Several friends are having family re-unions this summer. Some expect more than 40 relatives to attend.
        I'm a little jealous. Joan and I are both only children. So is our daughter. And our granddaughter.
        None of our aunts or uncles, as far as I can recall, had more than two children – several died childless – so even if all our living cousins came to a family reunion, we could probably still fit around our dining room table.
        Being an only child leaves me with contradictory emotions.
        On the one hand, I'm accustomed to be being on my own, to being a little bit outside the circle.
        On the other hand, I desperately long to belong.
        And I oscillate between the two desires. I want to be part of a larger group, to be almost homogenized into it. But once I'm in, instead of blending, I find myself looking for ways of differentiating myself from the others, whoever they are.

Our basic belief
        I read somewhere that the fundamental law of our "western" civilization is the Law of Non-Contradiction. Something cannot simultaneously be what it is, and what it is not. It has to be one or the other.
        Things have to be black or white, hot or cold, friend or enemy. George Bush applied that principle when he declared, "Those who are not with us are against us!" He offered no middle ground.
        Teenagers sometimes take that attitude towards their parents.
        But parents know it's not so. They can be against some of the things their children do. They can even turn their children in to the justice system. But they can remain profoundly, deeply, loyal to their kids, through thick and thin, through grad school and through jail.
        It's "both/and" not "either/or."
        The Law of Non-Contradiction is particularly problematic for people who take their religion seriously. How, for example, can Jesus be both human and divine? Aren't the two contradictory? Humans are mortal; God is not mortal; therefore God cannot be human – right?

Mixed messages
        The prophet Isaiah says, "Beat your swords into plowshares…" Another prophet, Joel, says the direct opposite: "Beat your plowshares into swords…" Can both be right?
        Biblical literalists tie their intestines in a knot trying to rationalize these apparent contradictions into a single consistent system of beliefs. They have trouble accepting that different contexts may have called for different answers.
        Eastern religions seem to have less difficulty with internal contradictions. Dreams and visions can be as real as physical experience. Avatars can both represent a god, and can also be worshiped as the god.
        The Law of Non-Contradiction does not come from faith. It comes from logic. And the rules of logic we follow were systematized by Aristotle, not Jesus or Buddha.
        When we raise Non-Contradiction to the status of the Ten Commandments – or higher, without being aware of what we're doing – we make our faith subject to an external standard.
        Do I belong? Yes.
        Am I different? Yes.
        And both exist together in a single person.