{"id":291700,"date":"2009-10-19T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-19T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/for-an-encounter-of-cultures\/"},"modified":"2024-05-13T20:39:56","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T18:39:56","slug":"for-an-encounter-of-cultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/for-an-encounter-of-cultures\/","title":{"rendered":"For an \u201cencounter of cultures\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>After her second trip to Fontem (Cameroon) in 1969, Chiara Lubich met  with the young focolarini of the international school of formation in Loppiano,  on May 15, 1970. On that occasion, she answered a question on the difficulties  that the young people encountered in living together, since they came from  different environments, cultures and mentalities, and even different continents,  in particular the youth of Asia, Africa and America, as compared to the European  focolarini.<\/em>  <strong>We who come from Western countries are absolutely behind the  times <\/strong>and no longer adept at living in today\u2019s world unless we  put aside our Western mentality, because it is only a half, a third, a fourth  of the mentality of the rest of the world. In Africa, for example, there is  such a unique, such a splendid, such a profound culture!  <strong>We need to reach an encounter of cultures. <\/strong>We are not  complete if we are not \u201chumanity.\u201d We are \u201chumanity\u201d if \u201cwe have within us\u201d  all cultures. <em>How? Chiara Lubich spoke about  inculturation a number of years later, in 1992, on the occasion of another one  of her trips to the African continent, in Nairobi:<\/em>  <strong>First of all, the powerful \u201cweapon\u201d is to \u201cmake yourselves  one.\u201d <\/strong>Do you know what it means to \u201cmake yourselves one\u201d? It  means to approach the other person completely empty of ourselves, so as to  enter into the other person\u2019s culture and to understand him\/her, to allow  him\/her to express him\/herself, to the point of taking him or her within  yourself and when you have taken him or her within yourself, then you will be  able to begin to dialogue\u2026. <em>In this passage Chiara looks more closely at  inculturating the Gospel in other cultures:<\/em>  <strong>Then yes, you will be able to begin a dialogue with the other person  and also pass on the Gospel message<\/strong> through the riches that he or she  already possesses. Making ourselves one, which requires inculturation, means  entering into the soul, entering into the culture, entering into the  mentality, the tradition, the customs of other peoples in order to understand  them and to draw out the seeds of the Word.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thoughts by Chiara Lubich after her trips to Africa in 1969 and 1992<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}