I've joined a religious tribe that has a history replete with cruelty and evil executed in the name of God. Colonization happened under the steam of missionary work, often displacing original cultures with Christian rituals to prevent the ancient Aboriginal and African practices perceived as pagan. Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and British colonization were fueled by slaves brought in ships to the western world. Ships where they lay like sardines, skin rubbed raw and festering on unpolished splintery boards, ankles and wrists shackled - human beads forming a human chain.
I am now the product of three nations of colonization. And in all three nations I am the lower denominator - not the colonizing Caucasian race. In Sri Lanka, I am the brown-skinned Sri Lankan ... the product of an Anglican Sri Lankan father and a Buddhist Sri Lankan mother. One half bowed to the spirituality of the colonizers, the other half holding fast to the traditional religion of the nation of Ceylon.
I am Jamaican - I grew up in Jamaica from the age of three, amongst friends and peers whose predominant race was black - of African descent, of the slave ships. A tactic of managing the slave population was to get the slaves to disown their own, home culture. Removing identity was a tactic of control. Creating separation was a tactic of slavery also - systematically creating an attitude of distrust and fear amongst slaves kept the white slave masters safe in their homes at night, on plantations whose greatest numbers were the slaves, whose main labour force was slaves who were treated more like animals than human beings, by Christian masters.
I grew up in a Christian country that had been made Christian by the colonizers. The same colonizers who completely eliminated the entire race of native Aboriginals (Tainos, Arawaks) whom they found on the island. The Tainos were a friendly and peaceful people and when Columbus' landed his boats, with his syphilis bearing crew on Jamaican shores, the curious and friendly Tainos did not know that the end they were greeting with open arms and beads as friendship offerings would include enslavement and disease and culminate in death. Yes, a land can be discovered, so long as the race that was there when it was being discovered can be subjugated. Discovery by Christian colonizers is not about who was there first - it is about which Christian got there first.
The story in North America, where I now live, is similar. Colonizing missionaries came to these shores and discovered Aboriginal people here and destroyed a sustainable way of life that had existed here for thousands of years. But it is called discovery because for Christian colonizers it is about which Christian got there first. Aboriginal people who had an amazing relationship with the land and the environment were lured into the materialistic ways of the white man, the Hudson Bay Company; bears and animals began being killed not for their meat but for their pelts. The practice of wasteful use of the environment was begun. Families were torn asunder as missionary schools ripped children from the bosoms of loving mothers who were perceived as "savages". But these savages lived cohesively with their environment, and with an environmentally whole spirituality that was completely sustainable before colonization and Christ was brought to them. This Christ is not the Christ I know.
Being a Christian is joining a tribe with a history of cruelty and injustice, especially against people of colour - and I joined this tribe as a person of colour knowing that I have joined with this history. My decision to join this tribe came about after a long spiritual journey. And I confess I do not live primarily in my Christianity, but rather in the spirituality I knew before I became a Christian. I live constantly in relationship with God, but I often am angry and saddened by the tribe I have joined. I am often angry and sad at the way the Christian scriptures are interpreted to abuse and abase and isolate people, to exclude when Jesus' main message was one of inclusion ... when God's main message is grace available to all as gift.
This tribe still has in pockets the racist and colonizing mentality. This tribe still has in pockets members who want to be in the tribe because of the power it gives them over others, and not because of the opportunity it offers them to empower others in faith, and to introduce others to God's grace. This tribe still has in pockets people who think being Christians gives them the right to judge. These pockets make me want to dwell on the fringes of Christianity - it is the feeling one gets if one's own family behaves shamefully ... they remain your family but you are not necessarily proud of what you see.
God is a powerful, amazing God. After a long search, it was not optional to join this tribe. It was a calling, and a loud one at that. It did not happen through discussions with people, or through missionizing - it happened through long, genuine, often painful discussions, negotiations, pleadings, questionings and reasonings with the God of my understanding, the God understanding of me. I learnt that you do not turn away from a calling. Now I am having to learn how to live with the family members of whom I am ashamed, I am having to learn how to live with the history which makes me want to hang my head in shame ... this is my tribe that behaved so badly. This is my tribe that even now continues to behave badly, in what should be an age of enlightenment.
The only way I can make sense of it is through my belief that God works through us. We are His instruments, and in so much as we say "Thy will be done" and mean it, we enable His work to be done. I am only one person in the tribe. I am an instrument of God's will though, and I make the commitment to go where I hear God calling me. He called me into this tribe, and I won't let the grimy history and the power-hungry chase me out of this tribe, or displace me from my calling. "Thy will be done" is a very powerful formula for change. I believe in this with every fibre of my being, with all that is my soul. No colonizing missionizing Christian need tell me what God's will is for me, because as my father once said to a pastor who offered to intercede to God on my father's behalf, "I am not a step child of God, but a child of God, and as such I can speak with Him directly". Thank you very much.
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