This awareness flows straight from the life of Jesus, in which he constantly lived from his own “divine recognition” of the ordinary and common experiences within his everyday cultural life. Examples of the very common (but special) cultural customs of Jesus’s life include: being publicly named in his community (Luke 2:21); gathering in the synagogue for spiritual teaching (Mark 6:2); and observing religious festivals such as the Passover (Matt. 26:17). In other words, what makes Jesus’s life so attractive to us are the many beautiful ways he celebrated his culture even though his community was oppressed by the Roman Empire. His example invites us to embrace the particular cultural realities that make up our own lives, and can even help us transform stories that have been excluded or oppressed due to “Christian” colonialism from places of pain to places of celebration.

Although Jesus came from a poor and rural community, his spirituality was evident in extravagantly embodied living, befriending the marginalized in society, and unifying the diverse aspects of his mind, heart, body, spirit, and culture.

Celebrating Harmonious Diversity

True unity (which Christ prayed for humanity in John 17:21) is not uniformity but speaks to the love and space we make in our hearts for difference. Jesus’s example provides a model of how to live in harmony with diversity. True unity (which Christ prayed for in John 17:21) is not uniformity, but speaks to the love and space we make in our hearts for difference. It is the diversity present in life that makes life more beautiful (Rev. 7:9). This path of unity amidst diversity culminates in the life of Jesus’s followers on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon all the early disciples and gifted them with the ability to speak and embrace new languages and cultures. “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability” (Acts 2:1-4).

I am amazed by how the culmination of the disciples’ waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit was made manifest through diverse language and culture! In other words, if we are full of the Spirit, we are readily embracing diversity within ourselves and in the world. As a Pentecostal Christian, I am excited by this invitation to go to the places within myself and society that are rejected (Ps. 118:22) and learn to listen and speak the languages there. And further, if I am to take Jesus’s call to “follow me” seriously (Matt. 4:19), I must learn to embrace the fullness of my own human experience, including (and especially) the diversity of it.

I believe this process is the beginning of the healing the world needs, and it starts so personally. For me, this means accepting and engaging the psycho-spiritual work of embracing the dynamic range of emotions that come up in my experience (e.g., art and music that celebrate multiraciality), dealing with the shadow thoughts of my own mind and ego (confronted by intentionally pursuing relationships with people who suffer different marginalizing experiences from mine), and also reflecting redemptively about my culture, religious heritage, and racial-ethnic identity through writing, speaking, and creative storytelling. Doing this well requires first clearly understanding the ways in which systems and structures of oppression have not encouraged us to embrace our own diversity and to resist this.

When this happens, I can move toward deeper learning in how to integrate the aspects of my life (such as being multiracial) that I am tempted to disregard or allow to be silenced. Finding a therapist of color or joining an online community discussing multiraciality can be great first steps. I am also called to show up in authentic solidarity with others who are working toward the reclamation of all parts of human experience that are targets of violence and oppression.

Embracing Our Full Selves

I am not half-Chinese and half-Chicano. I am fully Chinese, fully Chicano, and fully multiracial. I refuse to be categorized and labeled to fit the structures of a government or society that refuses to recognize the wholeness of me. No, I am not half-Chinese and half-Chicano. I am fully Chinese, fully Chicano, and fully multiracial. I refuse to be categorized and labeled to fit the structures of a government or society that refuses to recognize the wholeness of me. Furthermore, I commit to advocating for the inclusion of my personal racialized experiences to help make known how White supremacy insidiously impacts all people and prevents us from embracing the racial-ethnic diversities we carry in our bodies.

However, I also commit to pursuing my personal process of racial identification within communities of accountability. How a person identifies racially is a personal process, but this should never be individualistic or done in isolation. This is for the sake of authentic living for all. This is especially important when it comes to addressing the rampant anti-Blackness that many people of color (who are not Black) benefit from if they are not carefully working toward pro-Black racial justice.

I never want to forget that I am more than my racial identification–and so are you. The spiritual path is not just about embracing one aspect of ourselves but unifying the whole of our personal experience with truth, compassion, grace, and love, and embracing the many tongues within.

Pastor Smith quotes author Zenos E. Hawkinson’s thoughts about the way that God brings growth out of hardship:

In my bones I feel that we are being uprooted now in a variety of ways, personally and communally . . . our forebears . . . found strange places and moments of unutterable anguish and loneliness [until] suddenly a voice says, “You are not alone. I have purposes. I have things to be done.” . . . Our own tradition in the Covenant Church gives us reason to have confidence that people can be thrown bodily out of their accustomed culture and create new things as a consequence.² I’m learning not to apologize for my very existence and my category-defying presence, which makes everything complicated for “normal” people. I’ve begun to rejoice in being the person God designed me to be.
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When I first read Check All That Apply,³ I was blown away. Hearing for the first time that I could image Jesus in all my complexity was a beautiful, humbling, overwhelming, life-changing thing. It was truly transformative. Reading that book, finding a multiethnic church, having mixed friends and biologically mixed children, and other things, have enabled me to be on the journey of better learning to love my multiethnicity, to see it as a gift to myself and the world. I’m learning not to apologize for my very existence and my category-defying presence, which makes everything complicated for “normal” people. I’ve begun to rejoice in being the person God designed me to be.

I’ve experienced moments when I understand what it means to be whole, what it means to have an integrated cultural identity that neither discounts some aspects nor smashes them all together into the other category at the expense of the uniqueness of each culture. Being entrusted with the stories of other mixed people and then endeavoring to share them with others has also been instrumental in my spiritual growth and walk with Christ as a mixed woman. Hearing others’ stories can do the seemingly contradictory work of helping us to see how others are both very much like us and also wonderfully different. We multiethnic folks can appreciate seeming contradictions in a very special way, and we can share that joy with the people that God places in our lives.  

‍Adapted from Chapter 8, “Mixed Identity in the Church and Society,” Mixed Blessing by Chandra Crane. Copyright (c) 2020 by Chandra Crane. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

<sub>1. “First parents” is a term used of biological parents to emphasize their dignity and importance in the lives of their children. I use the term “parents of color” to honor monoethnic, majority-culture parents who experience the unique intersectionality of raising children of color (through adoption, interracial marriage, or other means).
2. Z. E. Hawkinson, Anatomy of the Pilgrim Experience: Reflections on Being a Covenanter (Chicago: Covenant Publications, 2000), 14-15, as quoted by Smith in The Post-Black, electronic version, 125-6.
3. Sundee Tucker Frazier, Check All That Apply: Finding Wholeness as a Multiracial Person (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002) was the book that really started me on my multiethnic journey.</sub>