By Sister Rose Rita Huelsmann, Central Pacific Province
The year was 1966 and I was teaching in an “inner city” school in St. Louis, MO. My classroom was by definition multicultural i.e. black and white students. I knew little of the black culture. I did know that my way wasn’t working.
Several other Notre Dame teachers and I enrolled in a class to study Black Culture at Font Bonne College. That helped me began to understand the differences I had identified and I could plan with intention. I adjusted music and reading lessons for my primary students. I still taught the scale but included some Jackson 5 melodies to practice it. They told me stories about their life in the city and I wrote them down to make a classroom reader that would reflect their culture. I was now “being raised” in the Black culture. Even though some of the children had recently moved to the neighborhood from other states, they seemed to know the language.
Our liturgies evolved and our faculty meetings included lessons on black culture from the black faculty members. We began to understand that culture is the “human-made” part of the environment which becomes the “social-glue” of society. Our questions had a direction. What were the rules of the family, the institutional values, the writings and symbols that said the unsayable? What were the sins and graces of the culture? What gave it meaning? What language was used to transmit information? What were the convictions behind the words used to communicate? How did the culture change as members from around the country moved into the neighborhood?
We continued to open ourselves up to new values. We taught English as a second language, used groups to accomplish homework, and grew in our theology and our lived faith. Our “way of being in the world” with God and creation was being shaped by our experience of knowing and living another culture. Our expression of self, our response to suffering and well-being and our way of making life choices became deeper and wider. We were becoming intercultural. We were changed.
This all happened before the directional statement of the 24th General Chapter gave the challenge to the congregation (to embrace interculturality). I believe a large enough percentage of Notre Dames had this same experience to pave the way for the statement. Our world changed. and we did our best to remain relevant. The progression from culture to multicultural to intercultural speaks to the evolving human society on our one planet home. In a way, recent technology paved the way for part of this to happen.
My recent experience of being the only North American in the Augustinian Institute was a lesson in life. I was in a group of 17 people from 11 countries studying together for three months in Italy. This reality revealed to me the importance of my foundational experience of learning about culture. We connected immediately on “WhatsApp.” That became our “social-glue.” The mean age of the group I judged to be between 30 and 40. I was 74. They already lived online. The language used to communicate was English, though I was the only native speaker. The app was used for assignments, mass prayers, hymns, and our own comments about any current news.
Our “sameness” was quite easy to live. It was when the differences showed up that life became more challenging. Because of my North American background (culture), inclusive language was important to me; participation in liturgy was expected. With seven ordained priests in the group, I quickly realized how different my world was from the Western Hemisphere. “WhatsApp” could not fix that. I didn’t want to “disconnect” so I had to engage in face-to-face conversation with young religious. Certainly my awareness grew. I like to think theirs did also. It’s quite easy to connect with the like-minded around the world. We need a deeper theology to connect and be willing to understand the differences.
