Vincent Kundukulam
One of the issues disturbing the process of dialogue between Christian faith and cultures is the fear of losing Christian unicity. This fear is quite understandable because when Christianity is in conversation with the discrete identities of different groups, the latter shall crisscross with the then existing expressions of Christian mysteries. When the local identities raise serious challenge to the ways of faith-living, those who are passionately attached to the external rituals and traditions of Church may feel losing the ground of Christianity.
In fact, the reason for this fear is a false understanding of what identity is and how it is preserved. Usually, identity is understood as distinctiveness or as that which makes something different from others. But there is also another important component in the concept of identity. It appears well in the etymological meaning of the French equivalent l’identité which means ‘sameness of essential in diverse instances’. Here, the emphasis is on the sameness in basic principles than on the differentiating elements. Identity consists both in sharing of the common essence and in differing from the other in the externals.
This perception is very close to that of Eastern mind according to which human identity consists in two factors: individuation and commonality. God has created a person in the same essence of the co-humans, and at the same time, with traits proper to each one’s original context. Accordingly, the uniqueness of a person has to be defined both in relation to and in difference to others. The identity crisis shall decrease if we give more importance to similarity in essentials than difference in externals.
Another factor that generates fear about losing identity is the false notion that identity has a uniform structure. Believers accustomed to monolithic way of understanding reality feels threatened when they are asked to integrate a different way of expressing truth. The remedy is nothing but to get trained to experience the differentiated aspects of truth. Amartya Sen, in his work, Identity and Violence explains that cultural identity of a person is multi-faceted. For instance, the same person can be a British citizen, of French origin, a non-vegetarian, a Buddhist, a mathematician, an asthmatic and so on and so forth. Hence, in the pluralistic world, a person can be fairly understood only through an integral approach. Letting one dimension of these features take over others shall lead to reductionism.
Those who examine closely the history of Church shall realize that whenever Christians met with new cultures, they changed their old patterns of living faith. In this venture, the vision that helped them to keep a healthy balance between permanence and mutation was the belief in Trinity. The One God is a communion of three persons. While each person in Trinity has specific roles in the mystery of redemption, all the three together assume their responsibilities in mutual love and charity. Another model before Church was the mystery of incarnation. Religiously and culturally, Jesus was a Jew, but those features did not obstruct him from sharing the ‘human commonalities’ with other religious cultures. He kept the godliness while being fully humane. To live communion of faith in multiplicity of cultures is like the conductor coordinating an orchestra comprised of various instruments and singers.
The fear of losing identity due to the cultural encounters would have been legitimate if Church follows bluntly other cultural rites in the sense they are performed in their own traditions. But Church never copies other cultures with their original meanings. She receives and modifies them through Christian lens. What matters is not so much what cultural materials you use but how do you do with them. Christian identity is more a matter of how than what. As Herve Carrier says, Church is not an undifferentiated system but a living organism composed of varied (my addition) members, all contributing to the unity and enrichment of the entire body. Identicalness is not opposed to particularities; authentic identity consists in living the diversity as essential to the catholicity of Church.
- kundu1962@gmail.com
