biblical blindspots

             

           I recently went to a conference for Christian international schools in Kijabe, Kenya. One of the highlights of the conference was the keynote speaker, Dr. Randy Richards. He has lived and served as a missionary in Indonesia and is a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

                He spoke about culture as an iceberg, with the noticeable things we usually talk about -- clothing, language, food -- as the tip of the iceberg. The bulk of the iceberg is what is below the surface, and it is what "goes without being said." As we read the Bible, we miss what "goes without being said" and we insert our own culture's norms. As Westerners, we have blind spots when we approach Scripture.

                At the conference Randy made it clear that he is not merely criticizing the West; every culture has blind spots, but he wrote a book targeted to white Western males because he is a white Western male. He hopes that every culture tries to critically examine the blind spots they may have when it comes to Scripture.

                I bought a copy of the book Richards co-wrote, called Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. I highly recommend it. It has helped me look at the Bible in a different way and, living in Uganda, helped me understand some of the deeper differences in culture.  When I have moments of "Huh?" even though we're both speaking English, it's usually because I'm unaware of the currents of thought running below the surface.

                The book begins by addressing more obvious issues such as language and race. The next section skims just below the surface, touching on the differences between collectivism and individualism, the concept of time, and honour/shame vs. right/wrong. (Retelling the story of David and Bathsheba through the lens of an honour/shame culture was very insightful.) The next section goes even deeper, into rules vs. relationships, what we consider to be virtues and vices, and finally how we in the West often perceive ourselves as at the centre of God's will. As the book goes deeper and deeper into "what goes without being said," I realized how near and dear some Western cultural values are to my heart, even if they are Biblically neutral or even contrary to Scripture.

                Some quotes:

                "We can easily forget that Scripture is a foreign land and that reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience."

                "The most powerful cultural values are those that go without being said."

                "Church history is a two-thousand-year-long conversation about how the eternal truth of Scripture applies in different cultures at different times."

                [On the Western tendency to ignore Paul's verses praising singleness]: "... what goes without being said amongst Western Christians, especially in America, is that celibacy has no inherent spiritual value . . . Because we privilege marriage as God's preferred way of life for everyone, churches in America, on the whole, do a very poor job of ministering to single adults."

                "The highest goal and virtue in [Western individualist] culture is being true to oneself. The supreme value is on the sovereignty of the individual . . . The highest goal in [collectivist] culture is supporting the community."

                [Interesting note on collectivist culture: Indonesian Christians were shocked to learn that American parents allow their Christian teenagers to go on dates at night unsupervised. "For Indonesians, it seems unfair to leave an individual in a situation in which his or her only real protection is willpower . . . Indonesian Christian teens are relieved that someone else is responsible for protecting them.]

                [On Western tendency to see ourselves at the centre of God's will -- that chapter was hard to read!]: "When we realize that each passage of Scripture is not about me, we begin gradually to see that the true subject matter of the Bible, what the book is really about, is God's redeeming work in Christ. God is restoring all of creation (including me), but I am not at the centre of God's kingdom work. This is a much greater thing to be absorbed with than ourselves ." [Paraphrasing now]: Instead of reading the Bible and asking, "What does this mean to me?" find out what it meant to the original audience and ask, "How does this apply to me?"

                General tips for reading the Bible:  "We are likely misreading when our reading of the text requires us to ignore the context, to shorten the text to just this or that verse or part of a verse. We are likely misreading when our reading of the text requires us to lengthen the text, by pulling in verses from other parts of the Bible until we get all the pieces we need . . . Other times, though, we misread because we read alone. That is, we often hear only the interpretations of people just like us . . . The worldwide church needs to learn to study Scripture together as a global community." 

middle schoolers in heat

We have two pets here in Uganda: Wally the dog and Muwala the cat. Both of these pets need to be neutered or, as Canadians say, "fixed." The task of arranging the vet appointment was clearly on my husband Isaac's to-do list. I tried to avoid being a nagging wife and let it sit on his list. There it sat. And sat. And sat. Now here I sit in Ugandan while he is back in Canada, and the item is now on my to-do list.

Muwala in her younger days ... 

Now, to be fair to him, the man was writing exams and finishing his degree. He did go back to Canada earlier than expected, and only had about 36 hours' notice about his changed flight. He did make a valiant effort to get the animals "fixed" before he left, but the vet wasn't able to come in time.

He left for Canada on Friday. The same day my cat started showing unusual symptoms... I slowly realized that her strange behaviour was not because she missed him but, much to my dismay, because she was in heat.

I've never been around a cat in heat before. As I witness the behavior of a cat in heat (she is my only housemate now, after all) I can't help but think about the middle schoolers I teach and draw comparisons (no offense intended). In many ways, they are "in heat" for the first time in their lives and remind me of my little Muwala, who also finds herself in the midst of hormonal upheaval.

Some similarities between my students and my pet ...

1. Change in appetite. The boys start to eat more, some of the girls start to watch what they eat. In Muwala's case, she has hardly touched her bowl of food for the past few days. This, I read on Google, is normal for a cat.

2. Annoying loud noises. The boys in my classes are loud and rambunctious. The girls giggle much louder than is necessary, "whisper" secrets that can be heard across the room and explode in sudden bursts of laughter. Muwala is yowling. Especially at night. Even after locking her out of my room, I can hear her regular meows. Everyone is trying to get the attention of the opposite sex.

3. Emotionally needy and unpredictable. Google told me that a symptom of a cat being in heat is that they will be "more affectionate than usual." Muwala is a people cat to begin with, but now she is all over me. I can't get any marking done because she sits directly on my papers. She purrs and leans into my petting more than usual. And then, without warning, she'll turn around and swat at me! Oh ... the middle school years and the emotions that are oozing everywhere. I remember my own embarrassing emotional roller coasters and I have witnessed those of my students. Tears, hugs, fights, break-ups, make-ups ... Middle schoolers are emotional. I know this: I read their poetry.

4. Pushing the boundaries and becoming difficult to control. Being a female, Muwala is much more of a priority of being "fixed" than Wally is. Now that she is in heat, I'm trying desperately to keep her indoors and she's trying desperately to get out. Windows are closed despite the equatorial temperatures. I have to slide into the door sideways and push her out of the way with my foot as I do so. She is sniffing around the door frame. In the past week (before I noticed she was in heat) she was wandering further and further away, even going briefly outside the compound walls. (When did she stop being content to hang out close to home?) The connection to middle school is obvious. They want to go to the mall without their parents for the first time. They don't follow the rules as easily. They sometimes talk back. They often have no clue why rules are set, and are often convinced that adults just want to ruin their lives.

5. A little awkward. Middle schoolers are awkward; sometimes their coordination has suffered as their body grows and changes, and socially they don't always know the right thing to say. Let's just say Muwala has been doing awkward things the last few days that make me a little uncomfortable to discuss. On top of that, she's embarrassed me in front of my neighbours on the other side of the duplex -- when I asked this morning if they could hear her yowling at night they hesitated but admitted that yes, yes they could.  *Awkward.*

6. No ability to foresee future consequences. I have explained to my students many times this year that, by no fault of their own, the frontal lobe of their brain has not fully developed. This is why, for good and bad, young people are more likely to take risks and ignore (or have an inability to see) the future consequences for their behaviour. Let's be honest: Muwala wants to get outside for only one thing. She wants to hop over that compound wall and come back pregnant. She can't foresee the difficulty of raising kittens alone, or calculate the vet and food bills that would cost us, or consider the fact that in two weeks I will be leaving her for two months. While Muwala's choices are much more serious than the middle schooler who decides not to study for a test the next day, they are both thinking in the moment.

I read online that cats are in heat for SEVEN to TEN days ... This is going to feel like forever! And isn't that how it felt when I was in the midst of middle school? For. Ever.

*Sigh*

I can't believe how much my middle schoolers have changed over the past year. Students that were shorter than me at the beginning of the year are taller than me, voices have deepened, and -- dare I say -- in many ways they've matured.

And as I look at my little kitty, the furball Isaac pulled out of a gutter on Christmas morning, I can't believe how big she is.

When did they grow up so fast?


[... Can you tell I'm home alone and procrastinating on my final grading? Nothing to do but observe my cat and get sentimental about the end of the year!]

the greatest saints?

"Some of the people we met had nothing, absolutely nothing, but they were so happy," Kimberly said. She extracted a photograph from the crowded back of the piano, of her daughter with two Indian women, their skin dark and weathered, their smiles showing missing teeth. "These women were so wonderful," she said. 

Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty, because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

-- Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie

I just finished Americanah, probably the longest book I've read for quite some time. I had shown my grade 8 class the Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie called "The Danger of the Single Story." (Take 20 minutes and watch it! The best quote: "The trouble with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.") One of my students told her mother about it, who is a big Adichie fan, and since then they've been feeding me Adichie novels one at a time.

I have to say that I enjoyed Purple Hibiscus more  than Americanah. Americanah is the story of a Nigerian woman who moves to America and then back to Nigeria, with a love story woven the whole way through. Americanah was too long for my taste (477 pages!) and I felt that it started to get repetitive after awhile. I also didn't like the fact that the guy in the book leaves his wife to get back together with his one true love when she returns to Nigeria. There were some funny parts in the book when the character Ifemelu first moves to America and experiences culture shock, which I found interesting since it's the flip side of what I've experienced here in Uganda.

One thing Adichie is really good at -- in both of the novels I've read -- is complicating things. In the scene quoted above, when Ifemelu is working in America as a nanny for the wealthy, soft-hearted Kimberly, Adichie complicates the view that many people in the West have of "the greatest saints ... the foreign poor."

The greatest saints.

I have to admit I've been guilty of that. My sister works at an addictions centre in Canada, and I recently said to her, "That kind of urban poverty scares me. It's so complicated. Here in Uganda, it seems more black-and-white: this hardworking woman needs $100 for a sewing machine to start her own small business."

But the longer I'm here, the less I know. Everything gets so complicated, so gray. Sometimes it seems that every way to "help" is analyzed, criticized, and somewhere, someone has a reason why such practices are actually doing harm.

And whether I'm negative or positive about Ugandan culture, up or down, "the Ugandan poor" refuse to fit into the mental boxes I build for them.

There's the woman who tends her shop all day, every day, and makes around $3 profit on a good day. There's the kids who will smile and grab your hand. There's also the kids who swarmed a friend of mine, holding her hands and smiling at her while one kid dipped his hand into her purse. There's the woman who does your laundry, who you know lives in basically a shack the size of a walk-in closet, and she returns the 5000 shillings ($2) she found in your pocket. There's the people who must have watched my neighbour's house, robbing them in broad daylight when the house was left unattended for less than an hour. There's a shopkeeper who takes a microloan and invests it. There's a shopkeeper who takes a microloan and wastes it.There's the Congolese ladies learning English at a nearby shelter who don't know where their families are or whether or not they're alive, and yet they are bright and cheerful and somehow find optimism.

There's the hordes of young men who are jobless and who insist that, if given the chance, they would work hard. There's the night guards who sleep on the job. There's the Ugandan church lady who slips a wrinkled 1000 shilling note (40 cents) into the hand of hospital patient she is praying with. There's the alcoholic sucking waragi out a plastic bag, reeking of alcohol and leering at you. There's the stranger who will take you to the store you're looking for downtown, even if it's far out of his way. There's the person who will unzip the top pocket on your backpack to rob you as you are walking downtown (which happened to Isaac this past week). But then there's also the guy who hissed protectively to Isaac, "Mzungu! You need to take care! You were almost robbed."

Everything's complicated, and why am I surprised? Isn't painting an entire group of people in a positive light still painting them with the same brush? Isn't endowing someone with virtues simply because of their class or skin colour the same as pegging them with negative assumptions (ex: the stereotype of the "noble savage" in Canada).

People are not projects. People are not objects of pity. People are not perfect. People are not predictable. People are people, and people are complicated. (Even poor people in Africa!)