Confusing to Say the Least
Stamina in Culture Crossingby B Locuta
Why was everyone laughing?
The joke was straightforward enough, and my friend’s impression of his mother-in-law was amusing, in a hammy sort of way. But it certainly didn’t seem that hilarious. Everyone else in the room was doubled over. Once again, I felt emotionally handicapped, even as I fully understood that the problem was one of culture, not intelligence. I was an outsider to this humor, though I’d been around it for a quarter of my life. But that’s just how it goes with culture. Just when you feel like you’re out of the woods, it starts raining. The good news is that the edge goes away with time. With time, you don’t feel as lonely when you don’t get the joke, as long as you’ve got enough of a foundation in friendship. But it’s still no fun to be the outsider.
Nobody sets out to be ethnocentric. We prefer to be at peace with everyone. The trouble is, unless we work hard to understand each other, we will each envision paradise on our own terms. Paradise for me might be my friend’s dystopia. But when I plow ahead and make paradise happen, I can deeply hurt my relationships.
If it’s hard to get along with the people in your own family, how much harder it is to love and live cross-culturally! In idealistic circles (including frequent urbana.org readers), we gush about cross-cultural relationships as if they were the solution to myriad problems, from lame personal spirituality all the way up to war and peace, and the energy crisis to boot. And many of these claims are true: our God is a global God, and knowing him through the eyes of cross-cultural friendship is a sure way to get to know him better.
But in many ways, entering into community with those unlike oneself is volunteering for heartache. Everything you know will be turned upside down, and will begin to take on different meaning. It’s hard to over-exaggerate the trouble waiting for us once we commit to this course. You might find yourself forever lonely – unknown among your new friends, and no longer understood by your old friends. You might spend months and years feeling stupid in daily life situations like joke-telling, only to go home for Christmas and feel lonely among your own flesh-and-blood.
When God took on meat and bones in the form of Jesus, he also took on the blood, sweat and tears that come with the package. While previously he was able to see and know the world; now he could only know his little village, and even remotely at that: through the medium of human sensory perception. Once, in heaven as part of the trinity, he was immediately near the closest community possible; now his friends were embodied other than him, separated from him and each other by space, personality, language, culture, and sin.
He did it because he wanted community with us. We can learn a lot from that attitude. When we look for cross-cultural fellowship on our own terms, we’re by definition asking others to submit to our needs. But only by crossing cultures and making friends, can we understand certain aspects of God’s character.
The trouble is that cross-cultural friendship is less than glamorous, and it’s never entirely complete, any more than a marriage is ever complete. After the inevitable honeymoon period, during which essays like this seem overly gloomy, comes the real thing. That’s when your cultural hosts no longer crack out the china for you, but ask you to do the dishes instead. At that point, you need to proactively choose to stay in the game.
But somewhere along the line, and you can’t know when, you’ll look back and realize how far you’ve come and gain a sense of exhilaration at the progress and joy. You’ll understand the joke, or you’ll know when to show up at the meeting, the posted time notwithstanding. More importantly, you’ll be reading the Bible and an old familiar passage will leap out at you like it’s never been there before, and you’ll start to understand God in new and deeper ways. Just as the human race offers nearly infinite possibilities for relational histories, God also provides as many riches as possible communities of believers. As a fellow believer in a church of many nations and languages and cultures, you’ve got deeper riches at your disposal than you’ll ever be able to realize. But first you’ll have to pull someone aside and ask the meaning of that stupid joke.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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