The White Man Speaks

What follows is the beginning of a series of posts on the Religion and Culture Seminar we attended in January in New Haven, Connecticut.

Anthropology, Jesus, and Connecticut: Part 1

This past January, as I mentioned in a previous post, the formation director and the novices (first year seminarians) spent a week in New Haven Connecticut at the OSMC foundation for worldwide mission. A Protestant Organization, they provide support to missionaries all across the world as they serve the poor in third world countries… and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Evangelization: it’s been the one thing that I have been struggling with ever since I got here… Okay, not the ONE thing, but it’s been up there. When Isaac Hecker founded the Paulists in 1858, he had a dream of evangelizing a brand new America to the faith he thought best suited a democratic republic: Catholicism. Born a Methodist, Isaac spent many of his early years with the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s, eventually felt his spirit moving towards something more, and was eventually led to the Church of Rome.

As time went on, the Paulists also became leading forces in ecumenism (dialoguing with other religions) and reconciliation within the American Catholic Church, but evangelization has always been at the center. I myself have always been on board with the ecumenism and reconciliation pieces… I know my formation director has told me (and I do know this from personal experience) that The Paulists are not like this at all, but I’m still at a point that when I hear the word “evangelization,” I can’t get Jimmy Swaggert out of my head.

So we are spending a week with evangelical Protestants to learn how to convert other people to Christianity; it is hard not to begin this seminar without an eyebrow raised. Not the Protestant part of course, but the evangelical part... yet this has been part of Paulist formation for years. I have been told from those who have attended in years past, as the only Catholics who attend this seminar, we usually get A LOT of questions from the other participants in the group about Catholicism. I am very tempted to show up wearing fake horns on my head, but my formation director talks me out if it.

We took two cars in the drive up to Connecticut, but as I mentioned in a previous post, the car I was in got delayed through a series of events and we ended up missing the first afternoon of the seminar. We check in, find our hotel to freshen up, and head back to the center for dinner and evening prayer.

After freshening up at the hotel, we had back to the center for dinner and start to get to know the other attendees during dinner. Most of them have come to this seminar from all over the globe from serving in missions for different denominations. I meet one couple and tell them that I used to work for Catholic Relief Services and while I myself never got to go abroad, asked if their work ever crossed paths. The guy responded that their paths did not overlap too much because CRS’s relief work did not involve evangelization, and that it was important to both provide relief services in conjunction with spreading the Word.

That took me aback somewhat. I have done a lot of work with the poor through the Catholic Church over the years, and the one constant in the organizations that I have been involved with was that we would not push our religion on others. We would of course not be ashamed of who we are as Catholics and would share our faith if asked and as appropriate, but there were going to be no price tags on the work we would do for others. No required prayer meetings, no required testimonials; the poor have been stepped on enough. At the same time, this is also a time in my life where my relationship and understanding of God is on somewhat rocky ground, so if I go into a “faith off” with this guy, I suspect I’m going to lose, so I hold back. Plus, a part of me envies his certitude.

This is actually one week in a month long program on evangelization, the focus of this week being the relationship of religion and culture, so some of the attendees are here for only the week (like us) and others are here for the whole month. The main presenter is an anthropologist, and all throughout the morning, in order to support many of the points he is preserving, he references conversations that he has had with the people from tribes and villagers all over the world. “They would say, ‘White Man, we understand religion to be like this.’ ‘White Man, this is how we have gone about medicine for ages.’”

In addition to the stories, “White Man” starts putting up charts and diagrams that look very much like the charts and diagrams used to describe human behavior from my psychology studies in college, except now they are talking about culture’s relationship to religion. This isn’t theology, what some philosopher THINKS about God, or some encyclical from Rome; this is hard science describing the journey of mankind and how religion has fit into that journey over history… THIS I can relate to.

During the first break, I look in the folder we were given when we arrived to get some background information on the presenter: Darryl Whiteman... His NAME is “Whiteman” - not just some guy calling him “White Man!” “Yeah, he made a joke of that when he opened up the seminar. Didn’t you… oh, that’s right, you guys showed up late” remarked one of my novice brothers.

So with this new found knowledge, I settle in for the rest of week, take furious notes during the presentations, and start to wonder if my head will start getting some of the answers it has been asking about “the whole religion thing” these past few months.