Mortal Remains
Getting to Know Lizzie
by S. M. Hutchens
When I was a little boy, our family lived down the street from a big, ramshackle house where lived a girl named Lizzie who was the most fascinating person I had ever met. She was about my age, we played together whenever we could, and I liked her a lot. She and her family, I was told, were from deep in the southern hills. I had never heard a person speak as she did; her language was as fascinating as her person, although my mother didn't seem too pleased about my acquiring some of it, especially, as I recall, "ain't."
Lizzie lived with her grandmother and a bunch of taciturn, scruffy-looking uncles. Granny was the most arresting person I had ever met: I had no category for her, for she was nothing like any grandmother I had ever met, especially my own. She was obviously ancient—perhaps even fifty—gray, homespun, thin as a rail, missing a lot of teeth, and in the afternoons she sat on the porch smoking her pipe and singing hymns about Beulah Land.
Never had I encountered so paradoxical a creature, and although Lizzie was comfortable with her, she sure frightened me, even though she oddly seemed to be a friendly old lady. How could anyone who smoked (for this I had been trained to recognize as a dreadful sin) be unaffectedly nice, let alone good? I could not decide, so I didn't bother to. She was part of the Great World of which God was in charge and I knew myself to be ignorant. In the encounter with Lizzie and her family, I was having, as I later learned, an experience in "cross-cultural communication"—although at the time it only seemed to be getting to know Lizzie.
A Useless Academic Novelty
Fast forward more than twenty years to the same boy, now sitting in the most stultifying class he ever had to take in seminary, listening to a distinguished missiologist lecture enthusiastically on cross-cultural communication, the boy wondering who on earth could be dense or sequestered enough not to regard almost every point he and his textbook were making as obvious, and wondering more particularly why anyone who planned a vocation in missions could possibly be so stupid as to need professional instruction on something so rudimentary to living in the world.
For what could all this stuff be except "getting to know Lizzie"? And why did it need to be abstracted into a science for the advantage of missionaries, as if speaking of it in general terms could add anything to the actual doing of the thing as one had been, or should have been, doing it in daily life—especially among students who had been alive and in the world, were readers of a Bible that spoke to them with the highest authority from cultures so clearly different from their own, and with which they had likely been engaged from their earliest years?
Is not "the Lord is my Shepherd" to the modern city-dweller a cross-cultural experience—a cross-cultural experience as close and unavoidable as one's foreign neighbor from the Tennessee mountains or darkest Manhattan? Is it not what we need to meet any other person, since each human being and the personal culture that he is, is to every other person a vast terra incognita—a "thou"—who is nevertheless like him? (I'm reminded of what Hingest said in That Hideous Strength: "I happen to believe that you can't study people, you can only get to know them.") What is added to the essence of this "getting to know" if the neighbor in all his singularity lives on the other side of the world instead of up the street? Surely nothing different in kind.
Since the days when my opinions about these things began to grow more defined, it has seemed to me that getting to know Lizzie, and whatever serves this meeting, is what evangelizing Christians should aspire to do, while they may safely ignore the useless academic novelty of cross-cultural communication—for these seem to be two very different things. The theoretical science is not worth its candle next to practical engagement in the thing itself, for which God made us with natural tools infinitely superior to the abstract, analytical, and artificial. What, after all, is the best way to learn a language—by memorizing conjugations and declensions and studying grammatical patterns, or by living among those who speak it?
The Only Kind of Christianity
What has prompted me to record these thoughts is a semi-autobiographical book on this subject, which I shall not identify, that came across my desk for review some years ago, but which, in deference to its author, I did not. In it he records a sectarian Protestant upbringing very much like my own, his gradual awakening to "world Christianity," the importance of cross-cultural communication, and the depth and richness of the experience of the faith as it "floats on a different blood" [Lewis]. I was surprised by how strongly negative my reaction was, surprised by how unobservant the writer (a scholar of the first order) had been so as to need awakening, and surprised by what seemed to me an unhelpfully romantic assessment of "world Christianity"—the contributions to be made to our understanding of the gospel by and through evangelized cultures other than our own.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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