Jessica Wires's Blog
Elephants and the Big Picture / 02.16.10, 09:33 PM
“There are four blind men who discover an elephant. Since the men had never encountered an elephant before, they grope about seeking to understand and describe this new phenomenon. One grasps the trunk and concludes that it is a snake. Another explores one of the elephant’s legs and describes it as a tree. A third finds the elephant’s tail and announces that it is a rope. And the fourth blind man, after discovering the elephant’s side, concludes that it is a wall. Which one is right? Each in his blindness is describing the same thing: an elephant. Thus all are right, but none wholly so.” – A Buddhist Sutra
I have heard this story used to make several different points. I have heard it used to describe God, being something we cannot fully understand. I have also heard it used as an aid in understanding world religions and the reason that there are so many. But recently when I was reflecting over it I realized a different meaning as it applies to what I am learning this year about reconciling differences.
We can all relate to the four blind men in this story. They are all certain of what they have found based on the knowledge that they have been given and on the influence of their surroundings. That does not make them any less wrong.
Everyone has a different perspective based on the influence of culture, upbringing, and surroundings. We decide we do not like someone because they are “so different”. We cannot live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same churches, or share our lives with each other. Why? Because they are calling something a snake and we are so sure that it is a tree. We cannot understand their point of view and they cannot understand ours.
This disunity has been a problem we as humans have been facing for a long time. We are separated by race, social class, religion, and any other reason we can find. For example, since moving to Chicago I have become aware of the racial and economic lines that are drawn all over the city. It is made very clear that many people are unwilling to live around those that are “different” than they are. In my community (Englewood) a huge injustice I have witnessed is the cycle of poor education. My neighbors and friends that live here cannot send their children to the kind of schools that they deserve to go to. They do not have the same advantages from the very beginning because racism and classism have kept them stuck in a situation that is nearly impossible to get out of. So around and around we go.
We are told that the two greatest commands are love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. We seem to have a hard time defining neighbor. In a book I recently read, Jesus and the Disinherited, the author, Howard Thurman writes, “Jesus defined the neighbor by telling of the Good Samaritan. With sure artistry and great power he depicted what happens when a man responds directly to human need across the barriers of class, race, and condition. Every man is potentially every other man’s neighbor. Neighborliness is nonspatial, it is qualitative. A man must love his neighbor directly, clearly, permitting no barriers between.”
Luckily we are not left without a solution to our problem. There is a fifth man in our story who is not blind. God can see the whole picture (the whole elephant). Jesus came to heal our blindness. To show us the big picture that he sees. If we would allow ourselves to be healed we would see that we are wrong and from there we could work towards racial and social reconciliation and the peace that we are meant to live under. We have a role to play in the process. We have to be willing to accept that we cannot see the big picture and be willing to move towards understanding and loving those neighbors that we find to be different. It has been my experience that we are usually not as different as we think we are. If we will allow ourselves to be healed of our blindness and have God-vision we will realize that we are all looking at an elephant instead of a bunch of unrelated objects.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
1 Corinthians 12:21-26
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