Gwangphun Gangmei
Social Worker
With the coming of Christianity into our land, our people’s culture and customs have been greatly affected. Our age-old culture and customs have been greatly diminished in value and in figure in our society. Christianity in reality was not preached, practiced or lived by the people in toto, only professed. The good old culture of our olden people were lost or neutralised with the introduction of outside culture that appears better in others’ hand but bad in our own hands. For instance, respect for elders, belief in one supreme God, love and honour for nature practiced by our olden people were lost and now Christianity with all its wrong culture are considered accepted norms and the order of the day. Observing heathen originated festivals like Esther Sunday, Christmas, etc in the positive pretext of Christians’ reasons like celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus, the birth of Jesus etc are of pagan origins. The people, who at that time have turned or modified pagans’ culture into Christian culture or made to be taken as Christians’ practices. The truth is all human celebrations, festivals or observations haves its origins in the culture and customs of one’s society or people.
The need of our society today is to rethink of our culture in the light of the present truth and knowledge. We need to go more on reasoning out the truth and practice rather than accepting what high class, outside people, or great people who come and preach or telling us to follow what they preach. I meant, our culture is our way of life, Christianity is to live out the truth in action as the way of life or in the cultural life of the people. I think it is not wrong to celebrate the festivals of our olden culture like; Pukpha Ngai, or any other festivals, dances or performances provided we don’t go back to the past life of ignorance and trying to create the past primitive environment in the present which is impossible. We are to keep the distant between Christian practice and pagan customs. In other words, between the truth and the apparent or supposed truth. Our Christian society today is losing the truth in action and word and gaining luxury and pleasure to be truth and acceptable norms of the society. Christianity means living a life of self denial in the face of temptations and death. It is felt that we should renew our culture in the light of Christianity in its truest sense, just as Jesus had exemplified in His person in the Jewish cultural society.
