Mutterings from Fr. David
“Mummy … mummy! Some of the grade 6 boys were calling each other names and they used this yucky word.”
Taking a deep breath, Amber braced herself. “What was the word darling?”
“Bigot” replied Octavius, almost spitting out the word. “It sounds awful Mummy … What does it mean?”
Well it wasn’t nearly as bad as what Amber had thought, but it did provoke some thought. She went to the book shelf, took down the dictionary and blew the dust off it. This is what she discovered.
‘Bigot - Noun- a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group’.
Once my hair was much darker. In those days I thought that there could only ever be two sides of an argument. One was right (my point of view) and one was wrong. There was the dark side and there was the light side. I never considered that there might be shades of grey mixed into the argument. Either a thing was wrong or it was right. Simple as that. Or is it? One of the many things this problematic pandemic teaches us is that there are actually many shades of grey. Things are not clear cut. Life would be so much easier if that were the case. We splash around in puddles of grey. The guy who drives ferociously to be at his dying grandma's bedside should… have the book thrown at him… treated with compassion… or …??? With our peppery hair, let us splash gently in our puddles of unclear water. Everyone of us can agree that a bigot is not a nice word.