Is this not the carpenter’s son?

Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?

Aren’t all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things? And they took offence at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honour except in his own town and in his own home.” And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith. (Matthew 13: 5-58)

The experience of Jesus among his kith and kin, their indignation and downright disregard for him and what he represented is a common groupthink phenomenon everyone who leapfrogs from his peers will face at one time or another. Familiarity indeed breeds contempt.

They knew his origins, the young boy who followed his father, the carpenter, half-dressed and barefooted; the one they rubbed shoulders with and called by his first name.

To accept him as a messiah, the one sent by God, was an anathema.

When we are familiar with something or someone, we often lose the verve, aura, meaning and excitement around it.

Unnoticeably, through familiarity we can easily become numb to our homes, friendships, cultural heritage, source of livelihood, and even our faith.

Familiarity thus becomes one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation… alienation from our family, friends, ourselves, our vocations, our country, the world, and God.

Truth

German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hagel opined that “Generally, the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not known.”

It is a powerful truth that familiarity masks the unknown by keeping us focused exclusively on the external surface image.

We treat the most valuable as ordinary, the esteemed as ignoble, and the revered as irrelevant. Regretfully, for most of us, the people nearest to us and our immediate surroundings have become so familiar that they no longer invite or surprise us.

The routine of the familiar offers us no new challenges and robs us of opportunities for growth, shared glory and accomplishment.

And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.

Acres of Diamonds recounts a fictional parable circa 1870 that was told in present-day Iraq about Ali Hafed, a wealthy and contented Persian farmer.

One day, a travelling priest stopped by Ali Hafed’s farm and told him all about diamonds, what they looked like, what they were worth, and where they might be found.

Ali Hafed soon became consumed with thinking about diamonds, discontented to the point that he sold all he had and left his family to search the world for diamonds.

In the end, he found no diamonds. Penniless, exhausted and broken, Ali Hafed cast himself into the sea. Years later, the man who had purchased Ali Hafed’s farm found a sparkling stone in a stream cutting through his land. It was a diamond. This, according to the parable, was the discovery of the famous Golconda Mine that produced the crown jewels of England and Russia.

The point of the parable is that if Ali Hafed had stayed at home and mined the unfamiliar depths of his own farm, he would have found “acres of diamonds” instead of poverty, starvation and death by suicide.

Mindset

Increasingly, the average Ghanaian has become easily irritable, discontented and barely sees anything positive in the country.

So deep is this mindset that many a young man is quick to denigrate everything Ghanaian, from leadership, be it political, religious, or cultural, to the very foundational institutions of the State, which we run to when in need of help.

Familiarity was the curse of people who knew Jesus and can very well be our curse too. Our pride does not allow us to accept people we know or are placed above us and from experiences we might have gone through before.

And so, while the world around us might be applauding, and desiring earnestly to have what we have, familiarity becomes the curse that shuts us out and numbs our appreciation of what we have.

With its warts and all, Ghana has a lot we can be proud of. The writer is not oblivious to the myriad challenges citizens face daily, but may we not cast our pearls before swine(s) for them to trample them under their feet, and turn and tear us to pieces.

It is not all dark and gloom? Beware of the curse of familiarity.

The writer is a lawyer/perpetual optimist in the country called Ghana.
E-mail: yawberhene@yahoo.com