Embracing Otherness: How Difference Thickens Our Stories

Embracing Otherness: How Difference Thickens Our Stories

We have a quiet but persistent habit of resisting otherness. When someone’s perspective, culture, theology, politics, story, or very presence disrupts our categories, we often default to subtle (or not-so-subtle) strategies of self-protection: we project our disowned fears onto them, turn them into convenient containers for our judgments, or exaggerate their difference until they become either monsters or gods. Either way, we keep them at a safe distance. The result is not only fractured relationships but thinned-out stories—stories that remain self-referential, defended, and smaller than the reality God keeps offering us.

David Benner, inSoulful Spirituality, names this resistance with clarity and compassion. Soulful spirituality, he writes, invites us “to do a better job of recognizing and prizing the otherness of others rather than simply seeing them as extensions of ourselves or using them as containers for our own projections.” Honouring otherness, he insists, “is a deep and essential part of any authentic spirituality.” It is not optional spiritual décor; it is how we stay connected to reality and to the Wholly Other who meets us in the otherness of others. When we refuse this work, we distort both the other and ourselves. We live thinner, more defended lives.

Richard Rohr’s recent meditation on Acts 10 brings the same truth into sharp relief through Peter’s story. Peter receives a vision that dismantles the boundary between “us” and “them.” God, he realizes, shows no partiality. The Spirit falls on Gentiles exactly as on Jews. Yet when Peter carries this expanded vision back to Jerusalem, the community resists. Their story of belonging had been carefully bounded; welcoming otherness threatened to rewrite it. Peter’s gentle but firm reply—“Who was I that I could hinder God?”—exposes the heart of the matter. Resistance to otherness is often resistance to where the Spirit is actually moving.

What both Benner and this ancient story reveal is thatparticipating in otherness, rather than resisting it, is one of the primary ways our stories thicken and become more alive. In narrative terms, otherness functions as a powerful thickening agent. It introduces voices, experiences, and possibilities that the dominant thin story of separation or self-protection cannot contain. When we practice hospitality, deep listening, holy curiosity, and a willingness to be changed by the encounter, we are no longer the sole authors of our story. The other becomes a co-author. New meanings emerge. The narrative gains texture, complexity, grace, and room.

This is not abstract theology. It is profoundly embodied. Otherness arrives in actual bodies, actual accents, actual disagreements, actual beauty, and actual pain. Soulful spirituality does not ask us to transcend these particularities but to descend more deeply into them—trusting that the Wholly Other is present precisely in the irreducible difference of the other. Every time we choose presence over projection, curiosity over control, or welcome over withdrawal, we participate in a larger Story that is already moving toward greater inclusion and wholeness.

The practical question is not whether otherness will appear in our day. It will. The real question is whether we will meet it with resistance that keeps our stories thin and safe, or with the kind of courageous hospitality that lets the story thicken—personally, relationally, and spiritually.

Where might the Spirit be inviting you, today, to stop hindering the very movement that could make your story (and ours) more spacious, more true, and more alive?

This reflection weaves insights from David G. Benner’sSoulful Spiritualityand Richard Rohr’s daily meditation on Acts 10 (via Barbara Brown Taylor). It is offered in the spirit of re-enchanting our ordinary encounters and allowing difference to do its sacred work of story-thickening.