Of colors and color blindness...

Since we have begun attending an African American church, I have been paying attention to colors of all kinds... especially the language and the weight given to skin color. It fascinates me how often I hear someone white described as color blind, a virtue, in their interaction with people of color. I know what they are trying to say... this person treats everyone equally regardless of skin color... but I hope I never become color blind.
I love colors of all kinds... skin colors, flower colors, fabric colors, paint and ink colors. The color of spring green leaves and the deep green of loblolly pine needles, wild daisy white and Queen Anne’s Lace ivory, English shorthorn red and Rhode Island red, yarrow yellow and morning sunrise yellow, my farm tanned brown arm hugging Alexis’s cafe’au lait shoulders... Color is such a gift.
To not see our skin colors is to miss appreciating the wonderfully varied colored puzzle pieces of the creation that surrounds us. Our color, whatever it is, is a reflection of God’s creation and an important part of who we are. How can you really know me unless you know I grew up white in the south? And how can I know Pastor Pat unless I know she grew up with a different skin color in the south? How can we love one another unless we know and celebrate our differences as well as our likenesses? Skin colors are a part of our personal packages, a mirror image of a God of many colors, a technicolor God who has showered us with so many colors we can’t name them all.
As a child I would go to my mother’s home church, Bruington Baptist in Bruington, Virginia. After the Sunday School report had been given during the interval between Sunday School and worship, the children would stand and sing for the congregation led by John Ryland. This tall, spare man with a shock of bright white hair only knew two children’s songs, Jesus Loves Me and Jesus Loves the Little Children. They are two of my favorite hymns still and an accurate reflection of the bedrock of my personal theology. Jesus loves all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight...

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Gerald Manley Hopkins poem reminds me to celebrate fickle freckledness and dappled things, the beauty of color and shape and light and taste and feel in all their forms. Keep me from losing my sense of color, Lord. Remind me every day to sing my thanksgiving when I see your loving face in the faces of all colors around me. I always wondered where my freckles came from and now I know...they came from you.