God is the Ultimate "Other"

The Philosophical Other and the Mainstream Other

The term “the Other” is used in sociology often, and it is most commonly used to refer to one who is not part of the mainstream demographic in a given society. Most of my students are born and raised in the United States, and most of them are social media and popular culture savvy, so they understand the racial, ethnic, gender, and religious biases on our culture. It is not a difficult lesson to teach that, in general, the “eye” that our culture uses is white, male, and Christian. The general perception most of our media (news, entertainment, literature, academia, etc…) assumes the ideology and experience of what our modern critical culture refers to as the white, Christian patriarchy. “The Other” refers to anyone who does not fit into this particular sociological designation.

On the surface, my time living and working on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation was an encounter with "the Other", and in that encounter I learned how to Love and to be Loved. But on a deeper level, I was encountering God in my students. My humility and vulnerability to my students opened me up to develop a relationship with God. (photo: Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, P. Smith)

            This is an easy enough lesson to teach. All I have to do is show any piece of news media or popular culture and students can discern this mainstream hermeneutic at work. It is most easy to see in academia and politics as I show students who writes most of the history books they have to study and who holds political office in our country. “The Other” seems like a negative term; I am not sure if there is a particularly politically correct term used in sociology right now, but we stay disciplined in class and we try to be aware that even the language we use to describe “the Other” is biased. I often sense the frustration in my students. There is no way to avoid bias in the way we talk about issues of race and gender and religion. Everything we say or try to communicate will always be slanted based on where we speak from. If we add to that the complication of material Truth and the material inequality of all things, then it gets even more frustrating. But there is a lesson here. I teach my students the danger of fixating on material language in the world, because the words we use to describe each other are almost certainly not effective in describing the Authentic Self. Even more importantly, I am setting up the lesson that if we are in relationship with “the Other”, our Authentic Self necessarily needs to be increasingly humble. More importantly, as we apply the concept of “the Other to God, we realize that God is the ultimate “Other” to us, and if we are humble enough to grow in relationship with Him, then we can Truly begin to encounter our Authentic Self.