Oh the assumptions we make

There are so many greet­ings and appro­pri­ate phrases to use under cer­tain cir­cum­stances in the Ara­bic lan­guage. There are phrases to say when enter­ing a house, when receiv­ing food in someone’s house, when leav­ing a house, when get­ting out of a car, when meet­ing a friend and on and on. This makes it chal­leng­ing to a new learner of the lan­guage but offers other chal­lenges as well.  It causes some­one with a Cana­dian mind­set to think about the rela­tional mean­ing of each of these phrases and forces one to focus on the rela­tion­ship before get­ting right down to work.  It seems that in Canada we are quite accus­tomed to shorter per­func­tory greet­ings fol­lowed by some weather talk as a warm up and then we get down to business.

Many of the greet­ings here focus on bless­ing the per­son you are talk­ing to or call­ing on God in some way.  My guess is that there are var­i­ous cul­tural rea­sons why one might feel the need to call on God before or after enter­ing a house and so on.  Rea­sons aside, it is inter­est­ing to think what Cana­dian cul­ture might be like if we focused on bless­ing and greet­ing each other in God’s name each time we met those we met or stranger’s alike.  This approach really doesn’t seem to fit with Cana­dian cul­ture as it exists today.

I am not say­ing nec­es­sar­ily that one way is bet­ter than another since all cul­tures have their pros and their cons.  I am mak­ing obser­va­tions.  I won­der what the cul­ture was in the time of the early church? Was there par­tic­u­lar lan­guage used in cer­tain cir­cum­stances?  We cer­tainly have par­tic­u­lar lan­guage in the church today.  If a stranger who has not been exposed to church enters one of our places of wor­ship, what does that per­son under­stand from the ser­vice? Do idioms and phrases that we are accus­tomed to make sense to them?  Do those cer­tain phrases or ways of speak­ing tell oth­ers about what we are as a church cul­ture?  I would hope that the way we inter­act with each other and the lan­guage we use acts as a wit­ness that is just as open in hos­pi­tal­ity as the cul­ture is here. But I would also hope that it gives a clear indi­ca­tion of the grace and love of Christ.  Is the wit­ness one of real­ness, of gen­uine being and of gen­uine joy or pain depend­ing on one’s situation?

It takes being out­side of one’s own com­fort zone to real­ize all of those assump­tions one makes about a cul­ture – assump­tions that would be mean­ing­less to some­one from the out­side until explained by an insider.  It is cer­tainly a per­spec­tive to pon­der as one thinks about how to be a dis­ci­ple of Christ in a new context.