Beauty in diversity

By Mina Velasco, O.L.M. Associate
May/June 2010

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Before coming to Canada nine years ago as a landed immigrant, I was among several dozen Filipinos required to attend a seminar on life in the Great White North. My strongest memory from that day is of being told the importance of respecting Canadians’ sense of personal space. We were advised that it would be good to keep a distance of about two or three feet between ourselves and the person to whom we were speaking.

(Credit: Norma Samar, O.L.M.)
Mina Velasco, an OLM associate, enjoys a beautiful flower garden.

I was intrigued by this, coming from a culture that had almost entirely no concept of such an idea as “personal space.”

Little did I know that coming to North America would be something like a Pentecost experience: it is a microcosm of the real world, where people of different races, cultures, languages and creeds gather to live together peacefully (something one would like to see of the world at large).

My Canadian experience reminds me of a poem written by the 19th century Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, who in his work “Pied Beauty” described the world of nature and of humankind as a mixture of “dappled things”:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

Indeed, Canada is a land of so many differences under one sky.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

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