- Written in Sept 2013 -
I never wrote about what happened
to me in May on my last thwarted attempt to visit DRC; I never considered it
right to. It seemed irresponsible and dangerous to offer a story to public
readership that holds every chance of solidifying the tragic prejudiced
assumptions many people already hold about the place. Besides, I had put that
horrible event behind me, moved on; forgiven, forgotten, hadn't I? Truly, I
believed I had. And yet these past three weeks, re-entering Congo for the first
time since all that took place in May, I discovered something in my heart,
something deep and disturbing that had its roots way back in that day. Now, it
has always been a point of great pride for me that no matter how much time I
spend in Congo and no matter how often I am exposed or made subject to the
corruption at the heart of the culture, I have never lost the love or passion
that I had for these beautiful and wounded people. From the moment I stepped
foot in Africa, and every moment since, Congo has been etched on my heart. It
lingers, a love and a grief over a place at once so beautiful and so broken.
Yet this time, something was different. I couldn't explain it; I didn't even
recognise it right away. I was frustrated, irritable, unyieldingly so. The
blackmail and bribery I have to deal with, once a mild inconvenience, had
become a source of overwhelming aggravation. I found myself searching always
for the hidden agenda behind people's niceties, friends or strangers. Police
officers and men in uniforms would wish me good morning with a civil tip of the
hat and I would walk on without regarding them. Something was different, some deep
wrongness in my heart, and it took time to recognise it for what it was.
It is not necessary to put to words
all that happened that day in May. Suffice it to say that travelling through
one of the Congo's major cities a friend and I had an extremely intense encounter
with a group of corrupt police officials in which we found ourselves very
vulnerable and at great risk. We came out of it unscathed, the physical threat
assuaged, and travelled safely home to Zambia the following day, albeit with
lighter wallets and fewer belongings. Little more detail than that is needed, what
is more important is all that followed. Though the physical threat was
assuaged, the threat to my heart remained. Today, recognising the effect that
this had on me as I returned to Congo these past three weeks, I am so aware
that what I discovered in my heart is something that takes a hold of many of us,
maybe all of us, who live outside of our own culture and people, a thorn that
takes the foot of many a man and woman walking the rough and often trying road
of a missionary life. It is a thing that we cannot afford to keep hidden or
unchecked, for the threat it holds for our work, no less than for our hearts. I
want to talk about prejudice.
Arriving home in Zambia after
what our eventful encounter in May, my friend and I discussed all that had passed.
We prayed much, and much was healed. We encouraged and challenged one another. I
told my friend and told myself that these kinds of things can stay like a wound
in your heart. They can make you sick, turn rotten and gangrenous, infecting
your perspective on the place and the people that have caused you this trouble.
Though you think of it afterwards as little more than an anecdote to pull out
over the dinner table back home, one of an arsenal of stories to regale your
friends about a missionary's life in Africa, it actually stays with you, buried
in your heart. Over time what you put to the recesses of memory comes out of
you afresh, very much alive, taking you unawares in the moment you discover
that all this time you were oblivious to a little wound festering quietly into something
much more fierce, dangerous, and disgusting. That is the moment you discover
your prejudice.
Prejudice is a constant threat to
the missionary walking every day in a culture and a people not his own. Like
many others who come to volunteer in Africa I considered myself immune to such
things simply by virtue of choosing to leave home and give my life to the work
here. And yet it starts so naturally, so innocently as to be almost
imperceptible. It is in the comparisons you make between your own culture and
the one to which you're exposed. Such comparisons are fun and make for good
conversation, but they can reveal prejudice like little else. It happens most
keenly when you use the values of your own culture as the line against which
you measure other cultures. You see the slow pace and rhythm of life in Africa.
When you measure that against a Western ethic, you risk prejudice, thinking
Africans lazy and slow. And of course, if the task-oriented Western ethic was a
given, you would call anyone lazy who doesn't match up to it. But then Africans
are not task-oriented, they are relationship-oriented. In that regard, Africans
must think Westerners tremendously lazy.
Prejudice also darkens your
vision. The thing you dislike in the few, you see in the many. Like having a
thorn stuck in your foot yet believing that the reason you feel sharp pain at
every step is because the ground is covered in bramble; the problem is not out
there but in yourself. Prejudice is often born of fear, such as mine. More
often and posing a far greater threat to the missionary or the volunteer is prejudice
born simply of over-exposure. Walking daily in a culture and amidst a people
not your own, having little respite or 'tastes of home' can harden your
receptivity to the experiences around you. I suppose it is a kind of defence, a
guard ensuring that no matter what, you remain inalterably you. I am learning that we must be so alert. We must never trust in
the resilience of our hearts, never sit secure in the illusion that this
"could never happen to me." I am also learning that it does not
become easier the longer you are here; it actually becomes more and more a
risk. We must hold one another accountable, point out when and where we see it
as soon as we see it. We must be ruthless where we find it, both with ourselves
and with others. Better to offend than indulge, better to tear it violently out
of our hearts than to massage the wound.
It is a devastating thing to
discover prejudice in your own heart, like finding a lump on your body where
before there was none. As followers of Christ especially, we must understand
that this hurts God's heart like little else. I think it was Dorothy Day who
said you only love God as much as you love the person you love the least. My
mind goes to Jesus' story about the sheep and the goats. I see myself on the
last day, chin up and chest puffed out, ready to receive the verdict as I
anticipate which orphaned kids God will parade before me, which street children
and homeless alcoholics that I have loved and cared for in my better moments. I
watch my face drop, my heart jolt, as in their place God leads out a large
Congolese policeman in a blue uniform. I've seen him before. He has a cigarette
perched between his snarling up-turned lips; a thick wad of my cash sticks out
over the top of his pocket. Behind him walks a host of Congolese friends and
strangers, innocents that I failed to love because where in their faces I
should have seen Christ, I saw the round, red, arrogant face of a Congo police
officer, stealing my money. Because truly, it is not only the poor and the
wounded and the dying who will give testimony of our lives to God, but the many
difficult ones that are hard to love, the trying ones on the other side of our
prejudice that ought to pity us for drawing a line that, but for Christ, we would
never have crossed.
But the good news is of course
that that line can be crossed. That black stain of the heart can be healed;
healed of the wounds left open to fester in the darker and deeper recesses of
our hearts. For me, the moment that the veil lifted and I discovered that black
spot of prejudice on my heart led me to my knees, drained me dry of tears and
for one of those rare and precious moments, taught me the blessed depth of what
God in Christ has done for me.
Because your heart was responsive
and you humbled yourself before God when you
heard
what He spoke against you,
and because you humbled yourself
before Me
and tore your robes and wept in My
presence,
I have heard you.
- 2 Chronicles 34 -
