I was born in Canada and grew up in the 1960s in Moncton, New Brunswick, where I spent many pleasant evenings with my best friend Johnny and his mother sitting out front on the veranda eating molasses cookies, watching the world go by. There wasn’t as much traffic then, and that was good both for street hockey and for people watching. With less going on to distract us we paid attention to what was in front of us and Johnny’s mother was a keen observer of life on its own terms. She offered pointed commentary in lively conversations I recall to this day. Not much escaped her notice. If someone was sick next door she knew about it; and she knew when they were in trouble, and when the cops were called. She was not alone in knowing these things because in those days we all tended to be more aware of what was going on with the people who lived among us. I admired Johnny’s parents and respected them. Like my folks they represented our Country’s famous Two Solitudes, he with a good Scottish surname and she an Acadian from Bouctouche. They were typical of our city with its cultural, linguistic mix of hardworking men and women, saints and scoundrels, all just trying to make ends meet. Ours was a neighborhood in which people of different mother tongues invested their lives in each other and lived on streets named for British royalty where French women cooked fricot and sold poutine râpée around the corner. I do not wish to paint a picture of an idyllic childhood since it was far from that but as kids we seemed to take things well enough in stride, and even though we had to make sure that the homeless who slept in the overgrown lot across the street were gone for the day before we could play tag there, it wasn’t like we could complain, especially on those quiet evenings when the lilacs were in bloom and the gentle breeze carried our soft laughter while caressing us with fragrance.
When a city grows and the population sprawls towards suburbia fragmentation occurs as people who live in one neighborhood must work in another and attend school in yet another, and when the children wish to go out and play they have to be driven miles away to the subdivision where their friends live. As a child I simply played with the kids who lived on our street. We didn’t always get along but usually managed to tolerate each other. We found a way to live together; we had to. We could not ‘redistrict’ our lives the way we do today when we can record our shows, choose our news-source, design our internet, and screen our calls to insure that we never encounter a contrary opinion and then hunker down on the back deck where community is strictly by invitation only. Instead of growing and adapting to fit in where we live we would rather shop for a different location.
We tend to roll our eyes when we hear the phrase ‘unity in diversity’ because it seems a tired slogan, a cliché, and yet my eyes filled with tears the other day when I realized that unity doesn’t really have an opposite. We assume that unity and diversity are opposing principles and that the best we can hope for is to find some balance between the two, but this is to confuse unity with uniformity and control. Unity is the very nature of life, the underlying reality in which all diversity happens. When I sit by the window looking out on the front garden at sunrise and sunset I am often reminded that birth and death occur as cycles within life which itself has no opposite and is eternal. Unity refers to life in its wholeness; its completeness. We witness this in nature which always follows her laws and where there really are no ‘freak storms’ or ‘rogue waves;’ not really, because those laws are not suspended even when the unexpected happens and something new comes along. All of life’s glorious diversity takes place within the greater unity which makes it possible.
Growing up in the middle of a ‘Cold War’ might explain why as a very young child I used to wish that we could step out of ourselves somehow, transcend our differences, rise above our attachments, and meet in spirit, as spirit, and agree to work as one. I did not imagine we would be given specific answers in that spiritual realm, that ‘Free Meeting House’ of the mind, but I thought if we could recall our unity there we might celebrate our diversity here, and heal our sad divisions, or at least get out of the way when a solution came along. I know this was a childish vision, and yet lately I’ve come to regard every other way of thinking as insane, and although I’ve managed over the years to ignore this insight in search of autonomy and specialness and living endlessly by comparison, I’ve always been drawn back to the truth of our essential unity and oneness. Maybe this is the reason ‘E. Pluribus Unum’ strikes me as telling only half the truth, sort of like beginning the Parable of the Prodigal Son with the son already in a faraway country. We need the first half to know that it’s a story of restoration. It’s a story about going home as a young man recognizes who he really is and remembers what he has always been. It’s a story which like all stories requires diversity to be told and unity to be understood.
Of course I recall the turbulence of the times, the protests at City Hall, the demonstrations and marches down Main Street, the heated rhetoric and passionate arguments on all sides. These too were part of my childhood, but I recall as well that we managed to get through it, and that we did so together. We knew there were no perfect plans to please everybody but we also knew we would muddle through because at the very heart of it all, below the surface of our disputes, we were one. We would always find a way to live together and move beyond what divided us because, after all, we had stuff to do; stuff like watching the hockey game on Saturday night, playing music in the kitchen, going to the wrestling matches at the Arena, having dinner at the Palace Grill, gathering at the park near the river’s edge to watch the tide roll in, and listening to the evening sound of crickets while sitting out front on the veranda with Johnny and his mother, eating molasses cookies and watching the world go by.
