Each of us is the destiny of the other.
-Jean Baudrillard
We are living in a world of exclusions.
Exclusions abound from the supposed benign globalization on one hand and from
various forms of militant reactionary movements on the other. The politics of
fear and exclusion seem to be evident everywhere. Inevitable violence
between the self and the other is assumed, which produces a proliferation of
“gated” communities. The notion of “shrinking space” and “Global village” has
become an uncritical romanticization of the homogenizing tendency of the free
market culture at the expense of the local and vernacular. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a
distinction between the notion of “globe” and of “planet”. Spivak lucidly puts
it: “The globe is on our computer. No one lives there…The planet is in the
species of alterity, belonging to another system and yet we inhabit it, on
loan.” Therefore, she declares, “I propose the planet to overwrite the Globe.
Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere.”
What does it really mean to be a human
in this time of exclusion and violence and what are the responsibilities
endowed to us as Christians? Namsoon Kang, the famous diaspora theologian, asks
the same question: “What does it mean to continue to live as a human, to remain
faithful to the divine while living in a cultural, socio-geo-political, and
a religious world where power disparity between humans based on their
nationality, citizenship, gender, race, class, ability, religion and so forth
still prevails?”
An active Christian living, especially in the diaspora context, involves
responding to these questions and stimulating the practice of freeing and enlarging
human possibility in everyday realities. If loving one’s neighbor as oneself,
the core message of Christianity is merely a spiritualized, romanticized
the rhetoric that people simply acquiesce to in the church without rigorously
wrestling with the profound questions of the faith—such who is my neighbor, to who am (are) I (we) neighbors, and what constitutes loving oneself and
neighbors—then the significant value of loving one’s neighbor as oneself loses
its profound meaning. Based on the Spivakian idea of planetarity, Namsoon Kang
proposes the idea of “Planetary Conviviality” as a paradigm for authentic
Christian existence, witness and duty in a fragmented world like ours.
Planetary conviviality emphasizes the duty to understand and to care for those who
are on this planet as our fellow beings. The biblical idea of “the Kingdom of
God” is proposed as the ethico-political and theological space of planetary
conviviality. A few dimensions of this idea are expanded upon below.
Epiphanies of Face
According
to Immanuel Levinas, the ethical relation is fundamentally a “face-to-face relation.” The
simple gaze at the face of the other beyond one’s name, one’s gender and all
other constructions, is transformative and divine. One’s face precedes one’s proper
name and any kind of identity marker. There are several Biblical parallels for
this sacred gaze at the face. It is in Jacob’s gaze at the face of Esau
(Genesis 33:10) that Jacob realizes the “divine” on his face. The face was a
sacred epiphany to Jacob. Jesus’ gaze in the story of his encounter with
Zacchaeus is another example. Jesus did not preach nor criticize him for being
wrong. Instead Jesus looked into Zacchaeus’s face. When Jesus looked at his
face, a miracle, an unexpected transformation, happened (Luke 19:2-10). For
Zacchaeus, as a short person and tax collector, it must have been the first
time in his lifetime that someone truly looked at his face without judgment—an embracing, affirming genuinely human gaze. What Jesus did was to
look at the face of Zacchaeus, and Zacchaeus also was able to see the face of
Jesus. There was no hierarchy of beings between these two faces. When Jesus
calls his disciples at the beginning of John’s gospel, the unconditional, face-to-face encounter,
leads to the act of following. Thus the primary responsibility of discipleship
becomes facing the deep and the divine in the face of the other.
Radical Hospitality
The event of face-to-face encounter is
liminal in character. No one could
predict the actions of this event. In the Zacchaeus story, Jesus’ first act was
looking at Zacchaeus in his face, in which his first utterance was “I must stay
at your house”. There was no question of conditionality. The very liminal space
between hospitality and hostility turns into the absolute willing of
hospitality from both Jesus and Zacchaeus. Here the seemingly self-evident
the border between the host and the guest becomes blurry and is made pointless
through Jesus’ act of traversing the border. Zacchaeus completely welcomes the uninvited
visitation, and Jesus offers an invitation of himself to Zacchaeus. Jesus
initiates moving beyond the rigid boundaries between the home, the host and the
guest, and the borders between visitation and invitation. In this event, the
absolute welcome of the epiphany happens in the face of the other. Abrahamic
hospitality also serves as a paradigmatic illustration of radical hospitality:
the unconditional welcoming of the epiphany of the face of strangers. As a
host, Abraham bowed down to the ground (Gen.18:2) to welcome the faces of the
three strangers and then served the strangers water, bread and meat. Without
calculation or pondering their identity, Abraham offers hospitality to the
guests. Planetary conviviality demands such radical hospitality, which goes
beyond the hierarchy of host and guest. When there is no hierarchy of beings,
there would be a genuine exchange of smiles and laughter. The song "Welcome Home," a celebrated song by New Zealand singer/songwriter Dave Dobbyn, rightly illustrates the notion of
radical hospitality. Dobbyn was inspired to write the song after seeing
Christchurch anti-racism protests and the sense of community that came through
them. The song affirms an idea of radical hospitality -“I made a space for
you.”
Redeemed Relationality
Radical hospitality redeems us to the
point of celebrating our relationality and interconnectedness. The story of
Zacchaeus ends with the affirmation of redeemed relationalities. Zacchaeus was
inspired to celebrate redeemed relationality by exemplifying neighborly love,
along with deep and radical compassion for fellow beings. Such reconfiguration of
relationality is the central message of Christianity. In the Coming
of Cosmic Christ, Mathew Fox calls us to reconfigure our relationship with
the divine, fellow beings and the mother earth. Fox challenges us to enact the
resurrection of the living Cosmic Christ in our beings and then in our actions
in order to transform society and bring healing to all the world’s suffering,
broken parts through the practices of love, imagination, peacemaking, and
environmental, moral and social justice. Fox argues that restoring the mystical
mind of compassion, the Christian work of love, can bring a global renaissance
to the entire world, including every aspect of society, from religion to
sexuality, from peacemaking and disarmament to the mentoring of the youth. In nutshell,
Fox calls for the celebration of redeemed relationality. Obviously, the
remodeling and refashioning of the uneven world requires planetary
conviviality, the transformative love for the planet and planetary beings.
We celebrate planetary conviviality not
in vacuum but in community. Community is not a romanticized imaginative space,
but a realistic challenging space where we lose ourselves to find ourselves
more meaningfully. Jean Wanier says that “Community is terrible place. It is
the place where our limitations and our egoism are revealed to us. When we
begin to live full-time with others we discover our poverty and weaknesses, our
inability to get on with people, our mental and emotional blocks, our seemingly
insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to
destroy. While we were alone, we could believe we loved every one. Now that we
are with others, we realize how incapable we are of loving, how much we deny
life to others.”
Being in community always demands a re-positioning of ourselves for the
betterment of the community. Planetary conviviality is such a revolutionary
mode of understanding and reconfiguring the self, the others and the world. It
is an ethic of responsibility, compassion, hospitality, as well as an ongoing
exercise of interdependence in the face of violence, war, and exclusion. In the light of planetary conviviality, I would like to
re-define Church as the community which happens
in an amazing serendipitous way in the midst of our everyday life with its
complexities. Church is a wonderful space for the celebration of the epiphany
of marginal faces, radical hospitality and redeemed relationality through the
paradigm of Jesus Christ.
_____
Bibliography
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Kang,
Namsoon. Cosmopolitan Theology. St.Louis : Chalice, 2013.
Vanier, Jean. Community and Growth. New York:
Paulist, 1989.
[2].
Namsoon Kang, Cosmopolitan
Theology, 181.
[3] Jean Vanier, Community
and Growth (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 17.
