Beyond the Mask

We’ve come to the end of week number two of the Seminar in Creating Understanding here in the Magdelena section of Lima. At this point in the Seminar, we’ve worked long and hard to develop new skills in observing. Teachers and students alike have visited centers of various cultures around Lima. We’ve gone to the city’s main plazas, museums, cathedrals, and even the building where the Peruvian Congress meets. We’ve looked, listened, and noted. We’ve paid attention to foods, to uses of space, to clothing, to buildings and cars. We’ve listened to music and watched people’s gestures and faces.

After these trips, the students (and the teachers!) write up their observations. We set apart time to share with one another, so that what one person saw can help his or her colleagues. Around the tables and in late night talks, we talk over what we have seen. Most of the students are not from Lima (though they have lived here), but even those who grew up in the city tell us that they are seeing their city and their culture through a whole new lens. In a debrief session yesterday, one student said that what we have done so far would not only help someone to be a better missionary, but a better teacher or pastor or medical worker.

In the visits we made this week, some of us came across a museum that wasn’t part of our plan. We had an extra 45 minutes, and so we took the opportunity to go into the “Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions.” What a delightful display of the multitude of Peruvian art forms! In the museum I saw a poster promoting an exhibition on Peruvian masks. The title says, “Seeing the invisible.” This poster might become a new favorite way for me to explain what the Seminar in Creating Understanding is all about. Let me explain. . .

Why all of the focus on observing, interviewing, recording? It is because every culture has its favorite masks. The museum display was of physical masks, but there are those cultural “personas” that serve as masks too. I personally like the mask of a John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart – calm, in control, the one who knows what to do. (If you prefer, substitute Denzel Washington or George Clooney or Tom Cruise! The mask is the same). Even if I don’t use a piece of wood or plastic to put on that mask, I use the mask none-the-less.

We use masks – whether real or metaphor, to hide what we don’t want outsiders to see, and to display what we want to be visible. To those inside a group of people, there is understanding of what each mask means. Ahh, but trying to learn those meanings as a foreigner is quite another story.

Everyone knows that behind the mask is the real man or the real woman. How do we get beyond the mask to know that person? How do we see the invisible? As messengers sent from outside a group to deliver the King’s message, how do we understand what is hidden and what is revealed by the mask? By learning. By asking. By watching and listening, eating with the people, sharing in their realities, knowing their stories, their preferences, their fears. Knowing how they choose their clothes and cars (or bikes, or which bus to take. . . . . ). Knowing what one kind of smile means, and what another type of smile means. The way past the mask is to participate and observe – to share the life of the people we have been sent to, and to watch, listen, taste, smell, and touch the world they live in. As we observe, we slowly gain the privilege of seeing beyond the mask.

Jesus sent us to proclaim – to make His Word understandable to the nations. He sent us to disciple – to teach others to obey all that He commanded. Sometimes people ask if all of this observing and “getting to the core of the culture” is necessary – after all, can’t we just preach the Word? But when we think that way, we end up preaching to the masks, and only seeing superficial response. Making disciples calls us to understand the people, so we can disciple them to obey Jesus’ commands in their place, among their people, in their way of living. To make disciples, we have to get past the mask. We have to see the invisible. And that is why that poster I saw in the Museum captures the reason for the Seminar in Creating Understanding.