The Zebra is the Lens

I’ve discovered something remarkable about Zebras. 

Yes, aside from the fact that they make an annual migration of 1,800 miles - among the longest of any land animal.

Zebras are an excellent metaphor for reality…black and white stripes…anyone?

Okay let me explain myself. 

So I’m walking down the street, a couple of blocks from my house, listening on my iPod to Richard Rohr talk about having a non-dual view of the world. Most of us start out life thinking of things in binary terms: good vs bad, success vs failure, right vs wrong, us vs them, and so on. This tendency towards duality, or seeing things just in black or white is a problem. As we mature spiritually we began to appreciate that seeing things in black and white, just doesn’t really capture reality very well. Or at least, seeing the world through a lens of either/or isn’t a helpful or healthy way of thinking.  Non-dualistic thinking, in which we consider reality in “yes/and” ways, seems to make us more able to live inside the paradoxes and tensions of spiritual truth.

Now when I say something like, “50 shades of grey” it conjures up an entirely different set of meanings for a lot of people. But this greyness of the world, in a whole wide range of shades, is how I’ve been thinking for a while; at least since my old black and white ways of thinking about things kind of came apart at the seems a few years ago. Seeing things as grey, is both a badge of honour and a great problem for those of us who think of ourselves as progressive. Lots of us think that seeing things as grey is a sign of our progress, while our more conservative brothers and sisters see it as our fundamental weakness. Greyness, especially when it comes to moral ambiguity can be really great when it comes to being inclusive and accepting, but it does make holding convictions rather difficult. (Other than the conviction that everyone who doesn’t see things as greyish as you do is hopelessly backward and intolerant) 

Being open and loving others just seems like an easier thing to do inside of a framework of grey. But what about those times when loving people involves calling them out on their brokenness and mistakes? Problem: if everything is grey how and where do we hold ourselves or others to standards? What often ends up happening amongst us more left leaning folks is that we become inconsistent with our use of a “greyer” perspective. Admittedly, I can be pretty arbitrary about when I see the world as grey; choosing to do so when it suits me/lets me off the hook (like when it comes to saving for retirement by owning stocks in multinational corporations who do terrible things) and then switching back to black and white as a matter of convenience (like when other people do things I think are terrible, especially certain politicians).

So as I’m walking and listening to Father Rohr, I pass by a local bar which has it’s patio open and folks enjoying one of the first warm nights this frozen Canada has seen in a while. Now this particular bar has somewhat of a reputation, for a lot of things, but not least of which is the heavy presence of cougars. Not the large cats you might find in a jungle - I mean the other kind of cougars. And of course one of the staples in a cougar’s wardrobe is none other than zebra print. So I’m listening to my esteemed padre talk about how Jesus is constantly deconstructing the dualistic thinking of his day and replacing it with non-dualistic ideas. Even the idea of being both fully divine and fully human is a non-dualistic concept of who Jesus is. And out of the corner of my eye, at about 50 paces in the distance, I see a cougar wearing a zebra skin mini skirt, with matching heels.

Instead of appreciating this fine display of fashion prowess, my mind went a different direction. 

From a distance, zebras look kind of greyish. But as everyone knows, that grey is just a product of black and white merging as the distance of the object exceeds the acuity of your cornea. They have black and white stripes nonetheless, and what matters is the angle and distance and lighting that affects your perception. Apparently even insects have trouble with perceiving zebras, and it’s believed that one of the benefits of their stripes is that biting insects can’t make sense of the contrasts. 

The truth is: there is good and evil. There is light and dark. Not everything is morally ambiguous. Conservatives and liberals, you can both be right sometimes and even at the same time! (Ha! See what I did there? Non-dualistic thinking about the age old conservative vs liberal dichotomy) Things can be both black and white, and also grey at the same time, depending on your perspective and the viewing context.

Freedom of speech - a good a thing isn’t it? Well, for someone who has lived under oppression and not been allowed to speak their conscience freely it might seem like a black and white issue. But for some of us who have long taken for granted this freedom and witnessed it’s abuses in the form of hate crimes and the music of Michael Bolton, it seems rather more greyish. Then which is it?

Yes…and. It’s all of the above. It’s grey and black and white. 

It’s a zebra. 

Ethnic groups? Zebras

Religions? Zebras.

Governments? Zebras.

The internet and electronic media? Zebras.

The New York Yankees? Not zebras - just evil, and ruining baseball

(Actually, they too are zebras, and now that I recall that they wear pinstripes, I can never look at them with the same malice again….)

It depends on your level of analysis, your context, and it depends on what else you’ve been looking at.

I realize that my desire to sort the world into black and white is a vast misjudgement of how things really are so often. People are never all good or all bad. Individuals as a whole are always grey. Even some of the most infamous perpetrators of evil have been known to be capable of great love and kindness towards others. Our minds kind of blow up a little because we can’t compute or categorize a person who engages in genocide during the day but goes home and loves their family. We have such difficulty with the idea that they have stripes of good and evil in them….how even we have stripes of dark and light in us. We need a lens, a metaphorical construct to be able to hold in our minds the reality of any given person’s black and white and grey qualities - all at the same time. 

Zebras, you are magnificent. Not just to middle age single females for whom your skins provide fashion accessories in the search to attract a mate. But in your fine hides you effortlessly capture this beautiful essence of human reality: black and white, and grey, all at the same time. The Zebra is the lens. It gives us the metaphor for understanding that much of what we see is grey, likely because the vision of the human mind and heart is so limited. But viewed from a different perspective there are black and white realities where true good and evil live in the same lowly beast.