Nuevo Amanecer keynote, by Rev. Pedro Suárez, Assistant to the Bishop and Director for Evangelical Mission in Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod of the ELCA

Time passes quickly, and our opportunities to gather seem so few. I do not want the learnings from Nuevo Amanecer to fade, so I will share via this 'blog some learnings, thoughts, and perceptions. At Concilio and other settings we shall make time to chew on bite-sized pieces as they strike us as helpful. A Spanish translation will be forthcoming soon after I publish each English text.

As I have said in other settings, the warmth and the power of the gathering, the sense that here there is something powerful and central happening, a new and different kind of Episcopal Christianity arising, was my overall sensation. In the Reign of God, the edges become the center, the last become the first. Frankly I feel that the Spirit of God has left church settings that remain monocultural by choice or by habit, and the power and passion of Nuevo Amanecer demonstrates to me where Spirit is moving. As I have shared in other settings, of late I feel that scales have fallen from my eyes, and I have come to think of The Episcopal Church as an ethnic white denomination being given the opportunity to become a body more reflective of the larger world, a world in which Spirit is making profound changes and breaking down barriers.

Rev. Suarez addressed core issues of this process in his keynote talk.

I sat and scribbled madly what I heard, which was presented purely in Spanish. If NA publishes an official translation I shall make this available as well.

Suarez spoke of the process of "inculturation", the process by which a people preserves their identity and culture and even language, and contrasted inculturation to other less positive processes such as "assimilation." "Assimilation" is more what happened to my Irish and Native American ancestors, and perhaps to yours as well: language lost (for my Irish ancestors that process began back in Ireland with the English imperialists imposing their tongue and punishing the use or the teaching of Irish Gaelic), culture lost to a significant if not complete extent (in my Tlingit grandmother's case, lost nearly completely). The churches btw in many if not most cases colluded completely in this process. In the case of the Indian boarding schools in this country churches colluded utterly, literally "beating the Indian" out of the children taken from their nations ("Kill the Indian, save the man" was the motto of the founder of my grandmother's school). In the case of the Irish, although the Roman church preserved a few distinct devotions and a sense of Irishness in that the Roman Catholic Church was clung to as opposed to the conqueror's exported Anglicanism, parochial schools worked hard at eliminating Irish accents and habits and tried to form a kind of generic "American identity" in order for the children to succeed financially in a white Protestant-dominant nation. Awareness of difference remained however--my mother taught me what WASP meant when I was still in grade school.

The above are my reflections, and BTW these are my personal reasons why our journey matters to me.

Inculturation values the distinct gifts and flavor, as it were, of any given people, and invites them to be part of a greater whole. We are all enriched and changed as a result.

This BTW is why I asked not long ago via FB "what do we (white dominant culture Episcopalians) bring to the table as part of our culture?" Those responses were very slow in coming forth, I think in part because we do not often think of ourselves as possessing a distinct culture or cultures. If we think of it at all, we assume that we ARE "the culture", and do not look on ourselves with an eye to naming what is distinct about us. As white-ethnic peoples continue demographically to become a minority in this nation (by 2050 fully 1/3 of all people in the USA are predicted to be of Latino descent given present trends), it behooves us to do so.

Fleshing out this conversation, Suarez spoke of...

5 Values of Latino culture
1) Family: loyalty and interdependence
2) Personalism: the personal quality of each interaction
3) Respect: proper regard for figures of authority
4) Machismo: masculinity and virility, understanding that the man is the provider, responsible for the well-being and honor of the family
5) Marianism: the values of the Blessed Virgin, that women are spiritual over other people and that Mary is spiritual above all others, that Mary is especially able to help those who are poor and suffering and that women in general are given this gift and charge as well

The above was presented not as "good or bad." It is easy to see that several of the values above have distinct shadow-sides or destructive aspects, particularly the culture of machismo. Culture just is.

By contrast, Suarez named these as five features of dominant American culture:
1) Individualism, emphasizing competition over cooperation
2) Equality: that all have the same rights or should
3) Time, as in organizing its use and keeping to time, for after all "time is money"
4) Directness and assertiveness
5) Materialism and consumerism

Again, culture--not necessarily good or bad. Culture just is.

My notes got somewhat broken at this point, partly because what Suarez said led me down path after path of my own, partly because I kept discovering the limitations of my Spanish especially when presented by an erudite native speaker! I was also stubborn about refusing the translation earphones.

But Suarez spoke of the challenge of transcultural assumptions--distrust and prejudice, of cultural values clashing and competing for dominance, and my addition is that cultural values under stress and pressure can manifest in destructive ways.

Suarez proposed "Cultural Competency" as a value to be striven for, a necessary feature of contemporary communities (a necessary feature for us at SPP I may add, and in this Diocese). Cultural competency presumes awareness, sensitivity, and eventual competence. Cultural competence means toleration at the most basic level, acceptance, and finally celebration of distinctiveness and the gifts that each bring to the community.

The risks of this process include:
1) Inadequate inculturation (there is a "loser" on some level)
2) Negative cultural values go into ascendency
3) The new culture/community assumes and remains in a lower socio-economic level
4) Prejudice and discrimination
5) Migrant status (one is always a stranger, and retains "stranger habits" for generations

As I recall, Suarez used a kind of "Johari Window" chart of various models of inculturation, ranging from loss of one's home culture and assumption of the new, loss of one's own culture and no assumption or participation in the new (this result is a complete kind of tragic alienation), retention of one's home culture but little if any participation or assumption of the new culture, or inculturation, retention of and celebration of one's home culture and full participation/competence in the new culture, bringing one's home culture as a gift.

Suarez spoke of five strengths of Latino peoples...
1) A strong religious sense and strong sense of family connection
2) High valuing of children
3) High value of literacy, especially in ensuring the education of the children
4) Economic opportunities for Latino people are increasing
5) Most Latinos look on the USA as an opportunity to work and to improve their lives

And Suarez spoke of these qualities of what he called "Leaders in Process":
1) The "Prime Directive", adopting a position of sensitivity
2) To have a genuine curiosity about one another
3) Contrasting the glass half-empty/glass half-full (a real good one in many ways for us at SPP!)What do we have here already, in terms of connections and contributions, local leaders. In all cases, the answer to the question is PEOPLE.

In any case, our tasks as a becoming-church culturally are...
1) To nurture a genuinely curious stance toward culture (including our own I may add)
2) To understand diversity and to negotiate language barriers
3) To have understanding and sensitivity, and to make room in all conversations regarding assumptions of culture and identity
4) And above all, to celebrate! Celebrate difference, and to celebrate the process!

Incredible amount of substance for us, and incredible amount of resonance with our experience even thus far.