August 21, 2016
As they slowly settle down in our country some refugees begin to show interest in Christianity. Most of them are coming from cultures and religions where life is regulated in every detail by tribal and religious traditions. To encounter our European way of life where personal freedom is given a large space, (maybe too large a space) is for them both frightening and fascinating. For all of us, locals and strangers, this encounter is a tremendous chance. Human beings grow and develop through encounter with others. If we stay always with the same people, we remain the same, we are not challenged to change. But when a child meets other children in the nursery it begins to change, not necessarily for the better. You come to mass here at All Saints because in our English liturgy you experience something you don’t find in German parishes. We only have to look at European culture to realise how much we owe to the encounter with other cultures. We took our school-system from the Babylonians, religious symbols from the Egyptians, our philosophy from the Greek, the legal system from Romans and the way we think about God and relate to God is heavily influenced by the Jewish scriptures. In comparison, many cultures of Africa remained for a long time relatively steady and stagnant because the interior of the continent remained isolated from the rest of the world. The importance of meeting people from other cultures and religions we also see in the bible. The major breakthrough in their experience of God happened when the people of Israel were in exile in Egypt and in Babylon. Those were traumatic experiences when their familiar world crumbled. But out of that painful experience the prophets developed a deeper and richer vision of God from which we still draw today inspiration. Nothing has changed Germany and the rest of Europe so much as the arrival of a million refugees last year. The event provoked the best and the worst in people. There were those who were frightened by the arrival of so many stranger who were different in many ways: religion, language, dress, food, family traditions... They reacted out of fear turned into hatred because they did not take the trouble to know them. I bet that hardly any PEGIDA protester ever talked to a Muslim. The unknown always scares us. There are also those who recognise the great chance of this forced migration for us as much as for them. Does our culture which has lost interest in religion not need to be challenged by people who take God seriously? Does the way Muslims pray and fast and witness their faith in public not challenge us Christians who often have become lukewarm and fearful? And do they not need to be freed from the heavy load of a life governed by the law to experience the freedom of God’s children that Christ brought? The challenge is not to proselytise each other but to share our riches with one another and so grow into a deeper understanding of God, our faith and ourselves.
Fr. Wolfgang Schonecke MAfr