What happens when we discover that God loves diversity?

Biblical reflections of Carlos Osma published on his blog Homoprotestentes (Spain) on June 13, 2020, freely translated by Giulia Garofani

Apart from those who have decided to live outside reality, or are blocked by their lies, it is clear that diversity is one of the characteristics that defines the world in which we live. We are different beings, who feel different things, and are understood in very different ways.

At least this is what happens when you create spaces of freedom where people can express themselves exactly as they would like. It is evident that the different identities, despite their limits, can help us try to shape everything we are, even if it must be taken for granted that we run the risk of making one better than the other, or even denying or silent those that seem unacceptable to us.

For us Christians, this reality of diversity that we introduce ourselves every day, makes us ask what the latter tells us about God, how it reveals it to us. And the simplest conclusion is the one that says that if we are created in his image, God must also be different. So that how clear, monolithic and completely adamant is our idea of ​​God, the more we could be mistaken. At this moment I will not talk about the divinity itself, I am more concerned with the influence it has on our perception of reality.

What changes if our God is different? However, I do not refer to what changes of God, but what changes in our way of understanding the world and ourselves if this God is something more complete than the black and white radiography that someone has made of him.

It is absolutely evident that all those Christians who deny diversity, who oppose that it is recognized by the Church or protected by society, reflect a tribal god who lies on the side of some (those who are like them) but not with the rest. A God who puts some people above others, and who places the rich western man heterosexual on the top of the Babel Tower a few centimeters from touching the divinity.

Obviously all the ideas we have of God are absolutely partial and conditioned, however: can we really say that in this case we are talking about divinities? I think that, however conditioned it is, there is a limit that has been widely exceeded here and that makes it impossible to believe that we are dealing with something that remotely refers to totally something else.

Deny the existence of those who are different inevitably leads to the need to have a series of rules, laws, stories and customs that allow to naturalize this negation. In fact, the tribal gods are always accompanied by their jurists priests, capable of finding Google faster in which chapter and verse it is written that you cannot be or feeling differently from the divine one (his).

The Vatican, for example, has just published the text "Male and female he created them"To alert those who want"annihilate nature", Demonstrating their inability to put themselves to those who are the victim of oppression for the umpteenth time.

Their tribal god is concentrated to protect a certain system that excludes and discriminates those who are not part of it, and moves away from the god of the Bible, that of which Genesis states: "And God saw what he had done, and it was very good " (GN 1,31). That different God who reveals himself at every moment of our life if we have enough eyes, and we do not condemn people and tell them how to identify or what he has to hear.

The tribal gods are not only false, like all the prophets and prophetesses that have as a spokesperson, but also only capable of generating false lives. If there is one thing that experience teaches us is that the more the God of a certain person resembles the tribal god of orthodoxies, the more he will treasure repressions and lies.

The opacity of the religious structures that are strictly opposed to the God of diversity, to the God of the Bible, hides nothing but corruption, envy, pain, suffering, abuses, lies and falsehoods. And we all know this, so I don't understand why some followers of the God of diversity have so much need for the approval of the God of Orthodoxy. How long they will need before realizing that it is false!

The different God in which no different human beings must be reflected, it is strange. First of all, because even if it contains all our projections, it does not let it be grasped, it is elusive. The God of diversity never tells us what the correct action is, or the exact answer; It does not offer us security, nor miraculous solutions. One day we think that he is talking to us, and the next day we realize that we had already prerequented the message in our unconscious.

The God of diversity is enormous, immense, intractable, indomitable ... bold and courageous. But he is also an accorder, protector, a friend, unamadre ... weak, humble and with a spirit of sacrifice. We perceive the different God with more sharpness only when love is in the middle. Where there is love, there is God, the different God, the strange God.

And it is creating those moments, those spaces where love becomes present in the diversity that wanted to give us, that we can perceive who is better. In places where love shines for its absence, where there is only a correct form of being, the tribal god sets himself at his leisure. Where there is love there is a path to go that brings us closer to God through the neighbor. This I think it is the best criterion to understand close to that God we find ourselves.

Original text: Dioses Extraños