I Want to See Color

I want to see color. I value color. Color gives life to a painting and texture and layers to life. For color is part of who we are, part of our story, and in fact is a story itself. Without color, there is no vibrancy or depth. Part of the joy of being married to an artist is that we talk about color and our home is full of often-changing colors. And I want our world to be as well. Far from not seeing color, I want to see it more vividly.

In an attempt to prove that we are not racist, we often will say things like, “I don’t see color, just people.” And the intent may be good behind that claim but let me offer two thoughts. First, when we say that, we are not being honest. Of course, we see color, and often we judge by it, we just don’t want to admit it. And second, when we say that to a person of color, what we are really saying is that we don’t see them. The truth is that a person’s skin (the color, the scars, the wrinkles and spots) tell a story of who that person is and how they got to where they are. To say that we don’t see that is to say that the person’s story is not important.

After listening to a sermon on Ephesians 2 this week, I spent time with some of the verses, and came away with an interesting lesson. Here are verses 14-17:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.

In the original writing, the reference is to Jews and Gentiles, but we can easily apply it to other divisions between people, including our current racial struggles.

We are told that our peace with each other is through Christ, who took all the hostility on himself in order to set aside the box-checking of the law and to create a new, reconciled humanity. He called out to those who were far away and those who were near. Nobody was too far away to be brought in, but nobody was close enough on their own either.

Here is what I saw…neither side was being called over to the other side, but both were being called to a new “side,” a new place, a new humanity! I think one of our problems, especially for white people, is that we think that racial reconciliation/restoration means that others who are different from us learn how to live in “our” world, and have to give up whatever cultural/religious/communal identifiers that get in the way.

I will never forget the lesson that a friend taught me in seminary. She was Korean American and had lived in a large city on the west coast. She described the vibrancy of the diversity of people there, and I called it a melting pot. She very quickly, and graciously, told me it was not a melting pot, but a mosaic, where the uniqueness of everyone added to the beauty of the whole.

That is what can happen when we see color. We each bring our stories, our victories, our scars, our hurts and our dreams. We bring different hues and shades and layers and textures. And together, God creates a mosaic, a new humanity.

For what is a mosaic but a bunch of small, maybe broken pieces, arranged together to tell a story. At first, it is a pile of broken pieces, but in the hand of an artist, those small, broken parts can come together to make something more beautiful than any of them ever could on their own.