P E R S P E C T I VAS - Princeton Theological Seminary

Perspectivas/Occasional Papers • Fall 2006Perspectivas/Occasional Papers • Fall 2006Multiple-belonging: Diversity in the Divine ImageExploring identity in terms of an expanded understanding ofhybridity as multiple-belonging, recognizes that human diversityis experienced as a belonging that is necessarily located, situated,embodied, engendered and lived—culturally, linguistically,socially, economically, politically, racially, religiously, sexually,spiritually. This hybridity is grounded in a shared humanity andderived from creation in the divine image that imparts a foundationalcommonality that must dictate the minimum level of expectationin our ethical behavior towards each other on the micro andmacro levels.Our embodied particularity is experienced as multiple-belongingthrough a variety of biological, geographical and relationalfactors. What we seek is not sameness but points of intersectionthat allow us to engage. According to Hawaiian author DarrellLum, the impulse to establish relationality in his context is criticalto understanding local culture that is also poly-cultural. Forexample, in Hawaii, a typical conversation-starter is the question,asked in Hawaiian Creole English (pidgin) “What school youwent?” This question has “its root in the native Hawaiian way ofidentifying oneself by geography and genealogy.” 57 Lum continues,“rather than being a question that divides us, [it] is fundamentallyan effort to discover how we are connected.” 58 We do notneed to become each other in order to be companions or even kin;respect for diversity entails a search for intersections and connections.As such, this Hawaiian local ritual “is expressly a way fortwo people to begin discovering their relationships with eachother, however distant, in order to talk stories that sprout on commonground. It is a way to begin weaving their histories together—andthis defines friendship, or an aspect of it, local style.” 59This way of engaging across contexts by privileging the local in apoly-cultural environment, offers fruitful possibilities for furtherconversation with U.S. Hispanic theologians and our privileging100of lo cotidiano, the daily, and our understanding of relationshipsthrough compadrazgo. 60At the same time, a critical appropriation of multiple belongingrequires attention be paid to the experience of multiple not-fittingin. Whether by choice or accident, as the result of other’scruelties or own stances, this is also a reality that inclusion rhetoricglosses over. Explorations of our hybridity and multiplebelongingmust also include a sustained conversation regardingmultiple-not-fitting-in. In other words who gets left out in ourconstructions of identity and community? Who resides on ourmargins when we omit the stories of our intersections? Who isostracized on the basis of arbitrary criteria determining the norm?Who is privileged and who is excluded when a particular norm isassumed as common? Who is silenced? Who loses agency? Whoare the gatekeepers controlling access?As theologians arising from the heart of a people who constitutethe plurality of the U.S. Catholic Church and the largestminority population in the United States, we need to understandourselves in a new way—as a majority. Theologizing from thisperspective of majority, our past and contemporary experiences ofmarginalization have sensitized us to the dangers of privilegingcertain particularities and of inflating their significance with universalimport. La comunidad latina is not the church’s diversity;we are the church! Our contextual horizons charge us as theologiansto question and critique current operative paradigms ofdiversity that fail to recognize it as constitutive of our human,national and ecclesial conditions. Our contextual horizons inviteus as theologians to pursue new directions for further explorationof diversity as these have ethical, practical and pastoral implications.Creation in the divine image may actually say more about therichness of God’s diversity than our own humanity. In the wordsof Fray Juan de Torquemada 61 this diversity as reflected in the101