Andy
: ?I'll conclude this week of excerpts from Lamin Sanneh's extraordinary book Disciples of All Nations on a positive note: the experience of the Catholic missionary Vincent Donovan among the Masai in Kenya.?Just as Jesus the Messiah of the Jews plausibly became Christ the Greek philosopher, just so as the Lion of Judah (Hos 5:14) could he become the Maasai Warrior. In a revealing testimony, a Maasai elder assured Donovan that the Maasai people did not search for him as a priest to come to them. Donovan came to them and followed them into the bush, into the plains, into the steppes where their cattle were, into the hills where they took their cattle for water, into their villages, and into their homes. Donovan told them about the High God, and about how the Maasai must search for Him and try to find Him even if that meant leaving their land and their people.
At this point the elder came to the punch line: it was not the Maasai who had searched for God, but God who had searched for the Maasai. He continued: God “has searched us out and found us. All the time we think we are the lion. In the end, the lion is God.”
Nate
: ?Of course, as the second half of the article notes, conversion is not always so easy -- as the passage of recent anti-conversion laws (and an uptick in persecution) in many regions of India make clear. I've always found it interesting how the English-language press in India invariably uses the passive voice to describe it -- "he was converted to Christianity" -- rather than the perky individualist western-style active: "he converted." One can find echoes to this in different attitudes towards western-individualist choises about marriage, career, etc.?Sometimes conversion is gradual, but quite commonly things come to a head in a single instant, which can be triggered by a text, an image, a ceremony or some private realisation. A religious person would call such a moment a summons from God; a psychologist might speak of an instant when the walls between the conscious and unconscious break down, perhaps because an external stimulus—words, a picture, a rite—connects with something very deep inside.
For people of an artistic bent, the catalyst is often a religious image which serves as a window into a new reality. One recurring theme in conversion stories is that cultural forms which are, on the face of it, foreign to the convert somehow feel familiar, like a homecoming. That, the convert feels, “is what I have always believed without being fully aware of it.”
Take Jennie Baker, an ethnic Chinese nurse who moved from Malaysia to England. She was an evangelical, practising but not quite satisfied with a Christianity that eschews aids to worship such as pictures, incense or elaborate rites. When she first walked into an Orthodox church, and took in the icons that occupied every inch of wall-space, everything in this “new” world made sense to her, and some teachings, like the idea that every home should have a corner for icons and prayer, resonated with her Asian heritage. Soon she and her English husband helped establish a Greek Orthodox parish in Lancashire.