So here I am. Durham, NC. 8 hours and 12 minutes from my Bluegrass home. Surprisingly, few things are different. Rolling hills, Southern accents of varying degrees, tobacco farms and an unhealthy college basketball obsession still populate and define the landscape.
And yet despite this, or perhaps even because of it, the tiny differences are all the more striking. The most striking change is in the diversity. Durham is immensely diverse with every skin tone, language and faith imaginable seemingly represented in only a few square miles. Headscarfed Middle-Eastern women check out Indian college students at Target. In the Starbucks where I now sit two bakers, one independent and one employed by a grocery, discuss the various issues involved in catering to a Jewish clientele. And of course along the shaded groves and walks that make up the greater Duke area there is the endless milling throng of students of all sorts (even before undergraduate classes begin).
The diversity is echoed in the geography as well. A street of old well-kept homes interspersed with beautiful foliage catering to the upper-middle class and academia of Duke butts up against a lower-income African American neighborhood. A street over the businesses advertise in Spanish and on yet another street an Islamic Community Center shares parking with a Christian Church. The possibility for finding some kind of truly diverse community seems just under the surface. Conversely, of course, tension, hatred and mistrust are always on hand when people of varying sorts meet.
And yet despite the possibility of problems I am encouraged by the things I've begun to see. From my vantage point in the cafe I see a dizzying human rainbow driving, walking and occasionally biking past. I think this the kind of place of Paul would have been drawn to, a place just waiting for barriers to be overcome. It all reminds me of a quote first entrusted to me by one of my professors but originally from the brilliant mind of Thomas Merton:
"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness..."
Logic is never going to overcome barriers of discrimination and distrust. And yet where logic fails, Love and Empathy seem to have the amazing power to not simply overcome barriers but to transcend them entirely. Only Love with its strange irrationality. Only Love in its mysticality. That power that Merton suddenly glimpsed at that corner. God touches us and for an instant the illusions of our prejudices fall away."Like waking from a dream of separateness...". Acts 9:18 (NASV) "And immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he regained his sight..."
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