going native

Someone recently used the phrase "go native" to describe the plot of the movie Avatar.

"Going native" is a phrase most commonly used to describe the following situation: a white person goes to a "primitive" location to scout out the "natives" and, rather than dutifully report back or disabuse the locals of their barbaric ways, the scout joins them - he learns their language, he adopts their practices, he discovers wisdom in their ways, he comes to love and live with them as one of their own.

I cannot adequately articulate my long-standing contempt for this phrase. I've always found it judgmental and presumptuous. It invariably implies inferiority of the "native" culture, so much so that the outsider's decision to join the native culture is equated with loss of sanity and abandonment of sense. The phrase is never used to describe the process by which immigrants adapt to a dominant culture. For example, if a Chinese immigrant moves to California, learns to speak English, abides by laws and societal norms and calls herself American, nobody would describe this experience as "going native," even if she adopts questionable norms such as living beyond her means or being excessively promiscuous. Rather, this would be characterized - nay, lauded - as assimilation. "Going native" is reserved for adaptation to cultures deemed inferior, underdeveloped, contemptible. Use "going native" near me and I'm likely to go ape-$@%# on you.

Then I went to Urbana 09, where the central theme was the idea that God, through Jesus Christ, "dwelt among us." That though he was God, he joined the human race, lived as the first-born of an unwed mother, as a refugee from a family of little means. He went through infancy dependent on the care of others, experienced puberty and young adulthood. He learned to read and write, he submitted to his parents, he worked. He talked our talk and walked our walk. Even as a man, he did not pull rank. Instead, he broke bread with tax collectors and prostitutes, reached out to Samaritans, touched and engaged with lepers. All that he did he could have done from a distance, but he chose not to.

This incarnation -- the very highest into the very lowest -- boggles my mind. And I would happily relegate it to an impossible standard but for friends and others who have followed Jesus' footsteps into some of direst regions of human need in the world. Rather than live in gated compounds, they make their homes in the slums, learning from and embracing cultures and lifestyles dismissed or forgotten by others. They don't see inferiority or superiority, only children of God equally loved by Him no matter what circumstances might suggest.

Call that what you will - love, assimilation, even the phrase that gets under my skin. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.