Our “Cubby Holes”
Recently, I had a person tell me that she was surprised to learn that our son was a minister. The woman said, “He sure doesn’t look and act like I think preachers should look and act.” She was not being unkind; she was just a good illustration of how many people react when they meet someone for the first time. Someone new comes into our lives and we immediately stereotype that new person by placing him or her in our mental “cubby hole” where we have safely placed other people. Then we think we know all we need to know about the new person.
Over the years, I have been guilty of this stereotyping myself, until I learned my lesson from a woman who came to teach writing at a seminar I was attending. When Janet (not her real name) stepped into the room, I immediately had her all figured out. Short, dressed in a dowdy, grey pants suit, matching her grey hair, frizzy with permanent, wearing thick glasses, she spoke in a soft voice as she rifled through her notes. We soon learned that she wrote poetry and kept a journal and taught in a small college in Pennsylvania. I decided right away that because she had all the looks and characteristics of an old-maid school teacher, she would never last fifteen minutes in a high school English class and wondered how she managed her college classes. I had no doubt that her student were completed bored within the first ten minutes. I could see her hunched over the steering wheel of her car always driving in the passing land, and I was not at all surprised when she said she owned a cat. It took less than five minutes and my stereotypical “cubby hole” was full. I was convinced that I knew everything about Janet that I would ever need to know.
Before the seminar adjourned I learned how wrong I was. Janet had another side – just as all of us have. She would pull a curly, red wig over her grey, fizzy hair, press a huge, yellow, rubbery nose over her own, don a big, bright polka dot caftan dress and slip her feet into vivid blue shoes two sizes too large for her feet. Now she was “Gracie,” a clown, no longer an old-maid school teacher, but a dancing, prancing comic.
Gracie could dance, but she couldn’t sing very well. No matter, she sang emptying her lungs to empower her voice. Maybe it was because of the outfit, but the next time she stepped in front of our group, we danced and sang with her, as she performed her clown routine, laughing at all her jokes. Delightful ! She had become a member of a clown ministry group in Pennsylvania that visited schools and hospitals is her area, and she loved every minute of it.
Janet taught me that I must close my “cubby holes” and be careful not to stereotype people. Every one of us is unique – just think,, we all have different finger prints. When we stereotype people, we make untrue (and sometimes unkind) judgments and miss out on the joy of meeting and getting to know some truly remarkable people,