The youth week of prayer 2008 fifth story

5. True Freedom
Casting Out Demons and Cultural Traditions

Matt. 15:1-28; Mark 1:39
Becky De'Oliveira is a native of Seattle who lived twelve years in the UK and now resides in Southwestern Michigan. She is a graduate of the creative writing MA program at Lancaster University in Lancashire, England, and works as a writer, editor and graphic designer.

“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

THE MAN WAS asleep on a soft mat on the floor of a crude hut, curled on his side like a baby. He’d fallen asleep there in the house of a cherished friend after a sumptuous meal and an evening spent telling stories around a warm fire. So comfortable and at peace was this man that he didn’t even stir as a dozen or so men crept single-file into the hut, quietly surrounding the man as if preparing for a friendly game of Farmer in the Dell. Each man carried a spear and wore a fierce expression. One or two of them carry pitch-burning torches. When they were all assembled in their rightful places, someone cleared his throat or made some other small sound. The sleeping man stirred. Someone shuffled his feet. All eyes watched the man, waiting for the moment when he opened his eyes. The story they’ve been working on is fast approaching its climax. The man licks his lips, sleepily opens his eyes, rolls onto his back . . . and then sits upright, eyes suddenly wide with fright as he takes in the sight of the circle of men, immediately understanding what it means. The circle of men erupts into laughter. Gotcha! Fade to black. Cut to strips of human flesh being barbecued on a large outdoor grill, the entire village lined up and laughing maniacally with bottles of A1 sauce in hand.

“I don’t get it,” I whispered to the girl sitting next to me on a plastic folding chair in the youth hall. “They ate him?”

BACK SOME TWENTY-ODD years ago, watching a film at home or anywhere outside a cinema was a big deal and required advanced planning. It also required renting equipment, perhaps a degree in engineering—or at the very least the ability to sort and plug wires without throwing your bowl of popcorn through the window in a fit of rage. Because of the logistical challenges, you knew with certainty that any teacher or youth leader who came bursting through the doors with a reel-to-reel projector or TV/VCR on a wheeled trolley was about to change your life. Anything they bothered to show would be burned forever into your mind. The Challenger exploding—and the endless replays, a long spiral of smoke falling over and over again into the sea. John Huss—or an actor playing John Huss—singing Jesus Thou Son of David in a quivering voice as the flames rose around him as he stood bound to the stake. Johnny Lingo and his ten-cow wife. Strips of human flesh being barbecued on a large outdoor oven.

The film The Peace Child, based on a book of the same title by Don Richardson, is about the Sawi people of New Guinea. As of 1962, when Richardson and his wife, Carol, went to live among them, the Sawi were cannibal/head-hunters who fought amongst themselves. In this twisted culture where values seemed turned back-to-front, murder was considered a good thing; but not just ordinary murder. In order to be “a legend maker” a Sawi would first pretend to make friends with someone, luring him into complacency, and then killing him once he was fully convinced of the authenticity of the friendship.

These same people, prizing treachery as the greatest good, laughed themselves into fits when the missionaries relayed the story of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus with a kiss. The way they saw it, Judas was the hero of the story, “a legend maker.” If the story of Judas and Jesus and the kiss were made into a cowboy movie, Judas would wear the white hat and ride off into the sunset with the pretty woman.

I was thirteen years old and it had never before occurred to me that there might be more than one way to see the story of Judas. Never! It seemed to me, at that still-innocent time of life, that there were such things as good and bad and that everyone—all humans everywhere, even the ones who stuck bones through their noses—understood those concepts in the same way I did. Even if a person did bad things—like sauté other peoples’ organs—he would be nothing more than an anomaly, someone the rest of his villagers would try helplessly to explain. “I raised him with values,” his mother would sob on an evening news program, wiping her nose with a wadded handkerchief. “He ate with napkins on his lap at mealtimes and had no more than half an hour of television a day—and never anything violent. He called his elders ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ He did his homework on time, never gave me nor his father a minute of trouble.” People could be bad, sure. But societally-sanctioned badness? Bad considered good? Hate as love? The big chief handing out medals to those who tricked and ate their friends? Was it possible that words were nothing more than jigsaw pieces—part of a giant puzzle in which any two pieces fit together; nothing had to be any particular way and no matter what you do, you create a picture?

Sucker punch! But the more I considered the idea, the more it started—strangely—to please me. I’ve always liked surprises—the little shock you feel when you discover a truth wholly unexpected. Eureka! Life is not what you thought. Eureka! You will never understand it all, but right now, you can understand this. Hold this truth in your hands for a moment and feel as it begins to swell. You can’t hold it forever; it will escape your grasp and you’ll be left, once again, yearning. So stroke it. Enjoy its cool clarity. The impossible was possible after all. There were people in the world who were nothing like me. They didn’t care about the same things, weren’t frightened or repelled by the same things. They were something else entirely. What? Is a person who prizes treachery, death and cannibalism even a person? A human being? What makes you human?

“Don’t be a fool,” a friend answered when I asked the same question. “Your DNA makes you human.”

“What makes you a Christian?”

“Giving up your sins and following Jesus.”

“But what if, to you, your sins are good? What if you’re taught that wrong is right? What about people who bury suspected adulterers to the neck and stone them, fathers who murder their own daughters in “honour” killings, tribes who perform ritual sacrifices? They do these things because they believe they are good— even required. How are people supposed to become Christians if even their thoughts are so corrupt that they don’t know the difference between right and wrong?”

“I don’t know. What happened with the Sawi people?”

“Are you kidding? It’s been more than twenty years. Anyway, after they ate the first guy, I think I went to the bathroom and locked myself in one of the stalls. I was too scared.”

CHRISTIANS, we are told, are supposed to transcend the cultures we are born into. We are not to merely reflect the values of our parents and societies, but we are to embody the character of Christ. In the old days, wherever wester Christians converted “natives,” those natives would begin to wear white shirts with collars and ties. They’d sing hymns. In the books I read as a child growing up, the people of Burma would stop chewing betel nut and they’d get rid of the pigs that lived under their raised huts. That was how you became a Christian and that was why it was always easier to convert people who already wore white shirts and lived without pigs or dark-red juice dripping from their teeth onto their chins. A “culture” was something only other people have—a wicked culture even more so. You don’t notice the extent to which the person you are is informed by your culture until you leave it and enter foreign territory where the behaviour of others jars you, where you feel always like a fool.

As a kid, I was fascinated with other cultures, with the clothes and customs and languages of other people. In hotel rooms on trips with my family, I’d busy myself in the corner with the Gideon Bible, copying John 3:16 in the curly script of Sinhalese or Tamil, the elegant scrawl of Arabic, the boxy simplicity of Hebrew or Korean. I spent hours poring over the section of the encyclopaedia that dealt with native costumes, admiring the bright silks of Asia, the lace of Spain, the palm fronds of the South Pacific. One of my greatest disappointments was when a girl from Zambia joined my third grade class and I found her dressed in blue jeans and a t-shirt with Wonder Woman underpants. Still, I wanted particularly to be her friend— to be the friend of anyone who came from anywhere else. The endless variation among people seemed wonderful to me. Some people were offended by feet, I’d marvel. Feet! Who would have thought!

The difference between being a child and being an adult is that when you’re a child, you never have to think about anything horrible for very long. Horrors, injustices, these roll off you like water off an otter’s fur. Things can appear to you as nothing more than curiosities—you don’t have to deal with them. They don’t confront you, forcing you to make choices, to take uncomfortable stands.

That people hold to various cultural traditions and have vastly different value systems—well, sure, you could call that magical. You could think it’s beautiful and the “spice of life” and the very thing that makes the world “interesting.” And this is quite true- if you’re talking about aesthetics; food, manners and language. However, the idea that there is nothing intrinsically human in people —in terms of values—is slightly alarming. Maybe even more than slightly so. Maybe it’s the worst thing in the world.

“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favours death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.” ~Octavio Paz

Not too long ago, I came upon an article in a newspaper about a young woman of a lower-caste family somewhere in the Indian subcontinent. She was the first in her family to receive an education, and as such, was the pride of her parents. The men of another family in the same village, unhappy that one of the young woman’s brothers was interested in their sister, decided to bring “shame” upon the entire family by kidnapping the educated young woman and raping her. After this news came to light, the school, which had recently offered the woman employment as a teacher, revoked their offer. They did not want to be “tainted” by association with this “scandal.” I read the article several times over, just to make sure I understood, because I couldn’t understand. How is it possible that people can think that by acting in a dishonourable, criminal way they are bringing “shame” on another person? Weren’t they, in fact, bringing shame only upon themselves? Although I am familiar with this idea and have heard many, many stories of this kind, they never fail to shock me a little. How is it possible for people—human surely, in their DNA, just like me—to look at the same set of facts and reach such different conclusions?

My thirteen-year-old mind thrilled a little at this new idea, the possibility of pluralism, the way there could be so many answers to the same question, endless facets to the same bit of cut crystal. She would hold that crystal to the sun and turn it this way and that, endlessly exploring and exclaiming aloud at the wonders revealed. My thirty-five year-old mind though, feels tired and a little sick at how people are, at how wrong the world is. Let me put it this way: Maybe sometimes there are some possibilities of life that should disappear—and quickly (don’t spare the horses)—without weeping or violins playing. Not everything is valuable or worth preserving just because it happens to be a part of someone’s culture. “Difference” if that difference includes violence or cannibalism is not wonderful or interesting. It is pain. It is a prison. It isn’t what we were created for.

LIKE IT OR not, we live within culture the way we live within the atmosphere. It holds you to the ground, allowing you to breathe and live. It is easy, of course, for me to cast a critical eye on the villagers of the sub-Indian continent for their sexist and unjust ways because they are floating in another bubble, one perfectly designed for pricking by just the sort of sharp instrument I hold in my hand. They could probably make pointed observations about the culture in which I live and breathe—observations that pass lightly over my head, barely brushing my brow. Like those annoying and almost invisible black gnats, you know they’re there, but you can’t quite grasp them, let alone find an adequate way of dealing with their presence. You wave a hand in front of your face, half-heartedly. You go about your business. This is how we humans survive.

Thinking too much and looking too hard hurts. It’s easier to keep moving. What, after all, does God expect from us? How can we be anything more than what we are?

I WAS CURIOUS about how The Peace Child ended, so I Googled it on the Internet. Turns out the Richardsons finally found a way to get through to the Sawi—a concept within their culture that gelled with the reality of Jesus. This was the idea of the Peace Child—the only guarantee that all Sawi would honour. It was the exchange of infants between villages. While any other form of murder was sanctioned, the killing of a peace child was not. Peace reigned as long as the peace child lived. Richardson used this idea—that Jesus is the peace child who will live forever, establishing eternal harmony among people—to get through to this tribe of people. Many of them became Christians as a result. Probably they started wearing ties and singing Amazing Grace, but none of that matters. What matters is that even in this depraved, upside-down culture there remained the essence of an idea that led to Jesus. And that, along with DNA, is what makes us human—this tangible link we all have with God.

It is okay for us to be different—in fact, more than okay, it’s the way it is. We are different, whether we like it or not—but we are not called to complacency. Jesus offers us true freedom from everything that might keep us from being the people we were created to be. This includes aspects of our various cultures that are not right. Socrates famously remarked that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” We all come to Christianity with our own cultures and viewpoints, our own way of seeing the world, but none of that excuses us from the task of trying to see the world as Jesus does. The mixture of beauty and ugliness that the world offers swirls around us like a colourful tornado and we stand still in the midst of it all. I will not be blown off my feet, we say, and close our eyes.