"I cannot translate conservative or liberal into my native
language," says Ilo, who was born in Nigeria. "If I visit my village, I
cannot describe these concepts in Igbo." He says that his African
friends and family can't relate to the concepts that polarize Americans.
"We can disagree, but we don't have to slam each other. This is
community," he says.
Americans should be better at dealing with ambiguity, diversity,
and disagreement, says Father Stan Chu Ilo, a research professor of
Catholic studies and African Catholicism at DePaul University in
Chicago. Life can embrace both joy and sorrow; two people can disagree
and yet love each other deeply.
For Ilo the concept of community
emerges from a distinctly African spirituality. Everything and everyone
is connected; your well-being depends on the well-being of the people
around you, as well as that of the trees, the streams, even the rocks.
This, for Ilo, is where we find God: in the common threads that bind us
together into one common web of relationship and responsibility.
Ilo
believes that what ties everything--people, rivers, rocks, trees, and
animals--together is God. African Christians see this rich connection
between all created things through their faith in Jesus. "Jesus made
these connections," he says. "A relationship with Jesus helps to tighten
this web of connectivity so that it doesn't fall apart."
What kinds of stories do people in the United States and Europe tell about Africa?
You hear multiple narratives about Africa and Christianity in Africa. Africa has always been a puzzle to people.
In
the 15th century, when the Portuguese were exploring Africa, they kept
looking for this elusive king called Prester John. They had heard of
this marvelous king in Africa. But it was all just a myth.
In
the 16th century, a great African king called Mansa Musa stopped in
Cairo on his way to pilgrimage in Mecca. He had so much gold and wealth
that he crashed the stock markets. The Arabs, too, became fascinated
with Africa, saying among themselves, "This king has so much money, 500
slaves, so many wives, and so much wealth." It was part of why the Arabs
decided to cross the Sahara Desert into the African hinterland.
So
false myths and stories about Africa are nothing new. Today the stories
have changed: I hear people say that people in Africa are very
conservative because they are opposed to social issues like same-sex
marriage, abortion, or gender issues.
I also hear people
say that Africa is the future of the church, since there are so many
African priests working in the United States and Canada. The church in
Africa is growing at a time when the church here is kind of shrinking.
Some
people are very optimistic about the church in Africa because of their
strong faith and the exponential growth of the Christian population. But
others tell the narrative of the poor church. People see images of
hunger, starvation, war, and disease--most recently ebola.
Finally,
some people see Africa as where you go to have fun and enjoy Africans'
hospitality and friendship. This summer I traveled with staff and
faculty from DePaul on safari. Some of them saw Africa as this beautiful
continent and connected with the natural beauty of Africa beyond some
of the negative stereotypes.
What do these narratives say about Africa?
There is no one story about Africa. Africa has many ethnic
groups in 54 countries. In my home country of Nigeria, for instance, I
can't even talk about a common narrative of Catholicism.
Catholics
have interacted with Muslims for close to 200 years in northern
Nigeria. This has made the texture of Catholicism there very specific
and unique.
If you ask me about the true picture of
Africa, I would say it is a multiplicity of human experience held
together by a common African spirituality based in the connections
between people.
The face of African Catholicism--whether
in South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Uganda, the Central African Republic,
or Ghana--is that common thread of the spirituality of the intimate
connections of reality.
This spirituality is often expressed
in celebration. People celebrate life. They celebrate faith. They
celebrate death. They celebrate suffering. Life is governed by a
spirituality of intimacy and connection.
Say more about this African spirituality.
Someone has called it the moral tradition of abundant
life. What is abundant life? I say it is human and cosmic flourishing,
when every reality is intimately connected to every other reality in a
harmonious bond. African thinking believes that war, hatred, alienation,
injustice, and segregation are all evils that not only diminish both
the perpetrators and the victims, but also God.
René Descartes, the French philosopher, said, "Cogito, ergo sum,"
or "I think, therefore I am." But many scholars in African philosophy
and theology say it would be more appropriate to say, "I belong to the
community, therefore I am. I am loved, therefore I am. I am related to
you, therefore we are."
In Bantu thinking, this is called
the "vital principle"; l experience life through my encounter with other
humans and cosmic realities. The more I am in harmony with creation,
the richer I become and the more life is generated in me. Even stones
have a vital principle because they are connected to the whole
bondedness of life. Many in Africa refer to this as Ubuntu, "I am,
through you" or "we are, through others."
The I cannot have any meaning outside of the loving embrace of the we. And the we has
no meaning if the multiplicity of individuals within that framework are
not intimately connected, sharing life, experiences, pain, and
suffering.
This doesn't mean that people don't have their
own individual identities or that you collapse the individual into the
anonymity of the commonality of human beings. Rather it's that your
identity is intrinsically connected to that of every other person in a
common web of life.
In traditional African society, when a
baby is born his or her umbilical cord is buried and a tree is planted
on it. This is how African traditional societies calculated people's
age. The tree makes a new ring every year, so if you want to know how
old someone is, you go to their tree of life.
We called
these ancestral groves, places where these trees of life were planted.
They were part of the intimate connection that holds everything
together. This is what it means to have a spirituality of abundant life:
It is only through connections that we can live fully.
No comments:
Post a Comment