Letter to Friends and Familiares #36: Myths, Conformity and Idleness

Cultural assimilation is a heady topic these days. ‘Heady’ remains the apt word because it exists mostly inside people’s heads. Recently, I participated in a training session on “the process” of “cultural assimilation”. Like most giddy subjects of political correctness, this discussion – grounded firmly in academic studies – contained about 20% substance and 80% methane madness.

Before the discussion, the weighting assigned to substance might have been 5% but volunteers serving in the country-side really face challenges and, as I am delighted to report, they adapt admirably well. We even suffered through the tedium vitae of a survey on culture shock to “help” newly arrived volunteers. Nevertheless, the people leading this discussion are earnest, decent and well-educated.

They are also wasting time and, in Mexico at least, fast becoming intellectual anorexics pushing food around their plates to look busy. The topic is not altogether devoid of meaning as anyone living outside of her fatherland must face adjustments, especially when that person has to study a new language. Nevertheless, people have been away from home for centuries: been there, done that.

While we may not be a global village, for at least half the world, the inter-net has extended the psychology of globalism into a common expectation of experience. This common vision, together with a modest amount of human sensitivity to the (re)actions of others, should suffice to navigate the rather dull waters of being an expatriate.

So why this entire hullabaloo about the obvious? Easy question: such vacuous discussions provide the fodder for boring Ph.D. theses published into dreadful tomes desecrating hallowed book-stacks of the Library Congress. Credit should go to a fellow volunteer who perceptively observed that the cultural adaptation model was ‘re-up’ of the five (or was it six) stages of grief from the 1970s.

Only one word need describe that erstwhile tripe remains: ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz

The only things interesting about Elisabeth Kübler Ross were the spelling of her first name and the umlaut in the first half of her hyphenated surname. The problem with linear models like these is, first, they are linear and, second, they reflect the reality of the person devising them. They serve one beneficial purpose of limited scope: providing means of support to an otherwise ill-equipped brainiac.

Anyone who has experienced the profound and riveting disintegration of genuine grief often finds the ‘simplistification’ of the Kübler-Ross model to be slightly condescending, perhaps downright demeaning. Grief is a living koän (i.e., the insoluble non-sense riddle of Zen) that breaks or grinds us down to an acceptance of certain latent limitations in ourselves and our lives.

So, too, with cultural assimilation. This re-tread, touted by professionals with the life experience to know better, trivializes the positive situation facing your typical migrant: the opportunity to collaborate with other people to expand his knowledge of language and manners as well as to widen her perspective. Collaboration with whom? Why, locals of course.

Cultural collaboration ought to be fun and reciprocal without the drudgery of falsely imputed tasks of overcoming ‘resistance’ or acknowledging ‘immunization’ or ‘denial’. We are discussing international living for pity’s sake, not some sort of syndrome or addiction. Most offensive is the petty tyranny of political correctness reigning down on anyone with the nerve to turn his nose up at this garbage.

People who do not buy into this spasm of the ‘glitterotten’ face labels like “out-of-touch” or “insensitive” or, worst of all accusations from liberal intellectual fascists, “well, he is, you know…” The little brat who decried the emperor’s nakedness was the Little Prince in my book even if he was damned as out-of-step with his more sophisticated and “grown-up” compatriots.

Letter #34 to Friends and Family: Good Friday re-visited

Yes, it has been three months since Holy Week and my sense of timing is as sharp as ever. Nevertheless, during an evening in Annapolis recently, Angelica and I celebrated Independence Day with my sister’s family as well as the Priest(ess) and her similarly ordered husband (of the Prunells' church) over dinner and fireworks.

What emerged from this few hours of chatting on everything from lapsed Catholicism to Bishop Spong was that Saint Ann’s Church of Annapolis, a mid-to-low Episcopal congregation, had re-enacted the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday 2011 for the first time in many years at the same time I was trudging around the Calesa colonia (i.e., neighborhood) of Querétaro on the “Viacrusis”.

The only difference between the two events that I could detect was that the temperature was twenty degrees higher in Querétaro and walking the good walk in México literally made me a red-neck. Of course, in April and May, I had the blog to end all blogs written out inside my head and, of equal course, I found myself too intellectually and inevitably indolent to do a damn thing about my spiritual insight.

Nevertheless, this parallel between two rather dissimilar groups got my attention since this nitty-gritty and not-so-pretty ritual – after all, it was re-enactment of the ghastly death of a young man – seemed to be addressing some deep-seeded need within the average human breast. I say 'breast' and not 'head' because sacramental acts hardly pertain to the intellect.

Interestingly, however, as the spiritual utility of ritual acts is realized (at least among my acquaintances), intellectual resistance frequently subsides into the irrelevant.

So this action ties, I think, into the sacramental side of Catholicism; that is, the ritual side (i.e. upper-church) Christianity. What do the sacraments mean? In actuality, I am referring to the “action” sacraments, primarily Holy Matrimony, Confession, Holy Communion and Extreme Unction.

Like these rituals, the “Viacrusis” entails the taking of action by at least one key party to it. These sacraments rang hollow for many years as I was struggling mightily to assert, establish and justify my intellectual pride.

Finally, after finding a very old, very Catholic book on the Church and its pre-Vatican II ways in my mid-twenties, sacraments began to hold a third possibility: perhaps, they represented the sacred syntax of a spiritual life in this material world. In all honesty, I still prefer the lower church practices of Unitarianism (not Christian) or Presbyterianism.

Yet I have found the services in lower churches often to be very long and sometimes tedious. And, for me at least, nothing else on Earth quite delights me as the high Anglo-Catholic services – in very limited doses – of Saint Mary’s Church or the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City.

I wonder why.

Could it be that ‘walking-the-walk’ for two hours on Good Friday and a quarter of an hour every Sunday enraptures people far more rapidly than a group talking itself into a state-of-grace?

Could walking through ninety-five degree heat, walking in the sandals of that repudiated revolutionary, bring me closer to his humanity to afford a glimpse into His divinity?

Obviously, I really do not know because I am not a Christian. But Christians of diverse levels of education, intelligence and socio-economic status two thousand miles apart may have established a coincidental consensus.

What do you think?