Few things are potentially more poisonous in relationships than labels. It’s true whether we’re talking of person relating to person, culture to culture, creed to creed or nation to nation. Whenever we bracket anyone by a particular characteristic – their colour, their gender, their religion, their politics, or any other – we dehumanise them and do away with our need to engage with the whole person. The Apostle Paul put it this way: ‘There can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 3:28). The following poem, written for my 2005 booklet Our Broken World, and reprinted in Poems to Help You Pray, emphasises the importance of looking more deeply at people than we so often tend to do.
Lord, for using labels to decide on people’s worth:
their age, their sex, their class, their roots,
their faith or place of birth,
their politics or culture, the colour of their skin,
the outward signs that mark them out
instead of what’s within;
for summing people up by what nobody can change –
allowing background, creed or race
to poison and estrange –
for all such prejudice, forgive, and from it set me free
to meet the person underneath –
to look and really see.