On tolerance...

Clinicians have come up with a label for folks like me...Third Culture Kid (TCK). Born of one culture, raised in another thereby creating an entirely separate third culture that is something of a mishmash of the two. Out of sorts with both mother cultures and simply trying to blend in.

"Now...they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years have a kind of emptiness when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. But...if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents.

Thus, between two countries, we have none at all..."

~Nathanial Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

Daily I am reminded that my worldview, my opinions, my theories, my philosophies are at odds with popular opinion of my chosen home country, home culture--at times even within my own four walls. But all of those things have been shaped by the life I have lived, the life I have experienced. And they are my own. My philosophy on tolerance, on coexistence, comes from a childhood of being in a vast minority...a white American female in a predominantly Islamic African culture...

One of the most important lessons I've ever learned...just because I'm right, that doesn't make you wrong. Usually. There are those who are so closed and narrow minded that it makes my back teeth hurt.

I have been blessed--or cursed--with an insatiable desire for knowledge. I want to know stuff. About lots of stuff. Religion is one of those "stuffs". I've studied my own. I've studied others. There was a time when I went so far as to embrace another as my own...not for long, but long enough. There's much we can learn from "walking in another's moccasins."

Using myself as a primary example...one cannot be judged by the color of one's skin, one's gender, one's religion or one's country of origin. We are judged by our actions. I was raised an Evangelical pentecostal Christian and I have come back to that. Yet I have never drunk poison, nor have I ever handled a snake in the name of faith.

If we lump every believer of one religion under one label, wouldn't it be hypocritical to not do the same with other religions? Or am I no longer blending in?