Social inclusion depends on peoples’ readiness to include, rather than exclude.
Social Inclusion Week (23 November–1 December) is celebrated each year in Australia. It takes many forms, as different organisations shape it to fit the challenges faced by them and by the people whom they serve. This year, there are many challenges in our own society and around the world to welcome diversity and to respect people who are different from us. Instead of seeing different beliefs, origins and customs as a blessing, and counting our differences as something that adds to each of us, we are constantly pressed to see them as enemies whose existence threatens us.
The election campaign in the US has displayed the costs to society when diversity is seen as an infection that we must stamp out instead as a gift that enriches us. This view sets people against one another, bans books to which some people object, tries to close down voters who hold views others than our own, threatens to rid the nation of people of different colour or origin, and sets the wealthy against the battlers. The tension that this causes within the community expresses itself in mass shootings, weakens the economy, increases anxiety and damages the nation. The conflict is intensified by the use of propaganda based on false information and by its spread on social media.
In Australia we are mercifully free from such violent polarisation, but the exploitation by political parties of economic hardship, the suffering inflicted on both Muslim and Jewish communities by the war between Israel and its neighbours, the aftermath of the Referendum on the Voice and the punitive measures introduced to deal with criminal behaviour particularly by Indigenous children, all mark a rejection of diversity. They express the desire to exclude people who are seen as not like us.
In fractured and anxious times, it is doubly important to enter the experience of people who are seen as different. Many of them have been disadvantaged by birth and by their place of living. Many were born into unstable relationships, had a precarious childhood in which they were subject to domestic violence and constant anxiety, suffered from bodily and mental illness, lacked access to health care and steady education, perhaps had to deal with addiction and dealings with the justice system, and lived in areas of high unemployment.
Where people’s relationships have been bruised by experiences of rejection, uncertainty and fear from childhood, they need encouragement to re-open them bit by bit. This process begins with finding respect for themselves as the persons they are, not for their looks, their money, the way they speak, nor their use to others. Social inclusion depends on social friendship – the readiness of people to welcome others into their lives and not to exclude them. It means looking beyond the labels that we put on people to see instead their person and their needs.
As Catholics we are fortunate to hear Pope Francis speak so often in such moving and down to earth words of the preciousness of each human being. We are even more fortunate to see how in his travels he shows respect and compassion by visiting prisoners, travelling to meet refugees, and celebrating with minority groups. He helps us to see that ultimately inclusiveness is not about big ideas but about simple human gestures of friendship.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ is an editorial consultant at Jesuit Communications
