God Uses Culture to Speak to Us
Saint John’s proclamation that the Word became flesh reveals the inseparable bond between God’s word and the human words by which he communicates with us. In this context we consider the relationship between the word of God and culture. God does not reveal himself in the abstract, but by using languages, imagery and expressions that are bound to different cultures. -Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
As missionaries we pay special attention to culture. All those things around us that tell us where and even who we are: traditions and practices, food, art, all the things that ground us in a place and in a community. Missionaries are called to cross cultural borders through the portal of geography and language. We are also called to point out God’s presence in all the ways he speaks uniquely in all cultures, a language of love.
The Christian understanding of God is not that of an omnipotent deity handing down commands from on high, but that of God’s emptying himself of glory in order to become one with his human creatures, inviting and enabling us to be lifted up by participation in his eternal life. In other words, incarnation; in other words, “the human face of God.” This encounter is not simply a private spiritual experience of “knowing Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” The Christ encountered is the logos—the word and reason that is both the source and reason of all that is. It is an intensely personal encounter but never just a private encounter. The revelation of God in Christ is emphatically public: in community, culture, laced throughout the contours of all of humanity.
GOD’S GRANDEUR
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)
“Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But here is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Not it. Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Ca you ask for a louder voice than that? What heaven and earth shout to you, “God made me!”
St. Augustine
CHECK OUT OUR PINTEREST BOARD: CELEBRATING OUR CULTURAL DIVERSITY
