I’m going to try to blog all of the little writing assignments I have throughout the semester. In my Ministry Across Cultures class, we’re reading A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki. and have been asked to write a reflection about the first chapter.
Here is the question:
Describe briefly takaki’s frame for what it means to be “American” Using this frame, how might we re-think our idea of what it means to be Lutheran?
Takaki uses the metaphor of a mirror to describe how we view ourselves as Americans. I especially appreciate his suggestion that the mirror used by many Americans the mirror is distorted. He also suggests hope for a mirror without distortion. “Reflected in a mirror without distortions, the people of multicultural America belong to what Ishmael Reed described as a society ‘unique’ in the world because ‘the world is here’ –a place ‘where the cultures of the world crisscross.” (p19) He points to Langston Hughes poem asking to “let America be America”. For Takaki, American identity is not defined by race or culture, but by common ideals. Even more strongly, one of the central ideals is multiculturalism itself. To be American is to be a member of a deeply multicultural nation. His parallel comparison to the Latino concept of mestizaje, the intermingling of cultures and races is quite apt. He sees the stronger value in “integration” rather than “assimilation”. I realized that we don’t speak of integration much since the removal of segregation laws, but I think the concept is key to the future of multiculturalism. It allows space for both strong cultural identity and strong community across cultural borders.
To apply this concept to the sense of Lutheran identity, I keep coming back to core ideas of doctrine. Many of us who come from a particular segment of Lutheran culture get bogged down in our ideas about potluck dinners and church basement coffee. I think we need to realize and embrace the reality that Lutherans, like Americans, are and can be very diverse in their practices and yet still be deeply Lutheran. Lutheran identity is informed primarily by theology, by the deep faith in God’s abiding Grace, and by the call to service to our neighbor and the world. That may very different in downtown Minneapolis than it does in downtown Los Angeles, but the core is still there. What I think we need to emphasize and learn from Takaki’s frame of American identity is that there is no group that is more Lutheran than another, just as he is, as a Japanese American with a certain background, as deeply American as a European American who’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and even as deeply American as a newly arrived Ethiopian American immigrant.
