Читать книгу Our December Hearts - Anne McConney - Страница 12

Perhaps the greatest shaping force in the life of a human being is the one that, much of the time, we are least aware of—the culture in which we live. This complex matrix of values and behaviors and expectations and mindsets is so much an unquestioned part of our lives that we seldom think about it. Yet this, perhaps more than any other factor, governs us from birth to death.

To speak of “culture” in the singular is, in fact, misleading, for all of us participate in and partake of many cultures: religious, professional, ethnic, national, and neighborhood cultures, each with its program of shared, inculcated beliefs. The languages we speak, the foods we eat, the ways we relate to one another within our families and our circle of friends—all are a part of the cultures that shape us and make us what we are.

Humans are not solitary animals. We are part of a community, which means that we are part of a culture. Without it, we could not survive as human beings; even those rare souls who reject their cultures are, by that very act, related to the thing they reject.

For most of us, there is no more temptation to reject our culture than there is for a fish to reject water. Culture exacts certain dues from us and we pay them gladly, without thought or question, for within a culture we find safety and acceptance. As long as we do not violate the generally accepted taboos, as long as we share certain basic assumptions, as long as we behave as expected, our place is secure. Culture rewards those who conform and punishes those who do not.

And yet throughout history we see an odd phenomenon: this social spiderweb that holds us fast is also our major vehicle for change, and change almost invariably begins from the bottom up. Like a great groundswell that suddenly breaks into the foam and froth of a wave, change comes with the rush that proves a great many persons were ready for it.

Those in positions of power seldom welcome change, and the young, the questioners, sometimes the discontented or the misused, seldom have the power or resources to initiate change. When a great visionary emerges to give voice and focus to their feelings, however, they follow with enthusiasm. Cultural changes often come, when they come at all, with blinding speed.

Such, I believe, was the case with Jesus, whose problems lay entirely with the authority figures of his day while, we are told, “the great throng heard him gladly” (Mark 12:37).

Jesus was clearly and directly involved in the common culture of his day; every parable he told shows his intimacy with the daily round of the villagers, farmers, and merchants of first-century Palestine; every recorded event of his life shows his deep knowledge of their thoughts, their values, and their assumptions. Yet there is no other historical figure who so completely transcends the cultural imperatives of his or her time and place. He did not reject his culture; he was, in fact, completely immersed in it, and yet he dreamed so far beyond it that, even after twenty centuries, the dream still calls to us in our madly different world.

Most of us, his present-day followers, are not called to be rallying points of great social changes nor, I imagine, do most of us want to be, as there are few more dangerous jobs in this world. Yet we can all be not merely followers of the dream but its active disciples. And we can do this not by either blindly rejecting or blindly accepting our culture, but by immersing ourselves in it as he did, by bringing each facet we uncover into the clear and all-revealing light of God's love and by daring to question old tenets and embrace new concepts.

There are, after all, no perfect cultures, for any culture that might manage to achieve perfection would, at that same instant, become stagnant and moribund.

We may dream of our Edens, our Utopias, our Camelots, even as we know they are impossible, but we follow God, the great Dreamer who forever makes all things new.