Your mission, should you choose to accept it....

DIVERSITY AND VALUES. undoubtedly, these words can attract a lot of attention in our politically charged society. However, when we go beyond superficiality, it becomes clear that these words mean a lot for those who think of themselves as missionaries.

For those preparing to serve in mission, diversity will take on a new meaning from the very first day they enter a new land. Perhaps we've always considered diversity to be one's willingness to accept, usually in a patronizing manner, the "different" ones, the "other." This view also indicates that we are letting others in and allowing diversity to exist. However, the call for each Christian to be engaged in mission for the sake of the gospel takes us beyond limited parochial attitudes and perspectives.

A key aspect of going on mission means reaching out to others and entering worlds--be they neighborhoods, villages, or cultures--that are different from our own.

Missionaries are people who feel this call to reach out and respond to it. As noted theologian and anthropologist Anthony Gittins writes, "We missionaries are impelled in a centrifugal direction, away from our familiar world. But wa are thereby drawn centripetally toward the world of others, a world that existed before us and independently of our knowledge and consent."

The call to mission, to reach out and go beyond our own world, is a task that many are not comfortable with. Persons who happen to be a part of an ethnic or social group of majority status, replete with its expectations of cultural and economic dominance, will often consider diversity and differences as their problem, not ours.

However, if we open ourselves to deeper meanings of life and God's creation, we are able to understand diversity and differences not as trendy words but as hallmarks of humanity. Pope John Paul II sounded this theme in his recent address to the United Nations on its 50th anniversary as he reminded the nations that "to cut oneself off from the reality of difference--or, worse, to attempt to stamp out that difference--is to cut oneself off from the possibility of sounding the depths of the mystery of human life."

It is through sounding these depths of the mystery of human life that we can encounter the deeper meaning of our faith. How do we feel about diversity? Is it a blessing or a challenge to us? These are crucial questions as each of us ponders our mission. Our faith, which, as the pope reminds us, is not silent on this issue, can guide us in how we live with the rich possibilities that diversity has to offer.

Unfortunately, human history gives us many examples of how diversity and differences have been greeted with fear and hate instead of love and hope. Very often, our first reaction to differences is to interpret them as a source of conflict--a reaction that is not guided by faith. In his U.N. address, Pope John Paul 11 pointed out the sad reality of this sort of knee-jerk reaction: "Unhappily, the world has yet to learn how to live with diversity, as recent events in the Balkans and Central Africa have painfully reminded us. The fact of 'difference,' and the reality of the 'other,' can sometimes be felt as a burden, or even as a threat." This way of the world--viewing differences with fear and as a burden or a threat--isn't restricted to political and social abstraction. It goes on to infect how entire cultures and individuals are treated.

WE MIGHT ASK, "WHY ALL THE ATTENTION TO diversity? Political correctness? Diversity sensitivity and awareness training?" Granted, such questions may seem trendy, but perhaps they can lead us deeper into how we relate our faith to the world around us. Consider the lawyer's question to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus responds by sharing with him the parable of the Good Samaritan. The lawyer was also reminded that his neighbor was the Samaritan--truly the "other" for the people of Jesus' time and society. Our neighbor is not always one who looks and lives like us, but our faith and call to mission lead us to know and serve our neighbor, even if they are the other. As mission takes us more and more out of our familiar worlds, our neighbors will change. However, the change will go beyond our limited understanding as we become a new and different neighbor to the people we encounter in mission.

In considering the identity of our neighbors. and how we are to treat them, our Christian faith has even more to say. We are called to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Such words are radical when compared to the wisdom of the world. just as the way of the world often tells us to treat those different from ourselves with contempt, it often tempts us to limit the scope of our love and concern for others. Consider the views of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, on the command of Jesus Christ that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. "If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way ... He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him, and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him ... But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so."

Such a perspective might be attractive if all we do is think of how we can get ahead--usually at the expense of others. However, this way of the world keeps the focus on ourselves and what we can gain. If we follow it, we will not venture out--to others and other worlds. Instead, we will become stagnated in our wants, which, if human experience is to be trusted, never can be completely satisfied. Mission, of course, calls us to venture outward to the stranger. Unlike the status quo of the world, being in mission means we live as if others really matter.

SOME SIGNS OF HOPE CAN BE DISCERNED IN our world as we respond to the call of the gospel to work for peace and justice and truly serve those in need. Recent attempts to promote greater sensitivity to minorities and women through political correctness have achieved some limited successes and opened the eyes of many to the reality of injustice and intolerance in our society. While such efforts have good means and ends, they can also appear to be superficial. The Christian call to mission leads us to go deeper and be nourished by values that withstand changes in the political landscape. Our mission is rooted in values that are nourished by the gospel.

These values impel us to go to the "other" and the "different." At the same time, we go fully aware that Christ has gone before us. We can be reminded of this reality through Saint Paul's Letter to the Ephesians: "For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." In our mission we do not cross boundaries and go to others with hostility; we go with an open heart, willing to serve and be in solidarity with others.

The values that we are called to live out in our mission are not passive realities. They require us to make conscious choices that follow the gospel, even if it leads us to a reality that is different. The values we follow call for change within our own culture and guide us in our encounter with other cultures. In his encyclical, Evangelium vitae, john Paul speaks of some of these new values and how they call for change. "In a word, we can say that the cultural change which we are calling for demands from everyone the courage to adopt a new lifestyle, consisting in making practical choices--at the personal, family, social, and international level--on the basis of a correct scale of values: the primacy of being over having, of the person over things. This renewed lifestyle involves a passing from indifference to concern for others, from rejection to acceptance of them." This correct scale of values and renewed lifestyle are essential to mission. They lead us to the boundaries we must cross and give us strength and meaning for the journey.