No Love for the Non-Conformist?

 What happens in our society when someone does not seem to conform? He is wrong. We feel a moral responsibility to help him change. We want to see him fit in and share the colour of everyone else. We are all yellow.

What do we do when the colourful person challenges the set of standards for communication, for cultured behaviour, for likeminded opinions? We call him strange, an outsider and loner, someone in need of being ‘treated’, and perhaps even someone we with aching hearts urge to be put away in an institution. There he may eat chemicals to calm down, blur his thoughts and make him inconsequential. The hope is that the dies within himself, and he will be resurrected with a yellow garb. Perhaps are the people all white in the institution. The walls are white and the workers are dressed in white. And white is not a colour; and white is symbol for whitewash, for sterility, for the clean and perhaps the pure. It is also the symbol of nothingness.

We think of our day and age as more developed, more human, better than earlier historical epochs; but is it truly so? Why do we kill the questions the non-conformist raise by calling him a madman and best ignored?

But I say: There is no argument against love.

How do we respond when the preacher struggles with faith, when the questions are complex and answers not simple? I have seen it: people turn their backs silently, feel like they are betrayed, do not fight against or struggle along side the lonely brother.

How do we respond when our leaders are becoming sick and depressed? We hope for the institutions, for the professionals and for the white washed walls. Then we have no further responsibility.

We think we live in a day and age where we have better systems for care. But it is a lie, and it only serves as buffer for our own comfort, as long as we can function within the paradigm.

But again, I say: There is no argument against love.

How do we respond when the stranger with other stories defines the relations in our world, using words and concepts with redefined content? We think he needs to unlearn his concepts and relearn the modes of speech to fit into our limitations. It may be the way he walks, the things he finds interesting, the comparisons he senses and expresses, the new and eccentric connections he sees in culture and interaction. But we have the power. We decide that he is an outsider, someone of no consequence. We decide that his voice must be silenced, and we give it no room. There is no room in the Inn for the non-conformist.

Have we never learnt that what drives our culture is the reaction against status quo? Our complacency with conformity leads only to mediocrity. Our complacency is denying someone life. Our refusal of own society to be a living organism is also a denial of real humanity. And as such, we deny the creative hand of God.

How should we then meet it?

There is no argument against love.

Paul says, in the context of Christian fellowship and the spiritual gifts, that without love nothing has value. He speaks of man of the implications of love in the letter to the Corinthians and sums up the passage with a triad: hope, faith and love; and the greatest among these is love.