(a song from Taizé)
Yesterday we went to the Mosterio dos Jerónimos and it made me think how much of it was built on the backs of slaves or oppression or of stealing. What I mean by this is that the funding for it came from treasure stolen from people groups who were then mostly massacred or at the very least, squashed under some belief of superiority from the colonizers. It made me really uncomfortable the whole time I was there because to me, God is simplicity and nature and harmony and love for the world.
I also believe that God loves art. Really, really loves art. God is creative and moves in the margins and artists usually have a really distinct perspective on the world. But art does not validate oppressing people.
When I was in Amsterdam, Ben and I went to the Museum of the Tropics. We were on a bike ride and it was cold and rainy and the museum sounded warm and dry and... well, tropical. It turns out, it was a museum of many of the cultures decimated by colonization and marginalized by "the West". Que fuerte.
It begins with South America and through Africa reaches Asia and the Antilles on the first floor.
As I browsed through the collections, my heart filled with pain thinking about all the diversity lost, all the people murdered, and the modern repercussions today. Immigration from the marginalized countries to the colonizers. Stereotyping and discrimination. Genocides in Africa between neighbors. Colonization was a really ugly time. Oh sure, there were some good things, but most of them fall on the side of the colonizers at a great cost to the other cultures.
How can we value these cultures today?
Meanwhile, as these thoughts passed through my head during a Portuguese Mass celebrated in a monastery built by stolen riches, I remembered the earrings I had purchased earlier. I wondered ho many ways I take advantage of people I do not see, step on the backs of the tired and overlooked and all without realizing it.
As I learn and discover more about the world, I will try to tread gingerly, to respect and observe, share and invite to share.
Grace, peace, love and hope to you.
1 comment:
Christianity, ideally, has a power to open our eyes to the ways of living and thinking we are accustomed to, and potentially help us to stop harming other people. Jesus, in the three years we know anything about, tried to illuminate the accepted, and wrong, customs that surrounded him. Hopefully by following him we can do the same things and know how to love people and distinguish between what is bad and what is just different. I think it can be easy to exchange a familiar society and culture and its problems for an unfamiliar society and culture, veiling their wrongs in colonialist guilt and desire not to repeat oppressive mistakes of the past. We have done wrong, but with God's help we can do better.
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