It has been more than a century since we embraced Christianity over our own indigenous religion, and it is time to introspect. To begin with, I want to ask a simple question. The question is: What do we gain by being a Christian? Or, what did the Zomi gain by becoming Christian?
I know this is a vague question which can be answered in many ways. My sentimentalist father answered me with just one word ‘Heaven!’ while my soon-to-be-Pastor (we hoped!) brother choose to say ‘freedom’, my always brusque friend says ‘civilization’. I ponder over their responses, they are all correct even though vague but then the question itself is vague. So I put the question the other way round, the answers remain the same. I suppose your answer will be in the same vein.
Don’t imply that I am against Christianity and blaming it for whatever we have become now. Neither can I blame our forefather for willingly embracing such a chance to gain ‘the land of milk and honey (if you ask me, I don’t like milk or honey)’, ‘freedom from oppression (whatever that means)’, and/or the chance to gain a brand new ‘modern & civilized civilization’!
They must have embraced it as something new, something exciting; an opportunity like I fervently took to blogging even thought I hardly knew anything about HTML/CSS. And, of course, I don’t want to live in some obscure village perched up high in the mountain and spent my whole life uprooting some grasses to let my favoured type of grasses grow! And definitely I don’t want to wear those lion cloth and most probably I won’t be writing this piece, in English, if they had not accepted those changes. Thank you very much.
But what I want to ask is; can not we make some room to put in our tradition into our adopted religion? If we look at the Christian around the world, there are many places, in fact, most of the Christian around the world practices Christianity within the context of their own culture and tradition. And of course, the Christianity we practiced today may not be exactly the same as it was in the day of the Apostles.
And since the church is the biggest organisation (in fact, the only organisation) among us, the changes have to come from it. My father says that since we have been Christian for over a century now, it is part of our identity now. I cannot help agreeing with that. But, can not we carve a niche for us to build an identity within that framework.
But then for us, the Zomi, even religion is based on linguistic, and anything remotely lingual got everything to do with politics. And when it comes to politics, we are the worst and most selfish politicians in the whole wide world. We equate politics with personal gains, and no one gains from that sort of Politics.
The present position of our churches is such that ‘tell me the name of your church, and I’ll tell you the name of your tribe, the dialect you spoke, the social organization you belong to, and so many more’. Does this sound very unifying?.
On the other hand, one cannot overlook the church’s contribution towards our journey during the last century. We the Zomi had had an amazing transformation in the past century, which I dare say is one of the fastest transformation from a jungle centred tribals to urban crawlers. Maybe that’s the problem. The transformation was so sudden that we forget to learn and pick-up our values, culture, tradition and identity along the way.
What we gained are not the same as our losses. Our gains as well as losses are many. Each has their merits and demerits. All our losses and gains are not necessarily contributed by the entry of Christianity. Other influential forces that contributed to our rapid transformation are the World Wars and Television. But that’s a whole new debating point altogether.
No matter what, the church is still the foundation on which our society is built. However the hold of the church over our society is weakening in recent years, and that’s not an entirely bad news. It only means we are thinking outside the black and white world as painted by the church. It is also bad news again because the church ceases to be the socially unifying factor anymore as it was in the days of ABM (American Baptist Mission) in Chinstate.
It may be a little late now, but contextualizing and adopting Christianity centred on our ways of life may still help. We had forgotten that we are a unique tribe created by the same creator, and in our pursuit of the creator, we had shaken away the unique traits that the creator had given us. And the end result is, we are just another faceless society in this big world.
But no matter what the position of the church in our society, I must still insist that putting our churches under the same theological framework may help us build many more bridges among us. If the church is powerful enough to build such a big gulf among a family, it can also build bridges to reconcile that family. And if the church failed to do that, than it simply means it failed us.
Whatever we gained, were they worth our losses? It’s a century since Christianity came to our land, and it is high time we introspect. As of now, for me, heaven will not compensate our losses. But I must repeat this, all that I asked for is a face, a name that I can identified with…
