Rediscovering friendship [part 2]

Cultural difference is not really about different foods and clothing and surface cultural products (though it might manifest there). Cultural difference is about us not understanding each other.

Culture is what is normal to us. It is the air we breathe. It is the way we think and see the world. It is what is natural. We can’t imagine how anyone could think or see or do things differently; and when we do encounter that difference it is with shock, surprise and disbelief.

An example: A Ugandan is staying with a Norwegian family. The Norwegian mother is preparing the supper and asks the Ugandan guest, “How many potatoes will you have?” To one of them it is an innocent question. To the other it is deeply offensive. Why the difference? Our language and social reflexes are rooted in underlying systems of value that are usually unconscious and so deeply held they are close to being hard wired – one of us instinctively values efficiency and fears waste; another values lavish generosity and fears not having a surplus available for the loved, the unexpected, and the hungry.

To give another example: I remember the moment when I first realised that asking questions is not a universal way of getting to know people and showing interest in them – that it actually communicates the hostility of a police interrogation in many cultures. I was baffled. How do you get to know someone and express love for a stranger and develop a relationship? How do you carry on a conversation? How does that work? And on the other side of the cultural divide the strangeness and confusion and dissonance is just as strong – How could you think that asking someone who has just arrived how long they are here for communicates welcome? How could you not know that conversations develop by a gentle to and fro of voluntary sharing of stories and information and insights? At times like these we feel that we don’t really understand each other at all. It feels like a gulf has opened up. There is mutual incomprehension. Distance.

In Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, there is a passage which captures very well the reality of cultural distance – distance created partly through invaded/invader, colonised/coloniser, slave/free perspectives but also through fundamental cultural differences – and also the potential of friendship to bridge the divide. Marcus is the Roman and Esca is the Briton.

Marcus leaned back, his hands behind his neck, ... 'Esca, why do all the frontier tribes resent our coming so bitterly?' he asked on a sudden impulse. 'The tribes of the south have taken to our ways easily enough.'

'We have ways of our own,' said Esca. He squatted on one heel beside the bench. 'The tribes of the south had lost their birthright before ever the Eagles came in war. They sold it for the things that Rome could give. They were fat with Roman merchandise and their souls had grown lazy within them.'

'But these things that Rome had to give, are they not good things?' Marcus demanded. 'Justice, and order, and good roads; worth having, surely?'

'These be all good things,' Esca agreed. 'But the price is too high.'

'The price? Freedom?'

'Yes - and other things than freedom.'

'What other things? Tell me, Esca; I want to know. I want to understand.'

Esca thought for a while, staring straight before him. 'Look at the pattern embossed here on your dagger-sheath,' he said at last. 'See, here is a tight curve, and here is another facing the other way to balance it, and here between them is a little round stiff flower; and then it is all repeated here, and here, and here again. It is beautiful, yes, but to me it is as meaningless as an unlit lamp.'

Marcus nodded as the other glanced up at him. 'Go on.'

Esca took up the shield which had been laid aside… 'Look now at this shield-boss. See the bulging curves that flow from each other as water flows from water and wind from wind, as the stars turn in the heavens and blown sand drifts into dunes. These are the curves of life; and the man who traced them had in him knowledge of things that your people have lost the key to - if they ever had it.' He looked up at Marcus again very earnestly. 'You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of the man who worked the sheath of this dagger.' 

'The sheath was made by a British craftsman,' Marcus said stubbornly. 'I bought it at Anderida when I first landed.' 

'By a British craftsman, yes, making a Roman pattern. One who had lived so long under the wings of Rome - he and his fathers before him - that he had forgotten the ways and the spirit of his own people.' He laid the shield down again. 'You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are of the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own.' 

For a while they were silent... Then Marcus said, 'When I came out from home, a year and a half ago, it all seemed so simple.' His gaze dropped again to the buckler on the bench beside him, seeing the strange, swelling curves of the boss with new eyes. Esca had chosen his symbol well, he thought: between the formal pattern on his dagger-sheath and the formless yet potent beauty of the shield-boss lay all the distance that could lie between two worlds. And yet between individual people, people like Esca and Marcus… the distance narrowed so that you could reach across it, one to another, so that it ceased to matter.

Cultures cannot really meet. But individuals can.

The friendship between Esca and Marcus is one of rock solid loyalty – the sort of relationship we discussed in the last post – bound together, willing to lay down their lives for one another. In fact the loyalty of Esca (the freed slave) to Marcus is so strong that some recent critics have suggested that Sutcliff’s presentation of it is unrealistic, patronising and colonial. But I suspect this underestimates a) the experience of redemption (Marcus saves Esca from death and frees him from slavery); b) the times of war and battle and the effect of a military/warrior background for both men; c) the shared cultural values of shame and honour; and d) the seriousness of ancient friendship.

Other critics suggest there is a homosexual subtext to the novel. But again this underestimates the strength of ancient friendship and reads everything through Freudian over-sexualised eyes. As Kathy Keller is quoted as saying: “We are the first culture in history to put sexual intimacy above the value of friendship. THE sustaining love you need to get through the inevitable suffering of life is friendship.”

It’s interesting to note a number of things that build the friendship between Marcus and Esca.

1. Shared stories – Marcus waits before asking about Esca’s past. “Some inner reserve, warned him that to ask would be an intrusion, a walking in without leave. One day Esca would tell him freely, but not yet.” But after some time together, “Marcus realized that he could ask Esca, now, about the time before [he was captured and enslaved].” Esca tells his stories. Marcus tells his stories. They discover intersections and they understand each other better.
2. Shared freedom – Marcus buys Esca as a slave to save him from death then grants him manumission. Marcus gives Esca the option to walk away, seeks to treat Esca as an equal and at several points has to remind him of his freedom: “You are not a slave now.”
3. Shared experience of mission – This is the one that occupies most of the book. Marcus and Esca spend months of journey and hardship together. They live and eat and plan and fight as a unit. The loyalty of the men to one another is tested in the furnace of many dangers. They depend on one another. And most significantly they are on a common quest – they are on a mission together to recover the eagle of the lost ninth legion.  
4. Shared wounds – At a key moment near the end of the book the difference between Marcus, A born-free Roman centurion and Esca a freeman-but-once-slave threatens to drive a wedge between Marcus and Esca. Esca is unwilling to enter the inner place of the house with Marcus and two other senior Romans. “On a sudden impulse Marcus reached out his free hand and caught his friend’s shoulder, not at all gently. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Are you going to live all the rest of your life as though you had taken a whipping and could not forget it? Because if you are, I am sorry for you. You don’t like being a freed-man, do you? Well, I don’t like being lame. That makes two of us, and the only thing we can do about it, you and I, is to learn to carry the scars lightly.’ He gave the shoulder a friendly shake, and dropped his hand. ‘Come up with me now, Esca.’ Esca did not answer for a moment. And then slowly his head went up, and his eyes wore the dancing look they always wore in action. ‘I will come,’ he said.” Marcus carried the scars which had ended his military career. Esca carried the scars of slavery. But at this moment, their scars, rather than chips on their shoulders, worked to level and connect them.
5. Shared citizenship – Finally, at the end of the novel Esca is granted Roman citizenship. They will settle down to farm the land together in Britain. One Roman by birth in an adopted country, the other a Briton by birth with an adoptive Roman citizenship.

Are those things not very suggestive of how cross-cultural gospel ministry friendships might develop: shared stories, shared freedom (freedom in the gospel and equalised power relations in practice), shared mission, shared wounds (vulnerability, honesty, brokenness), shared citizenship (most importantly in heaven and where possible on earth).