Today marks International Day for Tolerance. This day was created by the United Nations in 1995 to celebrate the anniversary of UNESCO creating the Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, which is a way to define and provide awareness of tolerance for any and all governing and participating bodies.
International Day for Tolerance aims to help spread tolerance and raise awareness of any intolerance that may still be prevalent in the world today. Although, of course, we should aim to be tolerant every day, it’s always good to have a specific occasion to remind us just how important tolerance is.
So, what is tolerance? Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human.
And how can we create tolerance in our lives, our communities and our world? What can help us to be more tolerant of others – particularly those with different backgrounds or different understandings of the world.
The suggestion made on the UNESCO website is to learn something about different cultures, so we can understand others or to spend time listening to our neighbours, who may have different viewpoints. We must try to create a world in which everyone is loved and appreciated and where tolerance is a natural, everyday creation and way of living our lives.
As Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO on the occasion of the International Day for Tolerance says, “Tolerance is an act of humanity, which we must nurture and enact each in own lives every day, to rejoice in the diversity that makes us strong and the values that bring us together.”
In Romans 2:4 we read “Don’t you see how wonderfully kind, tolerant, and patient God is with you?” and so perhaps today more than any other, we should try to reflect these qualities so that we can create a fairer, better world for everyone.
Catherine Booton
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