Call me Global!

This is a rant in a what could be a barrage of rants that have been tormenting my head lately. The unfortunate part is always that when not written down immediately, they tend to vanish or change with time.

On of the frequent debates I have with myself concerns my identity, particularly, who I am in reference to geopolitical factors and boundaries, which very clearly also influence the cultural identity. Many of my friends have heard me complain at times about what I like to think of as a “lack of identity” and other times, they might have also heard me be proud of it and even called it a gift. Fact of the matter is, however, that whenever I am asked: “So, where are you from?” my head starts racing. Depending on the occassion, the length of the answer may vary, but truth be told, I am not comfortable saying “I'm from Canada,” because frankly, I have not been here that long to be a “true Canadian” (what is a “true Canadian anyways?). Similarly, I am not comfortable saying “I am a Paraguayan,” because once again, if I am honest with myself, I feel that having been absent from Paraguay for 7 years has changed me in some ways, added to my life experience, and frankly to my personal worldview: I am a different person now, am I really still only a Paraguayan? Of course if these two countries which have shaped me and my thinking most profoundly do not have enough pull to make me a true patriot of either, Switzerland lands even further down the list. And yet, as irony would have it, I was born a Swiss and up until 3 years ago I was only a “Swiss” if official citizenship has anything to say in this discussion. So I have developed what I like to call the Rafael Patent Answer to Questions about Origin or RPAQO for short. So when I am asked “where are you from?” I take a deep breath and then answer (speaking as quickly as possible so as to answer as efficiently as possible to such a banal question) “I was born in Switzerland, grew up in Paraguay and spend most of my life there, and for the last 7 [this is a variable of course] I have called Winnipeg, Manitoba my home” Pheww!

Now, what is most bothersome and for that reason also why the question of origin is so dreadful to me is that if people decide to care, even just a bit, the conversation does not end with my RPAQO. There are classics responses to tend to guess exactly which country if a citizen of then, which is kind of fun, because I can usually prove people wrong in their assumptions, which nonetheless will necessitate a extensive answer on my part as to why it is the way it is. Or then there are the “I care for you so much I want to know more” questions, which tend split into two camps: 1. The camp who desperately wants to know which country I “feel” I most belong to, which is not helpful, because my emotional attachments are to people rather then places and thus the list of countries I “belong” to is amplified in this question; or 2. The camp who is intensely interested in where you think you will live for the rest of your life, with a corollary of “do you think you will move back to Paraguay?” Unfortunately for both them and me, my answers to these questions tend to be belaboured and cryptic, which is unpleasing for questioner as well as labour-some for me.

It is only during this last month, while speaking to people at the Mennonite World Conference General Assembly (MWC from now on) that I realized some thinks about this. As I was answering the quetsion of where I was from with my oh so quick and efficient RPAQO I heard a most fascinating answer that I liked. The person who asked chuckled and then said “Wow, just call me 'global,' eh?” Just call me global, and indeed why not. A lot of things the MWC, the first one I ever attended, did not live up to my expectation. I guess one should not expect learning experiences such as you receive in University conferences from a huge conference that the MWC is, but one thing it did is that got me started thinking about spaciality and the artificial boundaries that we have put upon the spaces that we inhabit, and which we expect to transfer to who we are as people and how we interact with each other. Do not get me wrong, I think particular, local, and unique culture is important. However, to much have we associated culture, with borders, with lines drawn on a map. In CMU-speak, have we not flattened our world into rigid lines of detachment, that transfer to our lives and force us to conform what we are to something that is not alive, not encountering it in our world as much as on paper which forces us to put up institutions to follow it. In other words, do I have to be either Canadian, Swiss or Paraguayan to have a full and valuable identity. The answer is fairly simple and yet true. You see, at the MWC 6000 people of different tribes, nations and countries came together, celebrating not their national heritage, but rather their oneness in a world that tends to be so fragmented and that puts so much value on territorial, political and personal sovereignty that it has made everyone else the other in order to be self.

And yet by meeting together as 6000 people believing in one God, his son Jesus Christ and confessing the same faith we were proclaiming that these fragmentations, these borders are not what the world is supposed to look like, but that it is a product of the fallenness of this world, the product of the initial separation between humans and what completes, namely God. And through God's gift of salvation, things have changed:

Ephesians 2
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the tow, thus making peace... So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.

At MWC 2009 6000 people came together as one, worshipping the same God in the same faith, in unity but not in homogeneity. It is that particular lack of imagination that our bordered world offers us that requires of us to the same if we are in unity, that just cannot imagine a world of oneness even in difference. And yet, that it was God calls us to, that is the gift of our creator that he has made us unique, some as Paraguayans others as Kenyans, and yet others as Canadians. And he has also made the floaters and in all of there is an uniqueness that reflects the oneness of our God, his image so manifoldly displayed in this world that refuses to be homogenous. So we came together as 6000 Christian Anabaptists worshipping, celebrating our oneness in God and our diversity as people of different cultures, that live lives in different ways and that relate to our God in varied ways and even sometimes understanding him in different ways then others. We came together knowing that God was there and that this diversity is his gift to us, a reflection of that God in us and a proclamation of his power to draw together those far and near into one body that transcends and ruptures the artificial boundaries or our wold and challenges the Kingdoms who want to break us apart. So please, call me what you want, ask me where I am from, because its true: I AM GLOBAL and so is our God, and so is our faith.

1. Corinthians 12:12-13
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.