A sudden turn jolted me out of a sound slumber just in time to see the head-on collision the instant before my life was to end. The apparent accident that was unfolding left no time for even a scream, or for my brief life of twenty-five years to flash before my eyes. In an instant, bone crushing, protoplasm-splashing steel would invade the cabin of our small rental car separating sinew from soul. The gallon of air that had just rushed through my mouth and into my lungs would be my last, or so I thought. Miraculously, without even so much as a swerve, the driver of the oncoming truck effortlessly sped off to our right, followed by several other vehicles. With the fog of car-sleeping momentarily lifted, I remembered that we were in Ireland, where people regularly traveled on the “wrong” side of the road. Relieved, I drifted back into a jet-lagged stupor only to repeat the same scene over and over again whenever the driver of our rental car hit an unexpected bump, or made a sudden turn.
My first trans-Atlantic flight had deposited me at Shannon’s International Airport a couple hundred miles south of my intended destination near Belfast. In those days, The Troubles were still an unfortunate way of life for the urban Irish of the north. The conflict in Northern Ireland compelled college students like me to donate a piece of our summers to supervise Protestant and Catholic kids in a play scheme. It was our hope that, by getting kidsfrom either side of the sectarian divide to play together, we could help cultivate an imagination for peace. At the tender age of twenty-five, I was shocked by how history, in that ancient place, refused to stay in the past. Ironically, that is practically an exact quote from William Faulkner describing the American experience. It was on that trip where I began to examine how the culture in which one is raised profoundly impacts how one sees and interprets the world.
In my church’s liturgy, this Sunday’s Gospel selection (Matthew 15: 21-28), recounted Jesus’ encounter with a woman, who from the cultural view of Jesus’ time and place, was driving on the wrong side of the road. She was a foreigner—a Canaanite. In Matthew’s account of this meeting, Jesus behaved very much like a man of his culture. Canaanites were to be ignored. But this woman’s aching need for her daughter’s health caused her to break through the conventions of that period. She demanded that Jesus stop and speak with her.
In our day and age, we have an Anglo-Saxon word for female dogs that is often used as a particularly stinging insult. In his repartee with this dogged woman, Jesus appeared to utilize such language toward her. But, like a pit bull, this woman refused to let go until Jesus responded to her concerns. In the end, that woman caused Jesus to leave his gated community of cultural comfort. Her doggedness, changed his outlook, the scope of his mission, and the complexion of the Christian community forevermore.
This Gospel selection pointed to the cultural embeddedness that is part and parcel of our human existence. Besides being American, Asian, Hispanic, Black, Caucasian or whatever, each of us was raised in a family complete with unique histories, unique customs, unique ways of seeing things, and unique ways of doing things. That means that whenever two or more people come together, two or more cultures are coming together. To some extent, every marriage, and every community is an exercise in cross-cultural relations.
In each of our lives, we will be presented with the equivalent of our own Canaanite woman that will ask us to step out of our own shoes to see things from another point of view. The question is, when that happens, will we be willing, like Jesus, to go abroad and confront the limitations of our own cultural embeddedness? Or, will we assert that we are the ones driving on the correct side of the road and suffer one avoidable head-on collision after another?