The spiritual discipline of the race-less life is a difficult one to practice.  Committing to it daily may sometimes seem impossible as there are multiple opportunities to exercise this belief often because of something we have thought, said or done.  Race-lessness not only challenges the thoughts, words and actions of others but ourselves.  The training involves a rigorous and intensive examination of the self or in our case, our many selves.  Some of them may be difficult to look at or even acknowledge.

This discipline reveals things about us that we didn’t know we believed about other cultures or about ourselves.  It places in front of us thoughts and behaviors that we know are not in accordance with our faith or reflective of the mind of Christ. The race-less life is confrontational in this regard and more often than not, the confrontation is one of self- confrontation.  But, we must not look away but continue to look at and into our selves.  This is the greatest fear that we must face.

There are selves that you know and there are selves that you do not know.  Some you are happy to introduce to others and then there are those that you do not want others to know about.  We think that they are only present in our thought processes, at home with family members or close friends, that we can somehow pick when we will exercise our racism, prejudices and stereotypes. This is simply not true.

And those selves run with us.  The trek is already difficult because the path is internal and the terrain is the very ground of our souls. But, the presence of selves, thoughts and behaviors that protest against the race-less life can slow our pace and negatively impact the distance we cover from day to day.  We must then examine our selves and if they are slowing us down, throwing off our spiritual rhythm or suggesting that we stop because we have gone far enough, that we have done enough, then I would suggest that they are not running with us but against us.

They are not seeking to cover this new ground with us or to run alongside us.  Instead, these other selves seek to compromise the challenge in order to pass us.  They do not want the new self, the true self to emerge.  They are not running partners but competitors in a lane of their own.  I know that they are apart of us, our history and memory but we must run against them.  This is the way of wholeness and healing.