Daily Reading for July 21
Westerners may find Ubuntu—an African concept of personhood—a strange word with perhaps an even stranger meaning. Emphasizing the communal and spiritual dimension of human identity, the concept of Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BOON-too) of necessity poses a challenge to persons accustomed to thinking of themselves as individuals. Imagine a fish trying to understand what it means to be wet, when all it has ever known is life in the water. Or imagine the desperation of an earthling landing on Mars without an oxygen tank. Becoming conscious of what we take for granted can be a strange, difficult—even painful—experience. Yet the winds of change that greet us as we begin the twenty-first century guarantee that Westerners will encounter non-Western assumptions about what it means to be human. The interconnection of identity on the personal, communal, and global levels is inescapable.
Ubuntu is an African concept of personhood in which the identity of the self is understood to be formed interdependently through community. Perhaps Desmond Tutu, the celebrated archbishop from South Africa, put it best when he said:
“A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”. . .
Ubuntu teaches us that salvation depends on interdependence and not conquest of the other. Christians around the world believe in a God who models Ubuntu. God’s three persons display a communal love within God which causes God to spill on us—to cast us in the image of God’s communal nature. This spillover looks like God reconciling a wayward creation to itself and its Creator.
From Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me by Michael Battle. Copyright © 2009. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org