By Bernardo Michael, Professor of History at Messiah University.
Dying to Self and Living in Christ
Cultivating a more truthful presence in the world calls for an engagement with the unknown that has been historically at work in our lives and the world. Yet, any critical historical engagement with the ignorance out of which humans live their lives must come at some expense. After all, the most significant claim and expectation of the Christian faith is about the importance of dying to self in the believer’s efforts to love God and neighbor. This process of dying is not a terminal death but one that paradoxically promises new life and rejuvenation. It is through this process that believers create more room for God, neighbor, and creation in their lives. It finds expression in pain, loss, surrender, sacrifice, and even physical death. This life-yielding process can enhance one’s capacity to imagine otherwise and to think anew. But who knows what one must die to? All the books in the world, the armies of the pundits, and purveyors of happiness might be inadequate for this task. So much of who we are and what the world is remain hidden from us despite our best efforts to make sense of them.
The Anglican educator, mystic, and activist Charles Freer Andrews (1871-1940CE) wrestled with such questions throughout his life. He was remarkably adept at undertaking the internal work needed to interrogate the shadowy unthought and the historically deposited in his life—his socialization as a hidebound Christian and a privileged white male inhabiting a colonial world. He was conscious about the need to confess one’s foibles when he observed that nothing “is so insipid in the historical records of saintly men than to read about their superlative and superhuman excellencies, without any counterbalance of their human weaknesses.”1 As a Christian, he was deeply conscious of how white supremacy had come to dominate the church and, indeed, his own life. He came to adopt a steadfastly anti-racist stance in the world and worked hard to detox himself of its effects. Andrews confessed that it was only with the help of Christ that he was able to see these undersides of his life and migrate away from them, while dying to himself in the process.2 This allowed him to assume a stance of remarkable openness that allowed him to cross boundaries created by inequality, hierarchy, and exclusion—that surfaced in so many areas of his life and the world he lived in. His humility, compassion, and love for others emerged out of a growing awareness of his frailties as he tried to wrap his mind around a world that exceeded the comfortable sureties of his early socialization in a strict Irvingite household.3
Such a project of self-discovery can take place not just at a personal but an institutional level as well. Institutions, like individuals, bear histories of their investments in inequity, exclusion, and injustice. Take, for example, the connections between educational institutions in the United States and the history of enslavement and segregation. Historically speaking, as these institutions grew in stature, so did their allegiances to a white world. For long these stories had remained a part of the institution's unconscious. It is only more recently that intentional efforts have being made to unearth them and acknowledge their legacies. It would take decades of activism and struggle before some began to acknowledge, at least provisionally, the long shadowy arc of this story and how it continues to animate life on their campuses—marbled deep into the plumbing, wiring, and architecture of the institution. Examples of such historical audits include Brown and Georgetown University along with some Christian institutions.4 Facing up to this history and transforming the inner workings of the institution will be no easy task as they will have to give up long-established and comfortable ways of doing business. They will be accompanied by a sense of painful loss—of unquestioned privileges enjoyed and long-standing commitments to white, patriarchal, and other supremacies. To take up the cross on these matters is to imagine our selves and institutions otherwise.
Critical Consciousness for Intergenerational Asian Churches
But how might this narrative play out, closer home, within the context of, immigrant Christian communities in the United States. Reconciling intergenerational difference remains a prominent theme in the unfolding story of such churches, including those within Asian American communities. Asian-American Christians have many pressing questions to address when engaging urgent questions about their location in the United States and the world. They are confronted with the dilemma of being genuine disciples and leaders at the very moment they experience the historic legacies of migration and racial formation and their associated traumas, and overall well-being, while dismantling structures of power and privilege within the community and beyond, while pursuing brokenness and healing in self, the church, and the world. Such dynamics are visible in churches not just in the United States, but across the world, in other times and places. On a recent visit to South India this summer, local church leaders confirmed that one of their ongoing challenges remains the building of intergenerationally inclusive churches in a digitally saturated world. Significant differences in cultural experiences and expectations between the earlier and succeeding generations present unique challenges (and opportunities) for engaging continuity and change, repair and healing, truth-telling, and transformation. In such situations, both leaders and laity are called to give a better account of themselves through spiritually driven and historically informed confession of how long-held beliefs and practices might enable or prevent building a beloved community and repair in the world suffering from wear and tear. In a rapidly evolving global context, the call to travel to the edges of one’s being to better listen to the voice of God and neighbor remains—both personal and corporate. Such boundary crossing, challenging as it might be, might offer new possibilities for growth and renewal.
The quest for intergenerational reconciliation lies at the intersection of one of the preeminent trends of our time—the growing intercultural character of our world. The term refers to the growing diversity within and across all existing boundaries that mark the edges of family, community, nation, and planet.5 Across the world, as time and space compress, humans are encountering each other in the borderlands of these and other categories in new, unpredictable, and intensifying ways. Humans today being increasingly invited to live in these borderlands where many of the signposts we grew up with have fallen by the wayside. This situation is one of flux, uncertainty, and open-endedness—and an eminently immigrant one. In this world of migrating people and imaginations—the intercultural has become a new normal in planetary life that resists easy explanations, and comes with no guarantees. To imagine otherwise life in these borderlands also comes with its own share of possibilities and challenges. As human lives increasingly intersect the significance of questions about the hidden-from-view character of self and the world, the call to inward living, incarnating life out of death, and the cultivation of a critical historical consciousness will continue to grow. The puzzle of the intergenerational is at once an intercultural one. Intergenerational reconciliation then becomes a borderland activity lying at the crossroads of what can be known and what remains beyond thought. Knowing that every one of us, hosts both knowledge and ignorance might serve as a caveat to the judgements we pronounce on each other. It might quieten our restlessness and anxieties, while being more willing to host difference, tolerate dissent, and come to terms with the traumas we might have inherited or experienced. This would be the new permanent condition of our lives that demands our careful attention in the life and body of the church
Ultimately, this is not just the dilemma of an immigrant church, but the church in general, and on a planetary scale. However, as in the case of Andrews outlined earlier, the promise and capacity for such renewal can be greatly enhanced by incarnating Christ’s promise of life and death in the upside-down kingdom.6 As we faithfully continue to discern our location in the United States and chart out just and inclusive futures, may we be reminded of the opacity of self and the world that informs our work. Indeed, they all point to the humility and grace we need to truthfully “imagine otherwise” our place in a broken world. Like the farmer who plants a crop and undertakes the hard work to harvest it, we will be tired, but we will be content that our souls are being formed in ways we could never have imagined through the sheer force of our thought. Perhaps we could end with this prayer of hope as we solicit God’s help to undertake the work that lies ahead:
God, we are your children, and you know every part of our bodies, institutions, and the worlds we knowingly and unknowingly create. You know us and our full beings, even before anything enters our conscious thoughts, schemes, theories, theologies, and worldviews. Connect us, in truth, to ourselves, and our worlds, both what can be seen under the light and what remains hidden from us. As the Psalmist pleaded: “I cry out to you from the depths, Lord—my Lord, listen to my voice! Let your ears pay close attention to my request for mercy! (Psalm 130: 1-2, CEB). May it be so.
Dr. Bernardo Michael is a Professor of South Asian and World History in the Department of History Politics and International Relations, Messiah University where he also directed the Center for Public Humanities and the Office of Diversity Affairs. He has lived and worked in India, Nepal, and the United States. He is currently working on a biography of the Anglican educator, mystic, and activist Charles Freer Andrews (1871-1940).
Cited in Benarsidas Chaturvedi & Marjorie Sykes, Charles Freer Andrews: A Narrative (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949), xii. Additional details about Andrews’ life can be found in Hugh Tinker, Ordeal of Love: C.F. Andrews and India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Andrews provides a fuller account of this in his What I Owe to Christ (New York: Abingdon Press, 1932).
The Irvingites were a nineteenth century church with a strict millennialist doctrine and active in Great Britain. The church declined considerably by the end of the century.
For details visit: https://slavery.virginia.edu/universities-studying-slavery/. For a recent example of a Christian university’s attempts to reconcile with its past see “Historical Review Task Force Report,” (Wheaton College, 13 September 2023).
Adapted from the notion of the intercultural developed by Grant H. Cornwell & Eve W. Stoddard, Globalizing Knowledge: Connecting International & Intercultural Studies (Washington DC: AAC&U, 1999). The authors use the term to signal the fusing of two important socio-cultural strands in the United States—international and multicultural.
For more on the upside-down kingdom see Donald B. Kraybill, The Upside-Down Kingdom, 2nd edition (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1990).