The Sacred Grey...

A few days ago, I watched a Harvard graduation speech by a young man whose family story began with a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew. As he spoke about understanding, curiosity, and the humanity that exists beneath our differences, I found myself unexpectedly emotional. By the end of the speech, tears were rolling down my face. Not because he said anything particularly groundbreaking, but because he reminded me that there are still people in this world asking for nuance. There are still people willing to look beyond the noise and remember that there is another human being sitting on the other side of the conversation.

Lately, that has felt increasingly rare.

Everywhere I look, people seem to be choosing sides. Politics. Religion. Social issues. Relationships. The world feels obsessed with determining who is right and who is wrong. Social media has become a battlefield of certainty where everyone is convinced they hold the truth and anyone who disagrees must somehow be misguided, ignorant, or dangerous. Listening to this young man speak reminded me of something I have been quietly wrestling with for years.

During the first Trump presidency, I deleted many people from my social media feed who supported his views. I was triggered, angry, disappointed, and genuinely could not understand how anyone I considered a friend could possibly support someone who represented so many things I opposed. At the time, it felt impossible for me to separate the person from the position. If you supported him, I wanted distance between us.

Then something shifted. By the time the next election cycle arrived and he was elected again, I noticed that some friends who had never been supporters had become enthusiastic supporters. I felt that familiar urge to remove them from my life, but this time I paused. Not because I suddenly agreed with them. Not because my views had changed. But because I began to realize that division itself had become part of the game. The more divided we become, the easier we are to manipulate. The easier it becomes to stop seeing one another as human beings and start seeing one another as categories to discard.

I remember thinking that if the goal was to separate us from one another, I would remove my consent from that process. I also wanted to understand what these people were seeing that I was not. I wanted to understand the fears, experiences, hopes, and beliefs that had led them to where they stood.

Why?

Because the older I get, the less interested I become in winning arguments and the more interested I become in understanding human beings and the kind of world we leave behind when we are gone. Perhaps this shift has only been possible because, over the past six years, I have been slowly remembering who I am beneath the conditioning, the wounds, and the stories I inherited. What some people call healing has taught me that life rarely unfolds in absolutes. More often than not, it lives in the gray spaces between them.

Over the years, I have come to suspect that fear and grief are often hiding beneath many of the battles we wage against one another. Fear fans the flames of anger, and anger stands guard over our grief. As long as we remain angry, we do not have to touch the tender places beneath it. We do not have to feel the heartbreak, disappointment, betrayal, or helplessness that lives there. Perhaps this is why understanding feels so difficult at times. To truly understand another person, we must first become willing to soften our own armor. We must become brave enough to look beneath the anger, both theirs and ours, and recognize the vulnerable human being waiting underneath.

One of the things I vaguely remember hearing during catechism classes was that "with God there is no gray. Everything is either black or white." But even as a child, something about that idea never sat comfortably within me. If there is a force so magnificent that it created galaxies, stars, oceans, consciousness, and life itself, I have always suspected it resides beyond our need to divide reality into opposites. I imagine it dwelling in the liminal spaces. The shoreline between land and sea. The twilight between day and night. The breath between inhaling and exhaling. The place where opposites meet and somehow belong together.

The longer I live, the more I find myself believing that we all hold a piece of the truth, much like a single piece of an enormous puzzle. No individual piece reveals the entire image. On its own, it can appear incomplete, confusing, or even insignificant. Yet each piece carries information that belongs to the whole. Our experiences shape the piece we hold. Our wounds shape it. Our culture, upbringing, fears, beliefs, and triumphs shape it. The mistake is believing that because our piece is real, it must therefore be the entire picture.

The challenge is not determining whose piece is superior. The challenge is learning how to interlock our pieces beside one another long enough to glimpse the larger image trying to emerge. Perhaps this is why I have become so fascinated by nuance. Every time I have expanded my understanding of the world, it has been because I discovered a piece of the puzzle I did not know existed. Sometimes it came from someone I agreed with. Sometimes it came from someone I strongly disagreed with, and if I am being honest, some of my greatest growth has come from those encounters.

Not because they changed my mind, but because they challenged me to examine it.

They forced me to ask myself why I believed what I believed. They revealed blind spots I could not see on my own. They invited me to consider possibilities I might have otherwise dismissed. Sometimes they strengthened my convictions. Other times they softened them. But almost always, they expanded them. Sometimes the piece arrived through a painful experience I never would have chosen for myself. Yet each piece added depth to the picture. Each new piece reveals how much more there is to see.

Maybe wisdom is not the possession of truth. Maybe wisdom is the willingness to keep making room for more of it.

Of course, what we do with our piece of truth matters. Some people use it to build bridges. Others use it to build walls. Some use it to cultivate compassion. Others use it to justify cruelty. Thus, the truth itself is rarely the problem. What we do with it is where things become complicated.

I think the danger begins when we become convinced that our piece is the entire puzzle. That is when humility leaves the room. That is when curiosity disappears. That is when righteousness quietly takes its place. We stop asking questions because we believe we already have all the answers. The person across from us stops being a human being with a story and becomes an obstacle, an enemy, or a stereotype.

Yet every meaningful lesson in my remembering journey has emerged from the gray areas of my life and consciousness. From the places where certainty fell apart. From the moments when I was forced to confront the possibility that someone who hurt me was also hurting. That someone I disagreed with might see something I did not. That understanding another human being is not the same as agreeing with them.

Listening to this young man's speech reminded me that compassion is born from humility. It is born from recognizing that none of us can see the entire landscape from where we stand. We are all looking through different windows, carrying different stories, trying to make sense of a reality that is far more complex than our earthly labels allow.

Perhaps none of us are holding the whole truth.

Perhaps we are simply holding different pieces of it.

Perhaps wisdom lives in the gray.

Perhaps understanding begins when we stop trying to win.

Perhaps compassion emerges when we become curious enough to ask another person how they arrived where they are.

And perhaps the sacred itself has been waiting for us there all along, not in the black or the white, but in the beautiful, uncomfortable, deeply human space in between.

☥