Encountering Difference: New Lens (and Meatball Soup Noodles)

 These days I have been spending a significant amount of time and effort learning Tagalog, the language commonly used here in Manila. I enjoy learning a new language, even though the process of learning can be quite frustrating. I often find myself now wanting to say something, but by the time I form the sentence in my head three minutes later, the conversation has already moved on!

You also have to be prepared to play the fool when learning a new language. Inevitably you will at some point find yourself saying something embarrassing. When I was still learning Indonesian two years ago in Indonesia, I was asked to read an announcement in a church group meeting about the activities at an upcoming seminar. There was to be a community service project. But by dint of dropping an “s” at the end of a word, I announced instead, “There will be meatball soup noodles!”

Despite the inevitable embarrassment, the rewards that come from learning a new language definitely outweigh the occasional embarrassment. It is quite wonderful to communicate with someone in their own language. Somehow the cultural barriers that separate us don’t seem to matter so much for a moment in the warmth of encounter.

It is not easy to enter into another culture. From my own experience I’ve discovered that when one first comes into contact with another culture, one inevitably sees it through the lens of one’s own. Before I first left home, a wise person told me, “the faster you come to accept that the Philippines is different, the easier it will be for you.” I hadn’t a clue what he’d meant. Only when I had experienced it myself did I understand how the process of changing one’s perspective works.  After the initial period of confusion and anger and struggle that the experience of “difference” brings, at some point, with enough good will and commitment on both sides, you somehow – quite without realising it – start to put aside your own cultural expectations. Only then can you start seeing things as they are. Your lens of judgment has turned into one of compassion.

It’s not as if you start seeing a rose-tinted version of reality… but that you are able to experience it as it is, in both its beauty and imperfections.

I remember the moment I became aware of having reached this point in Indonesia, about a year after starting to live there in 2015. We were then in Ende, Flores, a somewhat more remote part of Indonesia than the big cities one usually hears about. We had gone to visit a young woman we were supporting through university who lived quite a way outside the town, on a hill by a river just before it met the sea.

On the way home we stopped by the beach. Looking out at the mountains and the sea stretching out into the distance, with the hills and river at my back, I suddenly became aware that I loved this land and all the people in it… of the sacredness of each person and creature and pebble of sand in it. It was a moment of wonder.

Sunset in Ende, Flores

It was only recently that I started to wonder if this way in which we encounter another culture also applies to our human relationships. Surely it has some similarities: the “difference” I experience in others is inevitably a cause of judgment, conflict and struggle… but perhaps if I am willing to stay in the place of discomfort and open myself to the encounter, I will emerge from the other side with a heart and eyes of compassion for them in all their beauty and brokenness. And could it be that this beauty and brokenness also becomes part of me?

Food for Thought:
Where and how have I encountered “difference” in my life and relationships?
What gifts have that encounter had for me?