Yesterday, after I dropped Becky at her Animation Gets Real camp, I attended parent Q&A led by Sandie, Danni Bowman’s aunt. No doubt, hers is a success story: she said when she adopted 11-year-old Danni, she was moderately autistic, not even high-functioning. When I watched the documentary about Danni, I could not even believe she has ASD–she sounded very normal.
This is an inspiration, the hope I was so desperate to find for so long. Of course, this is more of a personal blog entry, but it adds to my reflexivity and therefore, this is a good space for it.
Because of my encounter, I am becoming really aware of differences between my native ontology constructed by my culture, family, and other elements of my environment and ontology I am awakening to now. In Russia, and especially growing up with my dad, I learned to believe that everything is predetermined. The quantitative approach to the exploration of this world is perfect because everything here can be measured. There are clearly defined hypotheses that can be and must be empirically tested: “we Soviets sent a man into space, and guess what? There is no God anywhere in the sky!” Then, oddly enough, in my senior year of high school, I picked up a copy of the New Testament and joined a Bible study group led by Korean American missionaries from LA (won’t even bother explaining that one :). I could not get enough of the Bible. I read it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; I covered it with my textbooks in college, pretending to study because I was running out of words to explain why I am so glued to the New Testament. The day I received my first “Full Bible”–Old and New Testament together–was a day to remember. I felt like I came to possess an unbelievable treasure. I breathed my newly found faith, I was as born again–I KNEW I was born again by faith and because I felt it in my veins–all was new, the world was new, and I was new as well!
Looking back, I realize that the ontology of my born-again existence completely resonated with my original Soviet-forged understanding of reality: in the Bible, too, there is a beginning and the end; plenty of Gulags, the need to stay together. There is also the MENE TEKEL PERES (Dan 5:27), the judgment day, and the FATALISM that very much defined the mysterious “Russian soul” (think Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, and many other literary monuments to my culture). It was my husband (a Puerto Rican) who pointed out the latter when I was well into my twenties.
Even my understanding of hope was colored by a striking lack of choice: “believe, and you will live;” “put your trust in God, and no one can be against you.” I wrestled with how God’s will is kind of predictable based on Rom 8:28, but ultimately unknowable. And if He had the final say in everything anyway, then it really does not matter what I do for a living as long as it pleases Him? In the USSR, we HAD to be useful to the society. Our choices too were available between certain parameters.