As my mom began to open the box my interest grew with every passing second. Slowly she pulled it out of its packaging. I was now more intrigued than ever at this new gadget that looked like a cross between Star Trek’s USS Enterprise and a can opener. Welcome to my introduction to the Label Maker!
Watching my mom navigate the alphabet dial was like watching magic. Turn the dial, half click, turn the dial, half click, turn the dial, half click, then one final full click and a label was created. A new world was born! Within days my mother, a very organized person, began to create order and clarity in our home, my father’s veterinary clinic and the hospital pharmacy where she worked.
In my experience, regardless of where you fit on the organized continuum, folks like to create ways to categorize. It is one of the primary ways we compartmentalize to make things more understandable and or manageable. The challenge is it can also unfortunately be fraught with assumptions and miss characterizations, and can be a catalyst for divisiveness.
Gender, geography, racial or ethnic background, economic status, political preference are a few of the favorite areas where we often label others. And while areas of affiliation and affinity have an important place in community, they are in my experience sometimes also used to separate and perpetuate a particular power dynamic. As professor, priest and spiritual director Margaret Gunther used to always say, “When I label…I limit.”
While I absolutely love the label maker, and greatly appreciate organization, when we begin to apply it to humans it has a real potential to be harmful and not helpful. What would it be like if instead we really embraced uniqueness and respected the dignity of every human being?
Jesus’ new commandment of love meant that neither beliefs nor words, neither taboos, systems, structures nor the labels that enshrined them mattered most. Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else—everything.
– Brian McLaren
BP