3. What has consecrated life learnt from so many years experience in trying to achieve inculturation?

It has learnt that we cannot evangelize cultures. Rather the Lord moves us to evangelize men and women within their cultures. This is an excruciatingly slow process, simply because cultural changes happen slowly. We have learnt that faith does not exist in a pure disembodied state, but that it is always and necessarily integrated in a culture. On the other hand, culture is not static; it is constantly subject to the dynamic influence of globalisation. For all these reasons, inculturation is less an interaction between faith and culture than an encounter between a culture that bears the Gospel message and a culture that, implicitly or explicitly, is disposed to receiving Christ. Thus inculturation is a living dialogue between the Gospel integrated in a culture and a people of another culture. Such an encounter is veritably the occasion for an exchange of gifts. Not a unilateral situation of giving on one part and of receiving on the other, but an interaction through which one culture is at once at the service of the other and receiving the enlightenment to live itself fully but differently the whole Gospel. Correspondingly, the receiving culture purifies and enriches the Gospel it is welcoming. For inculturation to be a true exchange in the Spirit, we must not only avoid the imposition of our own personal cultural structures, but we must also express our belief in the creative power of the Spirit by adopting a listening attitude to what the Spirit is saying when men and women affirm that the Gospel means nothing to them. We need to pursue a constant discernment to grasp the cultural sensitivity that lies behind incomprehension and misunderstanding. In these few statements, I have tried to show how different perspectives enrich the dynamic of inculturation.