Lenten journey - walking in another man's shoes

        I seemed to always have had a penchant for standing up for the under appreciated, the marginalized, the misunderstood.  I had always had this feeling of appreciation for the outsider but I did not fully understand it until I was about 50 years old. As a youth I stood up for my neighbor, an older man with cerebral palsy. He was a good man and he worked hard, actually riding his three wheeled bicycle around selling Avon. When he  was made fun of, I stood up to the bullies on his behalf.  On another occasion when my friend Plato was made fun of, I stood up for him as well. Plato was Haitian and honestly, to make fun of him was a bit humorous because I was the minority in town, a token white guy. But stand up I did on numerous occasions. I was rather successful at it too.  If only shaking up the bully but I also think I gave them something to think about, this pudgy pasty white boy geek standing up to them. Perhaps it was utter amazement.

      I left the Roman church out of self respect for them and for myself when I realized I was gay. I think some of my empathy as a youth might very well have been my subconscious knowing instinctively that I to was an outsider. Leaving the church afforded me great freedom of thought if not a bit of anger ( the respect was clearly not mutual ).
In any event, the freedom of not being on the inside any longer was freedom to think and speak and discover the world on the outside. If a prophet is not welcome in his own community, this idiom has been very true for me.  It is not just being an outsider as a gay man. Being gay can leave you feeling an outsider in many situations. But being gay and outside the confines of the Roman Catholic Church allows you great freedom to question and discover answers that you were not even free to think of before.

       As a Lenten exercise, it might be quite revealing and humbling to try and take yourself out of an equation. That is,  imagine wearing someone else's shoes. What is it like to live among white privilege? If that seems foreign, perhaps you can explore that there actually is white privilege and how pervasive it is. So pervasive that you may not even realize the role we often play in perpetuating it.

      Sometimes when we are a part of something, part of the problem, it is very difficult to see an opening, an answer, a solution. In fact, when you are an 'insider', sometimes you see no problems at all.