmatized category, I may be very short of social support in putting together new living arrangements that work. The oddest thing is, we have made this stigma up, to poison ourselves and each other, when we could just as easily be helpful, humble, compassionate, and full of awe. And that is where nature comes in.
Nature stigmatizes nothing. One of its great healing powers is that it has no opinions about “our kind,” whatever that kind may be. It opens a door out of the prison of human false certainties, woven of words, and into another realm of certainties altogether, where some things are very reliable but nothing can be definitively known. Nature embraces all. And we can learn from that — if we pay attention — to embrace ourselves and others, and to leave all the judgment to God. May everyone receive Nature’s loving invitation to continue to become!”