Mixed Lineage
This is an ongoing series of meditations on faith, in response to readings from the articles that preface The Oxford Study Bible.
I will trust the reader to dig up the context if the meaning is unclear.
I was stopped by this fragment of a sentence from page 6:
... both [the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament] relate the continuing story of God's involvement with the Jewish people and the surrounding Gentile world.
The continuing story of God's involvement with the Jewish people.
A pang at these words surprises me: what does this tradition have to do with me? I'm not Jewish, and since the word "Gentile" has meaning only from a Jewish viewpoint, I'm not Gentile, either. So why am I reading this book? Why am I attempting to rebuild my faith from this starting point, of all starting points?
If it were just a matter of academic curiosity, that would be one thing. Any tradition is worth learning about for learning's sake. But my purpose is different: I'm looking for home, starting from the scriptures that my community gave me when I was a child. And now I am confronted with the fact that I was given them may make no sense. These scriptures were not meant for me. They were written by, and for, someone else; they belong to a different culture—to a people who still exist, in the present tense.
Awkwardly, I find myself standing here in clothes that aren't mine. And the person they do belong to is also standing here, in the same room. What an awful imposition. Should I take my clothes off? Does it make any sense to stay?
Do I have any right to love and pray and call these scriptures my own?
Form and Content
I suppose there are both form and content at play here, the cultural clothing of a religion and the truth it expresses. It so happened that Hebrew stories introduced me to the God I know.* Their laws and poetry conveyed to me, an outsider, something of substance, a culturally particular vision of the larger reality in whose arms we all exist.
* And yet, and still, if the Bible introduced me to God, it must also be said that the Bible has nothing to do with the God I know. Everything is intertwined; everything is unmixable. When I walk outside, I remember the importance of direct experience.
That deeper substance, wherever it may be found, is our birthright as humans. You don't have to come from a place to see reality reflected in its stories. You have permission to love what you love, to be moved by what moves you, to recognize truth wherever it startles you. The truths inside the clothing can't be contained; they simply are. They don't belong to us. Instead, if we choose to, we belong to them.
I didn't ask my community to give me these scriptures, but it did, and as a result, I saw God.
The clothing, though, is not universal, and here's where it gets painful. The cultural expression, the history and heritage—the right even to be in the room when certain stories are told—these do belong to one group or another. These treasures can be misappropriated, and have been, and are.
I can't just shrug off the idea that Christianity took someone's holy book, added a bunch of other stuff, then reintroduced it as its own.* I'm not saying the faith is somehow illegitimate. Christianity has a rich, complex identity with two millennia of history and culture—still, I can't shake the feeling that the fact that it commandeered another people's tradition, however long ago, makes it something of an impostor.
* I'm referring to that early era of formalized Christianity which was fiercely anti-semitic, despite being founded on a semitic text. Cognitive dissonance, racism, cultural appropriation: that's not the whole story of Christianity, but it was an important layer in its establishment.
So it's a tangle, isn't it. The stories I was raised with don't belong to me; they come from a different place and culture. But they gave me something to which I do belong, and so they will always be there for me, in me, somewhere.
I can accept that. I can't say I'm comfortable with it.
Finding Root
Deeper down, I believe I'm grieving. I feel the emptiness of not having a faith tradition that's simply mine, particular to my origins. Like every other descendent of empire, here I am in borrowed clothes, standing in spaces that my predecessors took from others and reconstructed. Who am I, anyway? Where do I come from? Everywhere and nowhere.
At the same time, that tangle—the messy mix of stories and traditions that spill out from the past to give us the present—that, I think, is just part of the human condition. We all have a lineage, and no lineage is pure. The lines change over time, and new cultural identities emerge from blending ancestors who end up quite different from their descendants. That happens to every person and every people.
These truths don't mix tidily, but they are inextricably mixed. My lineage draws much from things it stole or borrowed, but I do have a lineage. I am an orphan of empire, but also, I am not without home or history. It's not a straight line, but no one's history is; every lineage is tangled, like a massive root wad with tendrils and tails drawing life from everything it ever touched.
Once on a time, a Jewish revolutionary re-envisioned his faith. Gentiles gathered around him, and his followers chose not to require them to convert to his own formal tradition, and so between them, a new formal tradition emerged.
Long before that, there was a Hebrew who had two sons, who called God by different names.
Longer ago, there were people and myths and gods, and the stories they told formed and reformed those who emerged through the telling, until Abraham was born and Genesis was taught. This happened in the cradle of what's called civilization. It happened in the land where some of the first people were.
The stories that belong to the land in which I now live are important, and I'm learning them; yet I am not native here and must admit a foreign lineage. I am a third-generation European transplant. My people were immigrants and Christians. Earlier, too far back for me to see clearly, they were pagans.
As for where to walk from here, all I know to do is to feel back along the roots: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, the paganism they replaced, the Judaism that preceded them, Hebrew texts and the stories that came before. I will seek to reconcile the problems I find. I will seek a truth to which I can belong, one that has relevance to the land where I live, to myself and my own.
Perhaps, in the end, I'll find that once again something new has emerged.