Sister Simona Brambilla: Macua-Xirima culture
We repost an article by Sister Simona Brambilla published in Missioni Consolata in 2009, before the publication of her doctoral thesis
Macua Heart
A Macua proverb says, “Although the path is winding, if the heart desires it, it will reach the goal.”
This is an effective summary of a research we have just concluded in Maúa, an anthropological and psychological study of the process of inculturated evangelization among the Macua-xirima.
The heart is the main protagonist of the study in the sense that it is its object and subject.
It is the object of it because the study addresses primarily the affective, pathos component of the person and the people, seeking to understand how this component is involved in the process of evangelization.
It is also the subject of it because the journey we have embarked on with the xirima people does not consist of mere academic speculation, but rather of a life experience that involves not only thinking and doing, but also and fundamentally sensing and feeling.
Traditional cures
Macua-xirima therapeutic processes constitute special occasions for re-immersion in initiatory themes, therefore for deepening and consolidating basic educational instances.
The construction of the therapeutic ritual edifice still takes place around the namulic principle (the myth of origins, see article, ed.), sung, danced, said, visualized, dramatized.
The myth is thus not only told but above all relived in the ritual. Lowered and embodied in the current situation of the sick person and his or her surroundings, it becomes an interpretive key, injecting hope.
The sick person feels that he or she is a participant in a larger story, in a network of mutually influential relationships, which support and illuminate the individual and communal journey by rescuing him or her from anonymity and at the same time inserting him or her into a common epic that transcends time, place and particular conditions without devaluing the contingent elements, indeed, giving them sacred significance.
A characteristic of traditional xyrima care is to take into account at all times the multiplicity and unity that characterize human existence: therapy is not about a diseased organ but about the whole person in his anthropological components, in his thinking, feeling and acting, in his more conscious and less conscious aspects, in his relations with the visible and invisible world.
It concerns the group to which it belongs, because an individual’s illness is not resolved in a private matter, but has causal links with the community. In this sense, xyrim therapy is personal and at the same time social and cosmic; it is medical and at the same time psychological and religious; it is healing and at the same time education and prayer.
The heart
For the xirima, the heart (murima) does not simply indicate an organ. The murima is considered the center of personality, the seat of desires, affections, and decisions.
The xirima tradition abounds with texts about murima considered in this broader sense of individual consciousness. The many proverbs enlighten us about the importance of murima in Macua-xirima anthropology.
The xirima is aware that the heart deserves much attention in educational processes: educating oneself to think and act is not enough, because “thought does not overcome the heart,” and it is the heart that “commands,” that “accomplishes good,” that “contains many things,” that gives the person the tenacity to get where he or she desires, to love, or to change direction according to the winds, to retreat full of shame, to petrify oneself in an avarice that resembles death.
Educating oneself, then, means knowing how to “trick” one’s heart, directing it, never turning off desires. It means making it flexible, pliable and able to adapt, like that of God who knows how to “change color” in the guise of the chameleon.
The heart cannot be bought, it has no price; the good heart is poetically compared to an inner moon, with all the symbolic, feminine and matea charge that the moon holds in the xirima world.
Rightly, then, xirima wisdom encourages us to look not so much at the face (beautiful or not) of the other, but at his heart, at that inner dimension that makes him fully a person: in truth, the person is his heart.
The shadow
The person consists of three components: body (erutthu), shadow (eruku) and spirit (munepa). The body is together with the shadow, while the person is alive. When the person dies, his shadow is with his spirit.
The shadow component is revealed as that element of union between body and spirit, that intermediate, fluid, highly mobile dimension of the person, capable of harmonizing the other two components, integrating them and directing the energies of the being to the mission entrusted to it. In this sense, eruku represents the strongest but also most vulnerable part of the person.
A positive and vital eruku results in a person who does and promotes good in and around himself. A weakened eruku is at the root of many personal problems, including depressive states, and many interpersonal difficulties. In fact, the activity of the traditional macua healer is predominantly aimed at fortifying and revitalizing the eruku, just as the activity of the sorcerer is aimed at mortifying, weakening when not actually taking away this vital element.
The eruku xirima easily enters into dialogue with what from other parts of the world would be called pathos, emotional sphere, subconscious. The doors of macua wisdom really seem to be open to dialogue with other wisdom.
Macua experience is particularly receptive to the question of holistic education of the person and education that has due regard to the feeling component. It opens up avenues for interdisciplinary dialogue on evangelization.
Attention to the “things of the heart” is at least as important as attention to the “things of the spirit” or those of the mind and body. And this applies to the individual as well as to the culture.