Faith Venture

I spent last week at a very technical conference. Lot of talk about programming for industrial applications. You’ll have to bear with me a little for the analogy to develop. Anyway, I got to thinking about abstraction–that is a way of thinking where you ignore the details and focus on generalities.

The company whose user conference I attended has developed software that allows programmers to handle complex programming tasks with greater success and ease. It’s a process called abstraction. Instead of concentrating on lines and lines (sometimes thousands of lines of densely worded text called code), the code is abstracted into small pictures that can be “wired” together. In this case, abstraction works to great benefit.

Then on the plane ride home watching the TED Talks videos on my iPad, I saw a talk given by a marvelous teacher. Then I thought about much political debate (and many people’s thoughts) over the past decade or longer about teachers. Get the distinction? One teacher or a group known as “teachers.”

Where is our focus? Do we think of people in terms of a group? Or individuals? It’s easy to make villains you hate about a group when you know many  individuals in that group whom you admire. In this case, abstraction from the individual to the group is not productive.

I can’t think of a time when Jesus dealt with groups as an abstraction. He dealt with individuals. John, in his Gospel, makes some abstractions (he often talks of “the Jews”), but John is also full of irony. He makes a comment about the Pharisees (the group) but also has talked about an individual Pharisee (Nicodemus). John likes that kind of contrast.

But I have concern when we try to reduce everyone to groups and fail to see the individual. The pastor yesterday talked about meeting a “weird” guy and then discovering he was a pastor. He went from abstraction to individual. That is much more beneficial in our lives. Instead of getting ourselves all worked up and stressing ourselves over abstracted groups that disagree with us, perhaps we could see individuals who are fellow seekers. Who have different ideas for now as they are puzzling out the same things we are–how to live with God.

Don’t look at “them.” Look at her. Look at him.

This entry was posted on August 8, 2011 at 7:13 am and is filed under Ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.