I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about congruence lately. About personal congruence yes, but more about congruence with the world around us. As a gay man, A lot of my life is fraught with a certain quality of incongruence, that of my lifestyle as it relates to the heteronormative culture that surrounds me. I, and my community, tend to try and mitigate that incongruence by forming our own culture, and in a lot of ways I am very insulated from the larger world by the gay community. The same thing often happens in the pagan community. In any community that has large idealogical or cultural differences from the norm.

It is very easy to submerge hirself in the dominant subculture, and in so doing remove the challenge of that incongruence from our daily lives. We see examples of this all over the world and in every community across the country. Our sub-cultures often turn their eyes inward and have as little contact with the outside as possible. I think this is a dangerous trend, but its one that many people are already fighting. We recognize that insulating ourselves because of our differences makes those differences seem larger than they are. That insulation, or isolation (as is often the case for some communities), breeds fear and mistrust in both directions. It serves to divide us and causes more wide-spread challenges as a result.

I believe that the wide-spread challenges are the price we pay for taking this easy insulated road to avoid meeting the incongruence head on. Instead of recognizing and working inside the reality of difference, we run and hide. The price we pay for that weakness is the larger community problems and conflicts that inevitably arise. The price is compounded when that isolated community denies that the larger problems exist, or places the responsibility to recognize and address the issue solely on the shoulders of the normative culture.

The core thing that needs to be addressed here is meeting that incongruence on a personal level. While it’s not enough, the gay community recognizes this, that’s why coming out and staying out are some of the core experiences of many glbt individuals. I have very strong feelings on being honest and true to myself, but for now I’ll simply say that coming out as ‘other’ no matter what that ‘other’ is, is the simplest, most important step anyone can make towards accepting and reconciling their incongruence with the dominant culture. Doing so with grace, sincerity, honesty, and without fear are a bonus I think we should all strive for.

In the pagan community, many of my friends and acquaintances have a similar trouble with incongruence. In some ways we have it worse than the gay community. Not because we are in some way more discriminated against, but because our ‘otherness’ is often more difficult to accept. Homosexuality as otherness exists in the heart and body. It’s a difference of emotional and physical behavior at its core. For many pagans, this otherness is a far more vital difference. We have a fundamental difference of understanding in how the world works. I believe with every aspect of my being that there is far more to our understanding of the universe than our conceptualization of physics can begin to comprehend.

I believe in magic. I believe that I can and do change reality to conform with my thoughts and will on a regular basis. How do I bring that worldview into congruence with the rest of my community and larger culture? It’s a question I think deserves a lot more consideration than we generally give it. How can I interact with people who share radically different beliefs about how things work without either of us feeling uncomfortable, or being repressed by the incongruence of our realities?

Many people would say that the answer is to avoid the areas of our realities that don’t jive with each other. I think this is absolutely the wrong approach. I dare you to walk down Halstead, or through the Castro and tell the residents to try not to bring up the fact that their reality is fundamentally different than yours. I’d offer to wait but there’s good odds you’ll have to make a trip to the hospital, and I’m not that patient.

Pretending we aren’t different, or trying to ignore our differences doesn’t work. Just like isolation it serves only to breed misunderstanding and fear of those differences. Worse, by avoiding them, they can grow to seem very much larger than they may actually be.

Part 2: Finding Congruence will be written when I can find the time.