Today, I went to church with the girls at the parish. This is the very same parish where the genocide memorial is held. We followed that dusty dirt road past the church and the mass graves. It curved to the left, and we passed the incomplete construction of the new church. It has been that way for years, Laura, says; the parishioners cannot fund the completion of the project. The services are now held is a building that used to be a school. Like most schools here, it is one long brick building, just a row of classrooms with doors to the outside. The walls between the classrooms had been knocked out, so the interior is a long rectangular space.
It hit me at some point that I felt very disturbed to be worshipping God as if nothing had happened in that place. I am not certain of the story in Nyamata, but I know that in many places during the genocide, when people flocked to the churches for asylum, not only were they not protected, but the clergy sold them out, welcomed the killers, and in some cases even encouraged brutality. How can the people forgive the church? Why do we trust priests? Why would anyone want to commit to a religious life within an organization in which such atrocity occurs? If there was so much wrong in the world that this could happen, and the Church (leaders and members) was just as vulnerable to it, then what makes anyone think it can do better in a more peaceful time? I understand that religion can be a way of making the spirutal tangible; at the same time, maybe it just as often takes the place of a meaningful personal connection with God, morality, or human love.
This makes me think back to a conversation I had with Lydia last week. In Rwanda, there is no shared family name; both names are chosen for the individual. It bothered me a little, when it occurred to me, that most Rwandans use their Christian names primarily and their Rwandan names less commonly. When they use French and English Christian names, aren’t they downplaying the importance of their own culture and embracing that of a people assocaited with so much turmoil in their country?
I later realized that I have no right to assume that using Christian names means rejecting Rwandan-ness. Who am I to say how Rwandans should wear their own culture? Perhaps a Rwandan name is kept more sacred and intimate by using it less often. Similarly, who am I to say that Christianity belongs to the imperialists and does not authentically belong to the Rwandans? In fact, it is probably more authentic to them than it is to me, (as would be obvious to anyone who has heard me facetiously label myself an “agnostic Catholic.”)
Lydia (a teacher here) explained to me that Rwandans very much separate Christianity from colonialism; the use of Christian names is a mark of their Christianity, but to them it is neither a lasting trace of their colonizers nor a rejection of their own culture. I don’t know how or why they were able to make this separation; Christianity came at the same time as missionaries and colonialism and taught people that many aspects of their own beliefs and culture were flawed. But Rwandans are extremely faithful, and of course in order to be genuinely faithful, they must have made a distinction between the religion and the white people who brought it. Likewise, they have separated the terrible actions of people in the Church from the faith itself.
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