"Tension." Not a particularly obscure word to the English speaker. Not one that is difficult to understand. However, it is a word that defines much of one's experience living abroad. No, not just living abroad, living in a world full of humans.
I am, by nature, a black and white thinker. I see trends, make judgments, and categorize people and experiences accordingly. When I move to a new country--or even city--for the first months, I absorb and analyze moments, noting what they imply about the host culture. Example: "Every time I ride the Beijing bus, lots of people touch me. Therefore, the Chinese personal space bubble must be smaller than my American one." Eventually, these little discoveries evolve into a whole mental framework of A+B+C+D=Chinese Culture. However, the problem with this way of thinking is that it is highly generalized. There are exceptions. There are cultural rebels. There is a least one old man that thinks, "wow, that laowai smells weird; I'm moving to the other end of the bus."
But wait! Ayoh! Ayah! That kind of complexity is hard to accept! It makes my brain sweat and my heart palpitate. It confirms my fear that I will ever be able to decipher the world completely. It warns me that my judgments are subjective and vulnerable to my own naivete.
Thankfully, friendly host cultures, loads of dialogue and debate, combined with wonderful literature in the hands of wonderful English teachers have all worked together to help me. I can now approach the color gray without too much anxiety. But I still wrestle with my own mind; I sword fight temptations to stamp every person/action/perspective with GOOD or BAD; and I often have dance-offs with the tiny philosophers I imagine sitting on the shoulders of the people I disagree with.
Two of my good friends often cite the importance of "living in the tension." But accommodations are not so comfortable there. The mattress is stiff, and the comforter scratchy. The sink sometimes leaks, and the air-con is on the fritz. It's much cozier resting on my initial impressions, condemning other worldviews (as well as their possessors) as simplistically flawed. Ignorant. It's easier to be ruled by my reflexes, my preferences for style of worship, style of conversation, style of community, my presuppositions about scripture, my condemnation of all things crustacean. :) But that would be irresponsible. A kind of intellectual apathy even. And if God has called me to love Him with my whole mind, I think He then beckons me to wrestle with truth, with His Truth, with half-truths and lies. I must engage the people and experiences that threaten to unravel what I assume is inflexibly concrete.
Hear me out. I'm not trying to embrace a kind of relativism, but instead, to be suspicious of my own blindness. In doing so, hopefully I will thus, value the complexity inherent in the lives of human beings that differ with me.
To close, here is a quote from Reading Lolita in Tehran. At this point in the book, the author's lit. class has put The Great Gatsby on trial, as many of the class's conservative students accuse the book of celebrating Western immorality--i.e. adultery and materialism. One female student, Nyazi, in her defense of the novel indicts its prosecutors of being,
another brand of careless people...who see the world in black and white, drunk on the righteousness of their own fictions.
I, for one, do not want to live a life, drunk on the righteousness" of my own construction of truth or worshiping a God that I have imagined rather than understood from his own, written words of self-disclosure.
May I continue to struggle with Truth and furthermore, seek a Truth inseparable from Love. Let me be a wrestler, wondering and wandering on the kingdom path of seeking God.
