Gift of place, challenge of displacement

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 13, 1996 by Dawn Gibeau

Alvie has misplaced her place, but in the far reaches of her mind it still comforts her.

--Kathleen Norris: The Cloister Walk

Kathleen Norris, the Presbyterian poet who frequents monasteries and the author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography; The Cloister Walk and other books, talked about place and displacement on the spiritual journey during a conference sponsored by the Collegeville Pastoral Institute, Collegeville, Minn., this summer.

So did Fr. Virgilio Elizondo, founder and first president of the Mexican American Cultural Center, who was pastor for 12 years of San Fernando Cathedral, San Antonio, Texas. So did the Rev. Maxwell Johnson (see related story). About 80 other speakers and participants explored the subject.

Norris' Alvie was not there in person, but her concerns dominated the agenda.

Elizondo contended that every person departs on his or her spiritual journey from the specific geographical locus of birth. "None of us chose the starting point," he said. "It's a given, therefore it's a gift," having limitations and graces. Norris said that returning to one's beginning may mean "going back to a place of displacement, a place where you aren't necessarily going to feel comfortable, a place the rest of the world says nothing good can come out of."

That was Jesus' experience as a Galilean, Elizondo explained. "The Bible itself says, `What good can come out of Galilee?' That's where God decides to begin. God always begins where we as human beings least expect God to be."

Galilee was a crossroads, undefined because people from many countries encountered one another there, he said. Therefore, "the Jews of Judea looked down on the Jews of Galilee as the impure ones who were in contact with other cultures and peoples. Yet out of what appears to be impure, the world's notions of purity and impurity are going to be violated and broken" as a new human belonging is created.

Jesus, having suffered from the Galilean experience of displacement, having suffered the pain of marginalization, creates "a space where nobody will have to suffer what he has suffered, where everyone is included," Elizondo said.

One's inheritance can seem to be a blessing or a curse, Norris said, asserting that the work of redemption is "to take the bad stuff along with the good and turn it all to good, which I think is God's purpose for all of us."

The phenomenon of inventing past lives is popular today, she noted, and those who concoct past lives for themselves claim to have been Cleopatra, perhaps, or Madame de Pompadour. "I have yet to meet someone claiming to be one of the slaves on Cleopatra's barge or the servant who cleaned out Madame's chamber pot. No one, apparently, was ever an anonymous 14th century peasant who died of the plague."

She told of a white woman who advertised in the newspaper Indian Country Today, offering to give baby clothes to someone who would "teach me the Indian ways, myths, ceremonies and beliefs so I may teach my son." Being white, "I have no culture to offer him," she complained.

Norris said she would not be surprised if the woman's son grew up to become "a fierce fundamentalist pastor or maybe a cult figure in a religion of his own devising Either would be a logical consequence of denying her own inheritance so completely that she has nothing of her own to pass on to him."

The woman's denial, however, is typical of a tendency that tempts many people. Although "Abel is welcome in our family tree, we would just as soon leave Cain out," Norris said. "But God who is good has given us both."

Elizondo spoke of similar rejection of one's history, of cultures of forgetting and cultures of memory. Many immigrants want to forget the misery and pain of their past, he said, recalling German and Polish immigrants near San Antonio who never spoke of their European ancestors because they wanted to forget and start anew, to create a culture in which they could become who they wanted to be.

In contrast, he said, are those "for whom the United States did not offer the opportunities they hoped for," among them Native Americans, African-Americans and Mexicans who became Texans when the flags flying over their homeland changed. These people enshrine and romanticize a "culture of memory, because memory brings out the glory of a past that is denied" to them today.

He identified another trend as proliferating worldwide today, the trend of massive migrations of people from land to land. He recently visited a parish in northern France, which "has 24 varieties of hyphenated French," among them Zairean French, Portuguese French and Brazilian French. Every Sunday in the Los Angeles archdiocese, Mass is celebrated in more than 70 languages.

Elizondo said migration patterns as well as patterns of forgetting or memorializing one's past involve displacement and lead people to ask, "What world do we want? Do we want a world of ghettos," communities defined and contained? "Do we want some kind of coexistence but with many tensions? Do we want, or do we even dare to suspect the possibility of, a future ethnic cleansing?"