by Marie-Lucile Kubacki
Kuching – Archbishop of Kuching in East Malaysia, Archbishop Simon Peter Poh t Hoon Seng is one of the most listened to voices in the Asian Church on mission, inculturation and interreligious dialogue. Coming from a Buddhist Taoist background and becoming Catholic as a teenager thanks to a mission school, he spent more than twenty years in direct contact with the indigenous communities of Borneo, whose languages he speaks. As Chairman of the Office for Evangelization of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences , he now carries at continental level a vision of mission that protects local cultures, values “neighbor religions,” and promotes the “whispering of the Gospel” at the heart of everyday relationships.
Archbishop Simon Poh, your Archdiocese of Kuching is at the heart of “indigenous Malaysia.” What are the specific features of this ecclesial reality?
Malaysia has two specific regions faces. One part is on the mainland peninsula, which is highly developed and predominantly Muslim, where major cities like Kuala Lumpur. Penang and Johor Bahru are located. Across the South China Sea on the island of Borneo, Sabah and Sarawak are located. These are sparsely populated. In the state of Sarawak where I live, half of the population is indigenous and where the majority is Christian. In the Archdiocese of Kuching where I served, we have twelve parishes, seven of which are rural, and nearly 300 village stations with Catholic Chapels. Priests can only visit and celebrate Mass once a month, with the local prayer leaders taking the spiritual and pastoral leadership in respective villages. These are vibrant village Christian communities but with globalisation, face the challenge of rural exodus towards the big cities and towns, leaving the elderly folks in the villages.
You insist a great deal on inculturation. In concrete terms, how did the missionaries protect local cultures?
Contrary to certain clichés, the Mill Hill Missionaries from the UK that came to Sarawak did not destroy the local culture. From my pastoral experience as a young priest in the 1980s, I had the privilege to work alongside these last few elderly missionaries. I began to appreciate their missionary approaches. They learnt the languages, studied the farming culture and rituals. Prayer books for Sunday Worship and blessings were slowly composed in the local languages. By translating the Bible, the prayers and the liturgical texts into indigenous languages, in particular the three Bidayuh dialects, the Iban language and the many other indigenous languages, they gave these peoples the possibility of celebrating the faith in their own tongue. Language is the soul of a people: by placing it at the heart of the liturgy, they helped to preserve the identity of the communities. They also integrated elements of traditional life: prayers before clearing the field, before sowing, for rain, for the harvest, the blessing of tools and of the new seeds, prayers at the moment of building a house. Without using the word “inculturation,” they were already practising it. Thus, faith did not erase culture; it elevated it by highlighting hospitality, the sense of the sacred, and the centrality of the family. And the culture gave local expression to the Catholic Faith as part of the daily life.
You have been actively involved in oral and audio Bible projects. Tell us about this adventure…
These indigenous communities have a strong oral tradition with their many stories and traditions that have been handed down orally. Many elders from the 60s or 70s never really learned to read. And these are the grandparent-generations today who have became Catholics and have kept and passed on the Catholic faith down to their grandchildren. These elderly Catholics have faithfully come to the Sunday Prayer Services for decades, listening to the Gospel weekly. We realised that the Word of God when this remains only in printed form in a Bible, this does not really reach them. We thus started the Audio-Bible project, working with various Christian groups to record and make audio Bible especially the Gospels available.
Audio Bibles in Bidayuh dialects and in Iban now allows these elderly faithful to listen to Scripture proclaimed in their “heart- language” – in their mother-tongue spoken in the village, with the images, rhythms and intonations that are familiar to them. This perspective changes everything so that the Bible is no longer a distant text that they hear in church on Sunday. The Gospel becomes a voice speaking from within their own culture that they may exclaimed “Now I know my God. It is Jesus speaks to me in my heart language.” This is a project in which I and my priests have been personally involved, both in the translation and in the recordings. We worked from the existing biblical texts, but with the requirement of remaining faithful to the Word while respecting the narrative style proper to indigenous peoples. Then it was necessary to find credible voices, from within the communities themselves, to read these texts: voices people know and trust. When the elders hear the Word proclaimed by someone from their village, in their dialect, they feel deeply touched as they listen to the scriptures in their own Heart Language and know that Jesus lives among them.
How does all this happen?
Here we see a very fruitful convergence between exegesis, catechesis and pastoral accessibility. It is not a “second class” solution for those who cannot read; on the contrary, it is an extremely effective way of transmitting the richness of Scripture in contexts marked by orality, dechristianisation or illiteracy. Bible groups can gather around an audio device or a phone, listen to a passage, keep silence, then spontaneously share what they have understood. For many, hearing the Word in their heart language opens an understanding and a prayer compared to a scripture text in another language like English or our national language Malay. At the same time, these oral Bibles protect the language, and therefore help in the transmission and conservation of their culture. Each time the community gathers to pray with the audio Bible, it makes its own idiom alive; it shows the young that this language is worth speaking, that it can carry the Word of God. In a context where children and grandchildren easily switch to more “useful” languages – English, Malay, even Mandarin. This is a very strong message to the young people – that their respective indigenous language is not only useful for informal conversation but it is capable of expressing faith, theology and liturgical prayer. This strengthens the identity and dignity of indigenous peoples. Today we are grateful to the intuition of the early missionaries, who had already understood that for the Gospel to truly take root, it had to embrace the language and culture of the people.
This attention to the land and to culture is also expressed in a project inspired by Laudato si’. What does it consist of?
In indigenous culture, land and identity are closely linked. Yet globalisation pushes young people, formed in mission schools and then in public secondary schools, to leave the villages and seek employment in the cities and towns. Only the elderly Grandparents remain in the villages. These have been farmers who posses vast wisdom of the land. They know where to find food, which plants are medicinal, how to read the seasons, and lived off the produce and harvests from the land. But their grandchildren, born in the city, no longer know the land of their ancestors.
We therefore launched a resilience project, inspired by Pope Francis’ Laudato si’ which consists in bringing these young people back to touch and reconnect with the land of their grandparents: spending a few days in the village, planting fruit trees, sharing daily life, listening to the elders’ stories. The aim is twofold: to transmit the wisdom of the land in the memories of the elders before they pass on, and to prevent the land from being sold tomorrow by heirs who are no longer attached to their ancestral land. When the village land disappears, the village community also disintegrates, the culture collapses, and with it the local Church too.
It is our sincere desire that with this reconnection with ancestral lands, these grandchildren generation who have touched their ancestral land will come back to cultivate and utilise the land with modern tools and new method of agriculture and horticulture.
Your own personal story is marked by this encounter between cultures and faith. How were you led to baptism?
I come from a Buddhist Taoist background. My parents attended mission schools, and so did I, with the Irish Brothers. It was there, as a child, that I first heard about a “Heavenly Father” whom we do not see, but who loves us. I recalled a picture of a young boy climbing down the slope to look for a sheep. This image stayed with me for many years and I eventually come to understand that it is Jesus the Good Shepherd who looks for the lost sheep.
One could say that, for me as well, the Gospel was “whispered” rather than proclaimed with great noise. It was through sitting in religious catechism class , the witness and tender care of the Catholic teachers, the life of the school community under the La Salle Irish Brothers. Gradually, the seed planted in my heart as a seven-year old took root, sprouted and grow. At age sixteen, I asked for baptism with the blessing of my parents. My mum had also came to faith in Jesus from a work colleague who had witness her faith through friendship in the work place. She had “whispered” the Good News of Jesus to my mum too and our family were all baptised that same year 1979. This personal experience makes me very sensitive to a form of mission that passes through proximity, education, the quality of relationships, friendship and discreet witnessing, more than through big speeches.
Within the FABC you have promoted two strong expressions: “neighbor religions” and “whispering the Gospel.” What do you mean by that?
In Asia where there are many faiths and religions, we used to term these in general as “other religions” or “non Christian religions.” However as an Asian in Malaysia who have the privilege to live with neighbors who are Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, Taoists. As a child, I recalled my mother entrusting our house keys to our Indian neighbor when we went back to our hometown in the countryside. After school, would go to each other house. we helped one another.
From this experience, at the 50th Anniversary of FABC General Conference, the concept of “neighbor religions” arises. This changes the way we look at various religions and opens the door for dialogue through friendship. From this flows a way of proclaiming Jesus – not imposing or debating in order to convince, but “whispering the Gospel” one person at a time within a relationship of true friendship of living as neighbors.
When a colleague or friend is suffering, a simple fact of spending time and saying, “I will pray to Jesus for you” is already a missionary act. This was how the Gospel was “whispered” and transmitted to me and my parents. Living in Asia where Christianity is minority, I believe that this is how Christians can “tell the story of Jesus in Asia”. We sincerely seek to live as good neighbors, in friendship, be respectful of cultures and faith, in dialogue and closeness to people by being attentive to those in need and serving our society. I believe this Asian experience of living among neighbor religions, and the mission approach of “whispering the Gospel and telling the story of Jesus among neighbors” will greatly contribute to the whole mission of the Catholic Church.
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