Well, this has been quite the week. Let me see if I can find some takes somewhere.
One
I found myself the last few days thinking a lot about culture shock, about the discomfiture that occurs when two cultures clash, when one cultural worldview doesn’t understand the other. Like when I would come back to America from Africa and feel a deep sense of alienation standing in the toothpaste aisle. Or how I didn’t even see the packages of cut up chicken, even when I was staring right at them, and always bought a whole chicken and dismembered it myself because I just didn’t know, I couldn’t see the packages of chicken thighs there on the shelf.
Two
This kind of alienated feeling is a fraught moment. While the mind tries to assimilate the language and categories of someone, to her, incomprehensible, underneath are the deep, murky waters of emotionally laden moral categories. My cultural paradigm so orders and arranges my mental and emotional world and it hasn’t occurred to me that there might be a different way of seeing or feeling anything.
Three
If you go to another place at first you will be charmed and amazed by how different everything and everybody is. But that is only because you are filtering everything through your own grid. After a while you will encounter some idea or concept that cannot make it through the wire mesh of your own moral sense. When you try to apologize for breaking something that belongs to a friend, and offer to replace it, and the other person says, “Why are you making war on me?” you will be tempted to retreat in humiliation. It will be very hard work to use the language and categories you do share in common to put new steps out in front of you that will eventually be a whole bridge to get to the other person. All the while, as you’re trying to understand, you suffer a deep inclination to say, “That’s just stupid and wrong.”
This is true of cross-cultural communication, of course, but also when two people come together to form a new family. The “that’s just stupid and wrong,” instinct has to go away.
Four
Usually the thing that isn’t making it through your grid isn’t making it because you “feel” like it is bad. Your mind and gut work together to expel it. It contradicts some deeply engrained, unquestioned value. This, I think, is probably the moment the two people or two cultures either walk away from each other, or they stay, but the one forces the other to conform, though it never is a full bending, and so bitterness grows up and stays there forever. Only very rarely do two people honestly listen to each other and lean in, attending so deeply that they can hear, understand, and accept the underlying good articulated by the other. I’m sure there are statistics about this but I don’t know where to find them.
Five
The command to listen comes from the desire to understand, of course. The trouble is, you can’t command someone else to listen to you. Accusing them of not listening doesn’t make them begin to listen. Indeed, contempt is the one thing that will break the attempt and make it impossible for two differently thinking people to hear and accept each other.
Six
It seems to me that most people right now are groping towards this meeting point of understanding. But, because the American cultural mind has largely rejected Jesus, it is the blind groping at the door by the men of Sodom, it is to judgement and not to mercy.
Seven
The nice thing about Jesus, if you really do consider him as an option, is that he is not bound by your cultural worldview. Indeed, he gave a revelation of himself that was meant to be put into every language. Every language and culture can hear and accept the singular revelation he gave of himself in the scriptures. But the way that you do it is to go to another person, or culture, and say, “Here is this lovely Word. Let me read it with you. What do you make of it?” And what they say will astonish you. They won’t say what you thought. They won’t repeat back to you what you expected. They will see Jesus for themselves.
Well, go check out more takes! Have a safe weekend!
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