De Saber a Conocer...

Before I start, let me just say that these blog entries are from the heart. I will learn, I will grow, and views and opinions will change (hopefully. So I just ask for your grace as I learn, grow and live over the next few months. Thanks!

One thing about English (and all languages have their downfalls) is that sometimes you can have too few word choices. One thing about me (most definitely a downfall!), is that I don't know Spanish very well...therefore the title of this may be heinous to some of you Spanish speakers out there. But what it should translate to (or what I want it to translate to) is "from to know to to know." Yes, that correct. Moving from knowing to knowing. Hmmmmm. Ya, okay Dave. But let me explain. While in Honduras (which was surprisingly only a few short weeks ago), our host explained to us that in Spanish there are two ways to express to someone that you "know" something, saber and conocer. The first, saber, is to know in your mind. You've read about it, heard it, or had someone explain it to you...now you know the facts. The second, conocer, is to know from experience or to know personally, such as how you know a friend. To have your "knowing" move from your mind to your heart...it is a deeper and more intimate way of knowing.

In my life, and all of our lives perhaps, we have those moments where something we knew or something we read suddenly makes more sense, you can almost feel it in yourself. The new knowledge can be heavy, freeing, painful, joyful, or a mix of any or all emotions, but you realize that your knowledge has gone deeper than before...it is no longer simply an act of the mind. Maybe it is when you first know what it means to love, either yourself, God or another person. Maybe it is when you encounter suffering, sickness, or material poverty. Maybe it is when you realize your own poverty of the mind or soul. Maybe it is when you realize your prejudices, biases, or worldview. Perhaps it is when you encounter a deep love of another person towards yourself. Perhaps it is when you experience the love of God. It seems in the past few years, whether I realized how to explain it at the time or not, that I have had these conocer moments in my life. Today was one of them.

When you enter the Slave Lodge in the heart of old Cape Town, you encounter a building that is graced with chandeliers, a lovely cobbled courtyard, and other seemingly misplaced items. Yet as you proceed through the museum dedicated to the history of slavery in Cape Town, you encounter the very different Slave Lodge of the times during the rule of the Dutch East Indian Company. From a young age, white American children (for the most part) are taught about slavery in America through the lens of the Civil War. North against South. Abolitionists against plantation owners. Lincoln against Lee. We may even learn parts of the Emancipation Proclamation or the Gettysburg Address. But do our children, or ourselves, actually attempt to view the horrors of slavery from the vantage point of the millions of slaves that were extorted everywhere from Massachusetts to Mississippi? Have I ever acknowledged my own part in it, my own benefits as a white American? Have I learned about the history of the global slave trade? I could go on with questions, but in my mind I can answer yes to all of these question and more. Yes, I know my mind acknowledges my benefits, my privilege, slaves' pain, and America's deepest wound.

Yet as I walked through this museum, read the walls, touched the names of those who were imprisoned there, were tortured there, and died there, I began to "know" in a new way. It was a way that brought deep hurt and pain. It was in the mind and soul, very spiritual. One spoken word section of the museum had you enter into a model of a slave boat where the voice of a slave women was reading the following poem:
If this journey ever ends, if ever
If we ever feel the land and know we breathe
and see the sun
Still, still the time must come
when we will die
and they will be born
Through each other, through each one
we will live
Through each one we will live,
our souls retrieved
I do believe, will you?
Will you believe?
Believe. Believe...

And it challenged me, do I believe that healing can truly come among us, a healing that is not glossy or founded on naïveté and ignorance? Can I acknowledge my role, yet be forgiven? Can we live through one another, even those in history who our ancestors or societies have wronged? How powerful if that is true. How life changing if that is true. How humbling if that is true. Just as in the way that I believe the church is a mystical communion of the saints of the past, those of the present and those of the future, are we as humans not all connected even if not in body? By walking through the halls of the very same building that dehumanized and defamed my brothers and sisters, can I begin to understand (even if only a little) their pain and their humanity? A pain that hurt them so many years ago and penetrates our societies still today.

I think this is what will motivate me during my stay here in Cape Town. Like I said in a letter to a friend, South Africa is no different than anywhere else in the world in that it has the same issues, joys and struggles. But for some reason, life here is magnified and amplified. Life is all up in your face! While you can choose to push it away or blind yourself to it with Dollars, Euros and Rand, it will always be there. But, unlike my last post, I don't want to sit back and wait. Yes, I want to be attentive and self-aware, but I have to encounter life. Life in the present and the lives of those before me. Our lives and our humanity are wrapped up together. There is redemption in our pain, but that pain must be shared. Pain is never isolated it seems, but rather it seeps out and penetrates the world around us. We must confront it, or it will confront us in its own time.

So I challenge both myself and all of those reading (particularly us students and academics), are we living life to saber it or to conocer it? What gates and walls have we erected to guard ourselves from our own lives, the lives of others, and how those interconnect? Can we honor the pain of the past by living lives that value the present and future? Will we, collectively and individually, choose to see the light in one another while still acknowledging both our capacity to do wrong and those wrongs which we have already committed? I believe that we can. I hope and pray that I can myself.