Samuel Rayan, SJ
Local Cultures
Instruments of Incarnated Christian Spirituality

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"Spirituality builds on, engages and is engaged by, one's cultural roots" writes Joan Puls in her 1985 book, A Spirituality for Our Times.

 This is going to be a meditation on culture and on its relation to spirituality.

A. Culture

1. Culture as used here is a metaphor deriving from cultivating the soil. Actively it refers to the process of developing an existing potential; passively it denotes the resultant product, state or condition. This second objective meaning is the more modern. Culture is what we humans grow or create. It is the result of human intervention, and is distinguished from nature which is given, and grows and develops independently of our minds, wills and hands. Thus a cave in a mountain is nature, while this room, this cave in which we are assembled, is culture. Hair on the head is nature, but each particular hairdo is culture. The skin is nature, the shirt is culture. In a profounder view, one might say that nature, creation, is God's culture - result of an intervention of the divine mind and will (Song, Choan-Seng, Christian Mission in Reconstruction. An Asian Analysis. New York: Orbis Books, 1977, 25:29-30). A cultivated thing or environment would be objective culture but that presupposes a cultivated mind or person, a subjective culture. Cultivated fields point to peasants of remarkable culture, even if these are illiterate.

2. Until recently culture used to be identified with and defined in terms of the fine arts: painting, music, dance, poetry, drama, etc., and the ability to produce them or to appreciate them. This bourgeois approach viewed culture as an élite privilege, a leisure-time activity, separate from the labour which sustains life. To the bourgeoisie culture was entertainment and fashionable commodity. Karl Marx criticised this view and use of culture as dehumanised and fetishist. He sought to restore the ancient holistic tradition by re-integrating culture into the totality of human activity. His analysis disclosed a web of interdependence between production relations and the other social and cultural expressions. The impact is mutual. Culture does not begin after the serious business of economics has been taken care of. The two proceed together, causing each other. Socio-economic activity is an integral part of the cultural process. The potter of old not only made a useful vessel which could hold water, but took care to make it shapely and beautiful and to adorn it further with designs of bird and flower. Unalienated authentic human labour which is useful and beautiful, is at once economics and aesthetics, work and joy.

 In the same bourgeois vein, conquerors and colonisers used to identify culture with their own way of eating, dressing, behaving or misbehaving. The conquered "native" had, of course, no culture. His art was not considered art because it was different from the colonialist's. But culture is more than art, and is not necessarily identical with the ways of victors. There is then a second meaning of culture. Culture is the total, complex, expression of the spirit of a people. It is a community's way and view of life. The way of life includes the group's relation to nature, the way they work and earn their living, the mode and organisation of production, the mobilisation of the community, their laws, traditions, festivals, language, arts, artefacts, tools, ornaments. Beneath all these there is a self-understanding of the group, an interpretation of life, a world view and certain values and priorities. These get expressed in popular sayings, stories, myths, and celebrations, in interpretations of birth, death, suffering, etc. Culture is then the historically developed expression of insights, values and needs which characterises the life of a community. It refers to "the organising principle of a way of life or to a set of traditions of living" (Nandy, Ashis, 'Cultural Forms for Social Transformation: A Credo', in Alternatives XII 1987). Thus seen there is no human group without a culture of its own. Education is the process of critical/innovative transmission and reception of culture.

3. In culture there is a spiritual element. Every culture embraces a multitude of values: material and utilitarian values, (like housing, clothing, food, health): intellectual and artistic ones (poetry, painting, philosophy): moral values (respect for life, love of truth, sense of freedom, concern for justice): and religious values (faith in the Absolute, relation to the Holy, its expressions in rites, liturgies, icons, temples): and finally the various skills and refinements of mind, heart and hands connected with each and all of the above. Cultures entail spirituality also in the sense that they are people's responses to the reality of human needs, possibilities, historical situations and events as well as to their implications and promises. As these evolve and unfold, new openness and responses are called for from the human side. And that means spirituality too keeps growing and putting forth new buds and blossoms.

4. Cultures are classified on various grounds. On the basis of geography culture is Eastern or Western, continental, regional or local; or also national or ethnic. On the basis of religion one may speak of Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic or Christian culture. On the basis of social domination and dependence, anthropologists are wont to distinguish between the great traditions in culture and the little ones. Culture could be urban or rural; commercial, industrial or agrarian. On grounds of social organisation there could be a capitalist culture or a socialist one; a culture of class divisions or of equality. There could be a culture of hate as distinct from a culture of love; a culture of oppression and one of resistance, a culture of the victors and a different one of their victims.

5. In that classification a third meaning of culture is suggested. Culture as social dream and political resistance. In creating culture we are expressing what we are and what we want to become. The aspirations, dreams and hopes which we cherish and nurse, and the mobilisation of energies, efforts and people in order to realise our dreams imply espousing the values and praxis of openness and 'response-ability'. And that tallies with our understanding of spirituality. Every effort expended to make life and society freer and gentler, more beautiful and human, more equal, co-operative and sharing is a culture-creating step. Every such process coincides with the spiritual-becoming process. The spiritual-becoming process is interior to culture-creating activity. In both there is always an intuition and pursuit of the "more" - the "more" of the Human and the Divine. We have rejected the view of culture as one more consumer commodity and status symbol for the upper layers of industrial society. We are now going beyond the concept of culture as a way of life. In a situation of social fragmentation through hierarchic classes and racism and sexism and imposed poverty and skewed development and arms accumulation and wars and the threat of wars by "the big league of human violence and greed" (Nandy, Ashis, 'Culture, Voice and Development. A Primer for the Unsuspecting', 1992, p. 7), it is "necessary to move into the struggle for personal and social transformation. Culture (then) is seen above all as a commitment to the construction of a more just and caring society for all ... particularly the underprivileged" - a society "without oppressed classes", without soulless consumerism and vulgar affluence side by side with widespread destitution and misery. (Candau, Vera Maria in Ideas and Action, 152/83, Nos. 3 and 4, pp. 7-9; cf. Lk 16:19-31; 19:1-10: Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37). Here we have the dynamic aspect of culture, and its spiritual dimension.

 Here culture becomes, in Ashis Nandy's words, "a form of political resistance, and the 'language' in which such resistance is articulated". A galaxy of political thinkers and activists, like Gandhi, Amilcar Cabral, Chinua Achebe, Masanobu Fukuoka, "have given shape to this meaning of culture". The affirmation of Indian culture under colonial domination was also a protest against political domination, a challenge to its legitimacy, and a defiance of its language. Recall for instance the Santal rebellion in the 19th century, Gandhi's satyagraha in the 20th, the anti-colonial struggles of the Pathans, the ongoing Chipko, Dalit and Feminist movements in our days (Nandy, 1992, p. 5).

6. Culture in its third meaning is resistance to oppression. But "no theory of oppression can make sense unless it is cast in native (local) terms or categories, that is, in terms and categories used by the victims of our times". The victims see that "concepts such as development, growth, history, science and technology" have become new 'reasons of the State' and "mystification's for new forms of violence and injustice". Hence it is that "resistance to modern oppression has to involve ... some resistance to modernity", represented by the concepts just listed. (Nandy, 1987, pp. 113-123). The victims are also sceptical and wary of the modern nation-State, of modern science and technology and of the large forces of history. Ashis Nandy calls attention to the fact that "in most Asian and African societies, the State has ... become ... the major instrument of corruption and violence towards their own people". Modern science has become "the basic model of domination ... and the ultimate justification for all institutionalised violence". Talk of history's large forces can be "a substitute for the political morality of everyday life", for personal responsibility and internal consistency. Attention has been drawn to the fact that "the Third World societies usually maintain within their borders exactly the same violent, exploitative, ethnocidal systems which they confront in the larger world: the same centre and periphery, the same myth that the sacrifices made by the people in the short run will lead to the beatitude of development and scientific advancement in the long run, the same story of over-consuming élites fattening themselves to early death at the centre, and starvation, victimhood and slow death at periphery" (Nandy, 1987, pp. 121-122).

B. Incarnated Spirituality

7. The Theological Commission of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC), meeting in Thailand, April 1996, saw Asia as a sea of suffering due to poverty created mainly by colonialism and globalisation, and by the systematic exclusion and extinction of indigenous groups, and by the marginalisation of people's language and culture: as well as by certain processes of modernisation and loss of precious heritage. They also took note of liberation movements and people's struggles. And struggle is the stuff of life. Jesus' was a life of struggle and combat due to an uncompromising stand he took for the poor and for freedom for all. The permanent need of the poor and the oppressed is to struggle and "to have the power to resist the oppressive and exploitive structures of society". Conversion and repentance consist not only in turning away from sin, but in resisting the forces that violate the image of God and counter the cause of the Kingdom on earth. In the face of the atheism that injustice is, integral evangelism "should emphasise not so much individual repentance as people's resistance against demonic forces" (Milanio Aoanan). Faced with the diabolical forces of militarism and oppression, the nature and process of spirituality would consist in awakening, conscientising, mobilising, resisting, and envisaging alternatives and going ahead to create them, and marching forward to celebrate freedom.

8. In India's national movement, Gandhi combined non-co-operation campaigns against the British with a network of constructive activities in which every one was to engage. These symbolic actions were meant as a cultural renaissance, political awakening, and development of self-confidence and courage. Gandhi tried to "draw upon the creative and innovative springs of local action at the grassroots" (Kothari, Rajni, 'Voluntarism and Political Action', in The Indian Express, 20 June l989). In Gandhi, as also in Martin Luther King, political action and profound spirituality were combined. Highly motivated people in touch with these springs constituted the real movement for equity, justice and human rights - that is, for authentic spirituality.

 Throughout Asia, over the long centuries, the rich and the poor have been in conflict "with intermittent periods of exhaustion and disengagement.... For the peasant, struggle has been a way of life, not an impulsive departure... For the Asian peasant ... rebellion was a common occurrence. The aftermath of uprisings, however, was often so devastating ... that the modern-day heirs of the tradition of revolt would not lightly feel moved to raise their battle flag again.... Yet for some the haunting memories of past failures had faded with a hero, a sect, an incident, rebellion's time had come again" (Lewis, John Wilson and Hartford, Kathleen J., eds., Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia, Stanford, 1974, p. 3).

 Christine White tells of how "the first French troops in Cochinchina in 1861 were amazed at the extent of peasant resistance.... The resistance centre was everywhere. The resistance grew as peasants came to feel the growing burden of taxes, forced labour, having to meet the high salary of French administrators ... leading to the formation in 1930 of peasant soviets (White, Christine P., 'The Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance: Intellectuals, Workers and Peasants', in Lewis and Hartford, eds., Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia, 1974, p. 91).

 John W. Lewis and Kathleen J. Hartford aptly observe that the spirituality of Asian peasants is to be deduced from their rebellion since it is not easy to find out their beliefs and attitudes (cf. Lewis and Hartford, p. 2).

 In the Philippines the suffering of many years, the criticism and the protest, the price paid in lives, the determination to fight for change, the action, the clear religious inspiration and expression, the inseparability of prayer from struggle for liberation, of spirituality from politics, the will and the faith of the people against the tanks - all came to a head on 26 February, 1986. It was the work of the people, a liturgy, in which many priests were willing to go underground for a revolution to secure the rights of the oppressed masses, and end the domination and manipulation by the resident U.S. army, and Markos, their tool.

 Similar stories of revolutionary Christianity could be told from China, Korea, Sri Lanka. Sevaka Johan Devananda of Sri Lanka, speaking from experience, describes the prison as a fine place of spiritual formation! Going back and forth, to and from prison is a beautiful hermeneutical circle of liberation spirituality.

9. Along with resistance and struggle there is much suffering in the world. People have their own ways of coping with suffering, their own culture of the cross. The passion of humankind is the passion of Christ who is solidary with the hungry and the homeless, and weeps with those that weep. There is God hidden in human suffering, and our suffering is hidden in the wounds of Christ. As the Council has confessed, God has ways unknown to us to enable every woman and man to participate in the Paschal mystery. Kroeger says it well when he affirms that "life itself has a paschal configuration. All peoples struggle to move from darkness to light, from alienation to union. Life has an internal dynamic, focused on the movement from death to life in all its dimensions: from falsehood to truth, from apathy to responsibility, from marginalisation to participation, from loneliness and isolation to universal communion, from sin to grace... . The paschal nature of all life and experience ... provides openings for a deep human-divine encounter. It allows the human-divine experience of one (Christian, Buddhist) to encounter the human-divine experience of another (Muslim, Hindu) .... It is in situations of apparent God for -sakeness that the Christian Paschal Mystery is intimately and validly linked with the paschal mystery of all humanity... . The paschal paradigm has the power to illumine the suffering that is omnipresent in creation and history as well as the truth of God in relation to suffering (Kroeger 1994, pp. 57-58).

10.  The truth of God in relation to suffering? That truth seems to be God's silence. And yet God is not silent. He bids us loud and clear to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and take care of the widow and the orphan. Still there is no life that does not run into the hour which makes us cry out, "Why, my God, have you forsaken me? (cf. Mk 15:34). Why do you not speak even if it be in anger?" For some all critical thought and inquiry starts from the Word of God. In Asia we start from what is prior to the Word', the Womb that bears the Word, namely, the Silence of God. When the Christian reads, 'In the beginning was the Word', the Buddhist asks, 'So you have never been silent? From the very beginning you have been verbose and noisy?' The Buddhist culture, pervasive all over South and East Asia, is inviting us to begin in silence, and through a minimum of necessary words to pilgrimage to deeper silence towards the unspeakable Mystery which can only be suggested by means of symbols: and of symbols, the best, the richest, the most expressive is Silence. The silence of the Buddha tells us that God is silence. "Not that God's being is silence", clarifies Panikkar, but that "God's silence is precisely a silence of being. Perhaps we should say simply that silence is the locus of God, ... the Psalmist's "abyss of the abyss" (Ps 72:8), the midnight silence that is beyond being, the silence that reigns in the void that neither is nor is not (The Rig Veda x. 129.1), the silence from which reality draws its origin" (Panikkar, Raimundo, The Silence of God. The Answer of the Buddha. New York: Orbis Books, 1989. Spanish, 1970, p. 171). In the last analysis the silence of the Buddha means that God cannot be the object of speech or thought. To make God an object is to reduce God to creaturehood.

11.  That leaves us with the importance of symbols and non-verbal expressions of the common people: the picture, the dance, the pantomime, music, icons, plays, liturgy. Also the social organisation and social behaviour of indigenous people are symbols, a kind of liturgy, pointing in the direction of the Divine, and enabling us to open up to the healing and liberating touch of the Spirit. Enter then in silence into the spirituality of Borobudur, Ajanta, Ellora, Sigiria, and of the unsophisticated drawings and designs of local people. The drawings, dance and drama of the Minjung of Korea are shot through with Han (pain, anger and frustration and yearning for freedom) and packed with protest against and criticism of feudal and colonial oppression, and pregnant with dreams of a different order of things, a different understanding and interpretation of life and people from that of the élite, and hence a different experience of faith, a different spirituality. There is also the original symbol system of the universe, this culture of God, the source of inexhaustible inspiration and the basis of endless contemplation.

12.  Silence is related not only to the unspeakable reality of God, but to the inexplicable reality of the universe as well. In the view of Asian and ancient peoples "everything in the universe is connected to everything else". The universe is "a dynamic web of inter-related events". Writes Fritjof Capra: "The cosmic interpenetrating of things and events is illustrated in the Avatamsaka Sutra by the metaphor of Indra's net of precious gems... . In the heaven of Indra there is said to be a network of pearls so arranged that if you look at one you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way each object in the world is not only itself but involves every other object and in fact is everything else". In every particle of dust "there are present Buddhas without number" (Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics. New York: Bantam Books 1983-84, pp. 276, 280-81, 287). This perspective is shared by all mystical thought. Recall William Blake's famous lines:

In his 'Monadology' philosopher Leibnitz wrote: "Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pool full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humours is also such a garden or such a pond" (Capra, pp. 287-289). Here is a culture involving a spirituality which rejects individualism and greed, patent laws and market principles; and affirms the social character of wealth and of all human achievement.

 Inter-relatedness also means that no phenomenon can be adequately expressed, explained or named. "The sages are not interested in explaining things, but in obtaining a direct non-intellectual experience of the unity of all things". They do not elaborate scientific theories, but shape a "vision of nature transcending the realm of thought and language and leading... into the world of acintya, the unthinkable. The knowledge contained in such a vision cannot be communicated in words. It will be the knowledge which Lao Tzu had in mind, more than two thousand years ago, when he said:

13.  I would like to conclude by recalling a few suggestive symbols from Asia.

a) The classical Japanese flower arrangement exhibits three layers. The flower or bunch of flowers or of leaves that stands out topping the whole is said to represent the realm of the Spirit, which is the realm of transcendent Beauty. The lowest layer closest to the vase or earth stands for the earth with its beauty fragmented and threatened, beauty on a pilgrimage, dreaming of its roots and its home in the Transcendent. The middle layer is the human, bridging the other two, open to the beauty above, receiving its overflow and communicating it to the earth below to heal its brokenness and make its beauty whole. The vocation of the human layer, the call that comes to it from above and from below, is to be on a mission of creating beauty, to receive it from above and embody it in physical and social realties on earth.

b) The Chinese Yin and Yang gives us a spiritual lesson in interdependence and co-operation. All reality is made of a pair of opposites which are always in motion, each having something of the other right at its centre. Joy and sorrow, success and failure, life and death, light and darkness, the feminine and the masculine, certitude and doubt, art and science - Yin and Yang expand and contract in turn in order to realise the possibilities of both and the roundness of the whole.

c) The colossal images of the Buddha, seated or reclining, which one finds all over East Asia, overwhelm one with the sense of a great Presence which people honour with lotus flowers, joss sticks and rice offerings. The presence reassures us that our wild desires which make sport of us, can be tamed, the demon of Mammon, even when organised into principalities aud powers of the capitalist market, can be overthrown, and the human liberated into the fullness of peace. The path of liberation leads through karuna, measureless, universal compassion. Perhaps it is this message that reincarnates in the statues of the Goddess of Mercy standing on many a cliff and rock overlooking the turbulent sea all over East Asia.

d) It has been said, Asia is rice and religion. Rice may be scarce, but religion is plentiful. The spiritual endeavour of Asia is to hold the two together in harmony and balance and not let the one overwhelm and edge the other out. Religion cries out for rice: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, give us today our daily rice. Kim Chi Ha, the Korean Christian poet and political activist, sings of the religious depths of rice. Rice is heaven. As heaven is for all and the stars are not privatised, so rice must be shared. Yes, rice is heaven. Rice must be eaten together. The song reflects the basic concern of the masses of the people everywhere: the concern both for food and for fellowship - an egalitarian economy which alone can correspond to the presuppositions of religion. That chimes in with the view of India's sages: he that cooks for himself alone, eats sin.

e) Here is a line from Tagore. An invitation to eco-spirituality. "Silence, my soul: These trees are prayers". Do not disturb, but join in. These trees are prayers. The earth is praying. Let the line keep chanting and echoing in the silence of our souls.

f) Finally two love-stories. Shiva was a Yogi, a rigorous ascetic, seated in meditation in the solitary recesses of the higher ranges of the Himalaya mountains. Parvati, the beautiful daughter of the Himalayas serves the Yogi Guest, cares for his needs, and eventually falls in love with him. Sensing the situation, the ascetic flees the scene, leaving Parvati tearful, and her father perplexed. Parvati takes to severe tapas, asceticism, one better than Shiva. Her purpose: to win the heart of Shiva. Months later a forest dweller, an ascetic, visits her, tries to dissuade her from the course she was pursuing, and ridicules Shiva in her hearing. Parvati was indignant. When the visitor thought his mockery had only redoubled the woman's love for the heartless Yogi, he put off his disguise: it was Shiva. He was now at her feet, and conceded that her love had qualified her to become literally half of Shiva's body. The pair is shown as having a shared Hermaphrodite body, ardhanariswara. Shiva is the divine reality, Parvati, the human, the cosmic, now becomes Shiva's creative Shakti, power. 'The two are one. Love is invincible. It unites and makes reality whole. Love is spirituality. Shiva and Parvati both exemplify the openness and 'response-ability' which we hold as defining spirituality.

g) The second love story is about Savitri who married Satyavan, a woodcutter. On the day of their wedding a sage told Savitri a secret meant only for her ears. Her husband was destined to die on the first anniversary of their wedding; Savitri kept her secret, loved her man, and prayed and fasted more and more and ever more fervently as the fatal day came nearer. Finally the day arrived. Satyavan took his axe and was leaving for the forest as usual. Most unusual, Savitri insisted on accompanying him. At noon they ate together. Satyavan then lay down to rest a little and fell asleep. It was then that Yama, the god of death, came by riding his buffalo, and declared he had come to take Satyavan away. The woman's pleading went for nothing. Yama had his orders, and the man's time was up. Yama turned to go, and Satyavan stopped breathing, his body began to grow cold. Weeping, Savitri followed Yama, and refused to turn back. Would she return if he granted her three boons? Yes, she would. Name them. She named them. Health and happiness for Satyavan's parents and people. Granted. Health and happiness for her own parents and relatives. Granted. Health and happiness and long life for Satyavan's children born of herself. Granted. It was then that Yama realised the difficult situation into which the women had tricked him. 'Very well', he said, 'go back, your man lives, and the blessing will come true'. Savitri returned to where her husband lay . At the sound of her steps, he opened his eyes, and looked about in wonder as if the world and the woman were freshly beautiful and dear. Love is stronger than death: even wiser. That is the culture of the people and their spirituality.

CONCLUSION

 'Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced', wrote John Keats.

 'If you want to make a thing real, make it local', said G.K. Chesterton.

 'The real world is not somewhere else, but everywhere, and each of us carries it within', writes John F. X . Harriot (The Tablet, 7th March 1987).