April 3, 2006
Color
The story goes that people complained when Henry Ford’s innovative assembly line offered the public a choice of colors on his new automobile. He said they could have any color they chose so long as it was black. (But he also paid his workers well enough, he said, so that they could actually afford to buy the cars they made.)
The freedom to choose is that imaginative gift from God that makes us human. But maybe it’s also what unleashes our daemons. Faith is in that bag of tricks somewhere, and so is love, for they are also choices. And the spectrum of life challenges us with far more than just shades of black.
It’s spring in our town about now, and, like they always do year in and year out, the colors are approaching dazzling. We need not choose, for mostly they’re there on this bush, that tree, those birds, and we can have them all at once. Ford was shrewd economically, both for himself and for his employees and for his wealth — and, of course, subsequently for the great and generous Ford Foundation. One might choose to say that he was colorful even in spite of himself, then one might choose not. That’s the beauty of it.