Repair Versus Erasure
The Emmaus Encounter 2024 travel seminar began with a visit to a fishpond and ended with a trip to a garden. In both settings, students learned from young Hawaiian activists retrieving and revitalizing ancient practices of caring for the land. We also got our hands dirty, volunteering time and labor so as to both give and receive from the earth and our hosts.
In addition to cultivating native plants, pulling out invasive non-native species that threaten them, and teaching the community the difference between the two, our new partners at Kokua Kalihi Valley build and restore canoes. After listening and weeding, and before getting cleaned up, our educator showed us something our conversation had sparked in his mind. Before sharing where he took us, let me back up.
K is one of the young organizers and educators I mentioned. He’s in his early 30s and has a toddler at home. He’s immensely knowledgeable about the land on which we were working, having grown up in a home adjacent to the property. He also happened to have graduated from the Punahou School, founded by Andover graduate and early missionary Hiram Bingham in 1841. Of course, we didn’t know that connection between us and K until we were wrist-deep in the dirt.
When he asked why we’d come as a group of seminary students and educators to Hawaii, and I told him about the Bingham connection, he realized where he’d heard our school’s name before. When I shared that our group was here to learn, fully aware that our missionaries and their descendants’ impact on Oahu was complicated and shot through with pain and loss, K seemed to totally and completely get why we would come to the island generally, and to Kokua Kalihi Valley specifically. I shared that we’re not sure what to do with the legacy of missionaries, but our faith calls us not to do it alone, but rather through mutual relationship with the people whose lives were most affected by the good, bad, and ugly of Christian missions in Hawaii.
K took us to see the canoe pictured above. It seats six or eight people and can store two weeks’ worth of provisions. It’s also been repaired. The six-sided shape whose wood is a different color from the canoe’s hull is called a pewa. These butterfly-shaped bindings repair cracks. Boats with many pewas are sought-after as unusually strong, but one cannot help but notice the repairs. In other words, pewas bind, protect, and hold together, but they don’t erase. Neither did our visit, and yet we have to start somewhere for reconciliation’s sake.
A week of visits to churches, schools, sites of military chaplaincy and history, and nature preserves was a journey of discovering God in everything. I didn’t feel any closer or further from God from the pulpit of Kawaiaha’o Church than I did with muddy, brackish water up to my knees in a fishpond. The week also demonstrated to me the limits of scholarly work in capturing this God-in-everythingness. A Hawaiian cosmology doesn’t make room for the possibility that God is here, but not there; above, but not below; in me, but not in you. This God-in-everything theological framework made conversion to and practice of Christianity easy to embrace. The concept of incarnation was met with, “Well, yeah.”
Reason dissects and separates, so it’s not a great help in imagining how all might come together. Reason might have us say, “It wasn’t our current students who created missionary outposts that paved the way for empire in Hawaii,” but such distinctions are meaningless to those who associate missions with the beginning of the end of Hawaiian independence. Reason would say, “Let’s start a new program between ANS at YDS and Hawaii tomorrow,” when a holistic worldview would show us that any new initiative not created out of relationship, in partnership, would reify the harmful practices that got us here, to a place of reintroduction after long estrangement, in the first place.
We don’t erase the past; we repair. Repairing isn’t passive, nor is it self-flagellating. It’s neither fast nor simple. It’s possible a relationship between the institutional descendant of the early 19th century’s American Board for Foreign Missions — a.k.a. us — could build a meaningful relationship with those who seek to set things right in nature, in the church, and in the minds of young learners in Hawaii. But whether we succeed or fail, there will always be a peva: a scar.
