Engaging Our Diversity: Interculturality and Consecrated Life Today

BOOK REVIEW

Engaging our Diversity: Interculturality and Consecrated Life Today, Maria Cimperman, RSCJ, and Roger P. Schroeder, SVD, editors, Oribis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2020, 246 pp.

Toward the end of Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis gives us this beautiful reminder, “Whenever we encounter another person in love, we learn something new about God.” This timely book is a collection of essays that grew out of a series of seminars at the Center for the Study of Consecrated Life at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Crossing boundaries of culture and language is as old as the Hebrew prophets and has been part of the Church’s missionary activity as far back as Acts of the Apostles. Nonetheless, the future of religious communities (and the world for that matter) may depend on our ability to improve how we live our discipleship interculturally.

The challenges associated with the high average age of the great majority of religious in the United States and in international congregations generally are not the only issues that should claim the attention of those in leadership in those societies and congregations.  Indeed, the gifts and insights of their younger, more diverse members should be seen as opportunities for a more intensely lived Christian discipleship. As Sister Sia Nyasari Temu, MM, reminds us in her essay, “community is built on the willingness to let the ‘I’ be molded by the ‘we.’” Initiating a dialogue between the charism of the community as articulated by the founders and handed down by previous generations and the cultural values brought by younger members from a variety of ethnic backgrounds can produce something new, creative, and life-giving. All are needed in the reign of God.

Although the terms multicultural, cross-cultural, and intercultural tend to be used interchangeably in informal speech, Sr. Jun Eun Sophia Park, SNJM, helpfully defines terms in her essay. And Fr. Anthony Gittins, CSSp, sets out an ambitious agenda: moving from ethnocentrism to interculturality. Robert Schreiter points out that “detecting the silence of subordination is of utmost importance in intercultural communication.” Unexamined assumptions need to be examined and active listening to the Holy Spirit and to each other also has an essential role to play.

We ought not domesticate God to be “just like us.” As we learn from the stranger, we can deepen our appreciation of God’s otherness.  In our communities we need to create space for all to continually convert to the gospel values without renouncing what is distinctive about them culturally. Of course, it is no surprise that culture and personality factors subtly intersect in each individual’s outlook on life and on life lived with others. Particularly in the later chapters there are some practical cases of situations upon which to reflect.

To whom would I recommend this book? Anyone who wants to facilitate the birth of a new, more inclusive era in religious life would benefit from reading these essays and working at gaining cultural competence. Particularly those involved in the formation of new candidates would do well to be concerned with moving themselves and their young candidates beyond multiculturalism to true interculturality. Likewise, leadership and especially delegates to international meetings of religious community members, should make the effort to absorb the lessons contained in these 246 pages. Interculturality really is a work of the Spirit.

By John Burger, SSC