The Scripture readings for this Sunday are difficult. Not difficult to understand, because Elijah's words, Psalm 16 and Luke's Gospel are pretty straightforward and to the point. The readings are difficult because they, each in their own way, point to one of the traits of being human that we are most uncomfortable with, the fact that we feel divided and pulled in two directions, that we are sometimes walking contradictions.

We want things either all one way, or all the other, we want --- to use purely American parlance --- guys in white hats and guys in black hats. We want heroes and villains, or like my grandmother used to say, "Tiro, tiro, caballo, caballo" (shots, shots, horses, horses) clinging to a primeval need to fight or flight, one or the other. Yet we know, that the truest thing about us is that we are completely capable of both.

As our country nears a Presidential election, as we unveil a memorial to the "Great War" while caught in a war we are uncertain of, as we have buried a former President, and as our own Holy Father's legacy begins to be discussed amidst of his advancing years and frail health, we feel this drive toward tying everything together into neat packages. Here is the hero, here is the villain, this person, this question, this decision was all bad or all good. Ambiguity, the possibility that in Bush, Kerry and Nader, Reagan, World War II and Iraq, and even in Pope John Paul II there exists an entire spectrum of getting things right and getting things wrong is something we somehow do not want to know.

Scholars of history point out that once something becomes "history", when it is retold from the vantage point of a later time, it almost inevitably tries to make a moral point. And truthfully, as some of the earth's oldest civilizations have shown us, the point of telling stories from generation to generation is indeed to teach moral lessons. Older civilizations had things called "annals," more like what we would call "records" today. The annals recounted sequences of events, who did what to whom, how much was lost, how much was gained, but most often this was told almost like a laundry list, just to set it down and not forget it.

Something very different was the historical epic, these stories told of past events, but fact and fiction, "embellishments" and additions all co-existed in order to make a point. And the "lesson" to be learned was the most important consideration, not the factuality of the events recounted. In the epic there were always heroes and villains, we were supposed to cheer for some and boo the others, and in the end we were certainly meant to render a judgment as to who was right and who was wrong. This kind of story did not deal well with the ambiguous. The epic presented life, not as it was, but in a way that told us definitively how we were supposed to be.

The problem comes, I believe, when we, with the instant "historicizing" of the electronic news media, attempt to render definitive judgments on what has just happened, or worst yet, feel completely capable of dividing the entire world into good guys and bad guys. We can't; real life is not that way. Real life is blurry, messy and incapable of being categorized.

Was Ronald Reagan a villain or a hero? Neither; he made some good decisions, and he made some terrible decisions, as did every leader before him, and every leader since. If we are unable to look at his life with such a sense of complexity, we reduce him and ourselves to caricatures. History will eventually render a judgment, but we cannot do it from the midst of it. We need to learn to "darle tiempo al tiempo" (give time to time).

Heroes and villains are illustrations of principles. Real human beings like Reagan --- or Elisha, the Galatians and the Samaritans --- were complex, and it is in considering that intricacy of real life that we can learn. St. Paul told us that in Christ there was no Jew or Gentile, no woman or man; perhaps he could have added no Liberal or Conservative and no Republican or Democrat, just human beings, and what being "clothed in Christ" gives us is precisely a new way to define what it is to be "human."

The Samaritans did not welcome Jesus on his way to Jerusalem, because he was one of "them," those Jews who are in cahoots with the Temple authorities (he wasn't); the disciples angered at this attitude wanted to do the equivalent of nuking them (they were supposed to love their neighbor as themselves). What did Jesus do? He "rebuked them" and went on to another town. Jesus knew the Samaritans were human beings, and that as wrong as they were in not welcoming him, so were his disciples wrong in wanting to destroy them.

Both were wrong, and yet both were human reactions. What Jesus did was point to what was not a "reaction," but what was the fruit of discernment and a new way of being human, his decision to accept how sensitive the whole situation was and to walk on. The Samaritans may come around in time, but they would come around because they saw in Jesus someone worth loving, not because they had been threatened with destruction. Yes, Jesus' teachings were hard; they demanded discernment, thinking, accepting of contradictions and no reflexes, no first reactions.

So, as we look to our past, our present and our future, perhaps remembering the Samaritans as both the most despised and also the best exemplars of charity can tell us that life is never simple, and embracing its complexity is the only way to live it.

Cecilia González-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.