disassociation

In my Gender and Religion class last week, our lecturer, Fatimatu, said something that meant a great deal to me. She is one of three professors who alternate teaching that class, each representing a different faith tradition. Fatimatu is the voice of Islam. As she was explaining the basic tenets of her religion, she paused suddenly. A desperate flush came over her otherwise rigid and reserved face. She pleaded, “Being a Muslim and practicing Islam are very different things. Don’t look at humans to judge my faith. We are human. You cannot learn Islam from Muslims.”

            It was as if I could see into her memory, with all the disappointments in a devoted life. Perhaps, when a religious mentor acted out of line, the time she opened the paper and cursed the acts of those who claim to worship the same God, maybe when she herself said an unkind word or refused help- hoping no one had noticed; at least no one who also knew what she believed. In that moment, I felt a strange kinship with this woman. How often have I silently begged my friends to look the other way, to not take all that I do as representative of the God I serve? How often have I felt, frankly embarrassed by Christians in the news and wanted to power of all TVs for fear that people will confuse Christians with Christ?  I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that surge of frustration so strongly as I did this weekend.

            We took a trip to Cape Coast where most Africans who were taken as slaves passed through to get to the New World. There are two large castles still standing there, looming over the village. The one I visited, Elmina Castle, is the oldest European building in all of Africa.

            Of course, it was a very sobering experience. The tour took us through the hallways once teeming with unthinkable madness, the Governor’s Quarters where who knows how many women were exploited and abused, and the female dungeon where I swear there remains a faint smell of waste mixed with horror and blood.  We passed through the “point of no return”- a narrow passage that led to the pier where hundreds of thousands were forced aboard the infamous ships- never to see their homeland again.

            As we came into the main courtyard above the dungeons, I stopped short. A sign, “Portuguese Church”, hung on a small brick building. Of course, I knew the Europeans were religious, that it played a large role in colonialism, but certainly not these Europeans. This was a separate endeavor, this slave trade. This was unrelated to their faith. They didn’t have any faith- not these murderers. But sure enough, on the inside wall, above the window that looks out on the Atlantic, above the scuff marks left from pews, right above the dungeons in which hundreds of people were packed, was printed a verse. An excerpt from Psalm 123- “This is the Lord’s resting place”.

            A silent fury rose within me. I tried to thwart my imagination from its inevitable wanderings: images of people worshipping in this room, of praying or teaching or opening Scripture here, of the people downstairs standing numbly as a “righteous” and “all-mighty” God was praised by their persecutors, a few feet overhead.

            How to separate, how to divide, how to detach, how to remove from the canon of “Christian” works the parts that I don’t think belong there. Slavery, the Crusades, Koran- burning, being judgmental, being self-righteous, hypocrisy, my list gets longer as I get older. This church in the middle of a slave castle has stood for 500 years. And it will remain. Giving fuel to the Christopher Hitchens’ of the world. Haunting those who read the same Bible.

            I suppose it isn’t really possible or feasible or fair or good research even to separate a system of beliefs from its believers. We judge the quality of a university by its graduates. We gauge the effect of political theories by those who implement them. So, I guess it’s unreasonable to ask for a distinction like Fatimatu’s to be made.

            But possibly, a request to widen the scope of examination to include believers beyond those who make the nightly news. Maybe, a challenge to anyone who subscribes to any system to be mindful of what and whom we represent in every great act and each passing conversation. And ultimately, like all experiments involving humans, we allow for error. To remember that we are, in fact, human.  And while that state of being is no excuse for intolerable and disgusting acts, it does raise a distinction between what we do and whose name we do it in.