|
 |
 |
|||||||||||||
|
|
|
[Back to index of July/August 2007 articles] Communion / Comunión By The Rev. Simon Bautista Betances Hello and welcome! I am the Rev. Simon Bautista, Latino Missioner for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, and coordinator of COMUNIÓN, a spiritual column for the Spanish speaking members of this diocese. The column is written by a different member of the diocese's Latino and Spanish-speaking leadership each month. This month our reflection comes from The Rev. Allan Johnson of Epiphany, Forestville. Jacques Audinet, in the preface of Virgilio Elizondo’s Galilean Journey, states that, “There is no such thing as a “pure race,” any more than there ever was a “pure nation,” a “pure state.” Yet this notion of purity is still alive, even in the church. Audinet goes on to say that, “every modern human culture that [exist] is a composite. It is mestizo. Thereby, every person is a hybrid a mestizo, and the claim of purity is the idolatrous belief that my particular hybridity is the center. The incarnation tells us that Jesus was not just human and he was not just divine. Jesus was fully both and exclusively neither. Jesus was a half-breed. Jesus incarnation is still being debated in the church by those who have a need for well-defined boundaries as they try to protect the purity of divinity less it be corrupted by his humanity. In an existential way, Jesus obliterates these boundaries. Jesus made himself of no reputation: a human, a Jew, a Galilean. In the incarnation Jesus becomes the ultimate border-crosser as he sets about eliminating all those human boundaries that separates us from each other: geographical, biological, religious, linguistic, or cultural. The Christian church began as a hybrid. It founder, Jesus, was a hybrid—a mestizo. Jesus did no embrace the ways of the Greek, nor did he affirm the purity of the Judaism. What Jesus offered was a third way, a via media, one that promotes the creation of a new humanity and a new community. Christianity grew and expanded through mestizaje and at times the result was a new creation. The Roman Catholic Church is the result of mestizaje—the early Jewish Christian church and the Roman influence. The Episcopal/Anglican Church with its Anglo-Saxon heritage is a hybrid. The very nature of the church is one of hybridity. It is in this context of hybridity that we come to the Latino/a presence in the Episcopal Church. If we subscribe to the purity of the church, then the Latino/a presence, with its Roman piety (The penitents/Nazarenes, promesas, posadas, “pesames to Mary,” May Cross, veneration of saints, and domestic shrines), threatens the purity of the Episcopal Church. If we subscribe to the view that the church’s very beginning was mestizo, that it grew and expanded through mestizaje; then the Latino/a presence is seen as another phase in the life of the church that is constantly evolving, changing and embracing the other. Jesus’ hybridity, his mestizaje, invites the Episcopal Church us to cross ethnic, social, and linguistic border, to continue what had been most original to Jesus, that of overcoming barriers in order to have table fellowship with all people. John’ vision on the Isle of Patmos is the vision of a hybrid church made up of people from every nation, tribe, people and language. (Rev. 7:9) [Back to index of July/August 2007 articles]
|
|
||||||||||
