Daily Devotion:

Title: Neither, Nor

Date: February 17, 2013

It happened more than a hundred years ago. A church minister, his fiancée, and two other couples rowed a dory from a cove out to Eagle Island in Penobscot Bay for a picnic. It was a beautiful day until the weather soured. The young couples hurried to their dory, and began to row to shore in wind and chop. Their dory floundered. All hands swam. The women in their layers and long dresses – were unable, unassisted, to make land. The men attempted a rescue. All six drowned that day. A newspaper carried this curious headline, “Three women, two men, and a minister lost at sea.”

Was the minister neither male nor female? What was he? Alien? Super human? When I was a Catholic kid, my friends and I dehumanized the nuns believing that the nuns never slept, nor ate. It was harmless childishness. We didn’t know any better. We raised the nuns far above us, imagining them as super holy beings. 

There is another kind of dehumanizing, the negative kind, that sees another person, or a group of people, as less than human, and therefore, as disposable. We may aim our ill will at those who don’t fit into our worldview, and judge them as unworthy of God’s love. You are a child of God, as is every human being. Judge not.

Let’s Pray: Dear God, You tell us, judge not lest we be judged, and yet it is so difficult to not do that. Open our eyes. Make us see others as You see all Your children. Amen.

Here’s a Thought: Who made you judge?

Source: Matthew 7:1