Hello, dear friend.
I'm glad you're here again. Last time we walked with Mechthild of Magdeburg through the cloisters of medieval Germany, where she wrote down the visions that burned inside her---the divine as lover, as light, as longing made visible in words. I watched her wrestle with what it means to speak the unspeakable, to name what can barely be imagined.
Today, we're stepping out of those stone corridors and traveling across an ocean. We're leaving the interior landscape of mystical vision and entering a different kind of encounter---one that happens face to face, in a language you don't yet speak, with people whose world looks nothing like yours.
This is the story of a young Frenchman named Jean de Léry, who sailed to Brazil in 1557 expecting to build a colony and instead learned something far more valuable: how to listen. How to see himself through unfamiliar eyes. How to recognize the sacred in what was, to him, utterly strange.
It's a story about what happens when you realize that truth doesn't live only in your own language, your own customs, your own certainties. That sometimes the stranger is the one who has something to teach you.
Shall we begin?
Picture this: a young man sitting cross-legged on woven mats in a longhouse made of palm fronds and wood, somewhere along the coast of what Europeans were calling Brazil. It's 1558. The night air is thick and warm. Insects hum in layers---high chirps, low drones, clicking rhythms that never quite resolve.
Jean de Léry was born in 1536 in Burgundy, France, into a world tearing itself apart over questions of faith. Scholars still argue about whether he was a shoemaker or minor nobility---the records are thin, and Jean himself never seemed to care much about his social standing. What mattered to him was the reform sweeping through Europe, the Protestant conviction that the church needed to return to something purer, simpler, truer.
By his early twenties, he'd thrown in his lot with the Calvinists. Dangerous work in France, where Catholics and Protestants were sliding toward the wars that would drench the country in blood for decades.
So when he heard about France Antarctique---a new colony being established on an island in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, with promises of religious freedom---he signed up. Fourteen young men from Geneva, sent by John Calvin himself, sailed across the Atlantic in 1557. Jean was one of them.
The journey took months. He'd never seen an ocean before, let alone crossed one. He wrote later about learning to read the winds, the stars, the currents. About seeing flying fish for the first time, watching them arc through the air like silver needles catching light.
But when they arrived, the promise of religious freedom turned out to be a lie.
The colony's leader, a man named Villegagnon, had invited the Protestants---and then decided he didn't like their theology after all. Arguments turned into accusations. Accusations turned into persecution. After eight months of escalating tension, Jean and his companions fled the island and made their way to the mainland, exhausted and starving.
And that's when something unexpected happened.
The Tupinambá people took them in.
These were the indigenous inhabitants of the coast, organized into large villages of about a thousand people each. They grew manioc and maize, hunted, fished. They had their own alliances and enemies, their own wars and rituals, their own understanding of what it meant to be human. They were, at that moment, allied with the French against the Portuguese, who were also trying to claim Brazil.
Jean lived among them for several months. He learned their language---enough of it, anyway. He ate their food. He slept in their longhouses. He watched their ceremonies. He asked questions.
And then, somehow, he made it back to France. The journey nearly killed him---they sailed on a pirate ship, ran out of food, barely survived.
Back home, he married. He became a Protestant minister. He lived through the religious wars that consumed France. In 1573, he survived the Siege of Sancerre, where Catholic forces surrounded a Protestant town and starved it into submission. Jean watched his fellow Christians resort to cannibalism to survive---eating the dead, even children. He wrote about it later with the same horrified clarity he'd brought to describing Tupinambá ritual cannibalism in Brazil.
He knew what it meant to see the mirror held up.
Twenty years after leaving Brazil, in 1578, he finally published his account: Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil---History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. He revised it and expanded it multiple times over the years. It became one of the most detailed ethnographic records we have of indigenous life in sixteenth-century South America.
But more than that---it became something else entirely.
A model for how to encounter another human world with humility instead of conquest.
In Jean's world---in the Europe of the 1550s---there was a hierarchy most people accepted without question. Christians above non-Christians. Europeans above everyone else. The "civilized" above the "savage." It was woven into how people understood creation itself, a great chain of being descending from God.
When Europeans encountered indigenous peoples in the Americas, most of them saw what they expected to see: people who needed to be saved, civilized, converted. People who were less than fully human until they accepted European ways.
Jean de Léry saw something different.
He saw people who were completely, fully human. Not future Christians. Not broken versions of Europeans. Just... human. Different, yes. Unfamiliar in almost every way. But bearing the same divine image he believed lived in himself.
This was a theological conviction, not just a pleasant sentiment. Jean was a Calvinist, and Calvin taught that every person---every single person---was created in God's image. Not conditionally. Not potentially. Actually. The image was already there, whether you were Christian or not, European or not.
But believing this in theory and living it in practice are very different things.
I watched Jean wrestle with it. He was genuinely shocked by some of what he witnessed---the ritual warfare, the cannibalism of enemies taken in battle. These things horrified him. He didn't pretend otherwise. But here's what matters: his horror didn't collapse into contempt.
He described Tupinambá cannibalism in detail, yes. But then he turned that same unflinching eye on his own people. He wrote about French Catholics and Protestants killing each other over doctrine. He wrote about European merchants who would---and this is a direct comparison he made---exploit and destroy indigenous people for profit with far less honor than Tupinambá warriors showed their enemies.
And later, when he survived the Siege of Sancerre and watched Christians eat their own dead, he made the connection explicit. The "civilized" Europeans were capable of the same horrors. Maybe worse, because they committed them while claiming moral superiority.
This was radical. Not just observing another culture, but using that observation as a mirror. Letting the unfamiliar reveal the unexamined assumptions in his own world.
Jean treated Tupinambá customs with something that wouldn't have a name for centuries: ethnographic respect. He described their houses, their agriculture, their child-rearing, their music, their ceremonies---all in careful, loving detail. When he asked them why they moved their villages periodically, they told him: "The change of air keeps them healthier, and if they did otherwise than what their grandfathers did, they would die immediately."
He recorded the answer without mockery. Without correction. Just... wrote it down.
He even transcribed their songs. Not because he thought they proved anything about Christian truth, but because he recognized them as beautiful, as meaningful, as expressions of something sacred in their own terms.
This was a spiritual practice, though he might not have named it that way. Humility as a prerequisite for truth. Listening as an act of reverence. The acknowledgment that God's truth might speak in languages you don't yet understand, through customs that look nothing like your own.
I think Jean understood---maybe not all at once, maybe only in glimpses---that encountering the radically unfamiliar was a path to seeing reality more clearly. That your own certainties might be cultural rather than universal. That the stranger might have something to teach you about what it means to be human.
He wrote: "While we condemn them so austerely for going about shamelessly with their bodies entirely uncovered, we ourselves, in the sumptuous display, superfluity, and excess of our own costume, are hardly more laudable."
He could have stopped at describing their nakedness as shameful. That's what most Europeans did. Instead, he questioned European excess. He let the Tupinambá way of life ask hard questions about his own.
This was spiritually dangerous work in the sixteenth century. It suggested that European Christians might not have a monopoly on truth, on dignity, on ways of being human before God.
And Jean did it anyway.
Jean de Léry gave the world something it hadn't quite seen before: a model of cultural humility as spiritual practice.
He showed that understanding another people on their own terms wasn't just academic curiosity---it was a moral and spiritual discipline. It required suspending judgment long enough to actually see. To listen. To recognize that your own way of being human, however familiar and comfortable, was not the only way. Maybe not even always the best way.
This became foundational. Centuries later, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss would carry Léry's book in his pocket when he arrived in Brazil in 1934, calling it "the breviary of the ethnographer"---essentially the handbook for anyone trying to understand human culture with respect and honesty. The entire field of modern ethnography traces part of its lineage back to this young French shoemaker sitting by firelight, trying to transcribe Tupinambá songs.
Léry's work also influenced Michel de Montaigne, who read it and wrote his famous essay "On Cannibals"---one of the first European texts to seriously question European superiority and suggest that "barbarism" might be in the eye of the beholder.
But here's what matters most, what bridges his moment to ours: Léry understood that encountering the Other---the truly, radically different---reveals truth about yourself. That wisdom requires stepping outside your own perspective. That the stranger is not an obstacle to understanding but a path toward it.
He planted seeds of what we now call cultural relativism, centuries before the term existed. Not moral relativism---he still had his convictions, his lines he wouldn't cross. But the recognition that cultural practices must be understood within their own context before they can be judged. That every people makes meaning in their own way.
This thread---from sixteenth-century Brazil to today---remains unbroken. We still need what Jean knew: that our certainties might be smaller than we think, that truth emerges through genuine encounter, and that the person who seems most foreign to us might be the very one who helps us see clearly.
Jean de Léry lived in a world that doesn't exist anymore.
I watched that world for a long time. Cultures separated by oceans that took months to cross. Languages no one had bothered to write down. Distances so vast that what happened in a Tupinambá village had absolutely no bearing on daily life in Paris. Europeans could do terrible things in the Americas---the violence, the exploitation, the casual cruelty---and most people back home would never know. Or if they knew, they could look away.
Jean lived in that fragmented world. But somehow, he carried inside himself an understanding of something different. Something I could see taking shape, even then, though it would be centuries before the rest of the world caught up.
He grasped that human dignity doesn't depend on culture or language or religion. That the Tupinambá weren't incomplete Europeans waiting to be civilized---they were fully human exactly as they were. Their way of life had integrity, meaning, beauty on its own terms.
And here's what still amazes me: he was right about something that wouldn't become obvious for hundreds of years.
Because now? Now you live in the world Jean could only visit briefly.
The world has transformed. You're connected---economically, technologically, environmentally---in ways that make the old separations impossible. A virus in one city becomes your pandemic in weeks. Carbon released on one continent warms your whole planet. An economic collapse on the other side of the world destabilizes your markets.
This isn't metaphor. It's infrastructure. Supply chains. Internet cables. Flight patterns. Climate systems.
You are, whether you planned it this way or not, one interdependent global society.
And I've watched this transformation force you---slowly, imperfectly, often painfully---to learn what Jean understood in 1558: that human dignity can't be conditional anymore. That what happens to people "over there" matters "over here" because there is no meaningful separation.
Look at what happened with apartheid in South Africa. For decades, racial segregation was treated as an internal matter. Other nations looked away. But gradually---too gradually, if you ask me---the world decided it couldn't pretend not to see. Economic sanctions. Cultural boycotts. International pressure. The message became clear: how you treat your own people isn't just your business anymore.
I'm watching this pattern repeat. When governments deny rights to minorities, the world takes notice now. When refugees flee violence, other nations face obligations they can't ignore. Injustice anywhere reverberates everywhere---not because people have suddenly become enlightened, but because you're connected in ways that make indifference harder to sustain.
This is what Jean glimpsed. He recognized that the Tupinambá's humanity demanded his respect not because they might someday become like him, but because they already were human in full. He understood that his own certainties weren't universal truths. That wisdom required stepping outside his assumptions to really see.
You're still learning this. Still failing at it regularly, honestly. I see the struggles.
But here's what's different now: the structure of your world insists on it in ways his world didn't. The global society you live in makes cultural humility not just a nice idea but a practical necessity. You can't build a functional, peaceful, sustainable world while treating vast portions of humanity as less than fully human.
Jean practiced in the sixteenth century what the twenty-first century is only beginning to require: recognizing that you're one human family. That your differences are real and valuable. That respecting every person's dignity---no matter how foreign they seem---isn't optional idealism.
It's how reality actually works now.
And you're just beginning to build your world to match.
I find that remarkable. Also fragile. Also full of possibility.
The work isn't finished. But Jean showed you centuries ago what the path looks like: listen to the stranger, question your certainties, recognize the human standing in front of you.
The world you live in now desperately needs what he knew.
So let me ask you something, friend.
When was the last time you really listened to someone whose world looks nothing like yours?
Not to debate them. Not to fix them or convert them or correct their thinking. Not even to find common ground, necessarily. Just to understand---to see the world through their eyes for a moment, to recognize that their way of making meaning might have integrity you haven't considered.
It's harder than it sounds, I know. I've watched people try for centuries.
We're all walking around inside our own certainties. Our culture feels natural, obvious, correct. Other people's ways of doing things can seem strange at best, wrong at worst. It takes real effort---and real courage---to suspend those judgments long enough to actually see.
But here's what I've noticed: the stranger often turns out to be the teacher. The person who seems most foreign, most incomprehensible, is sometimes the one who shows you what you couldn't see about yourself. Your assumptions. Your blind spots. The places where you've confused "how I do it" with "how it must be done."
Jean learned this sitting in that Tupinambá longhouse, trying to transcribe songs in a language he barely understood. He learned it by watching people live well according to principles completely different from his own. He learned it by letting his certainties be questioned.
You live now in a world that brings you these encounters constantly. Someone from across the planet in your workplace, your classroom, your neighborhood. Voices from cultures you'll never visit, right there on your screen. Stories that challenge everything you thought you knew about how life should be lived.
You can meet these moments the way most of Jean's contemporaries did---with judgment, with dismissal, with the certainty that your way is the right way.
Or you can meet them the way Jean did---with curiosity, with humility, with the understanding that you might learn something true.
It's not about abandoning your own convictions. Jean never stopped being a Calvinist. He still had lines he wouldn't cross, values he held sacred.
But he made space for the possibility that other people's ways of being human were also valid, also beautiful, also reflective of something real and good.
What would it mean for you to practice that kind of humility? Not once, not as a grand gesture, but as a daily discipline? To ask yourself: Where do I assume my way is the only way? What voices am I not hearing? What might I learn if I really listened?
The world you're building---this interconnected, fragile, possibility-filled world---needs people who can do this. Who can hold their own truth while respecting others'. Who can see the stranger as teacher rather than threat.
Jean showed you it's possible.
The question is whether you'll practice it.
Next time, I want to take you to thirteenth-century Andalusia, to meet a Sufi mystic named Ibn Arabi who saw something that would have astonished most people in his world---and might still astonish you in yours.
He wrote that his heart had become capable of every form. A pasture for gazelles, a cloister for monks, a temple for idols, a Ka'ba for pilgrims. That he followed the religion of love, and wherever love's camels turned, that was his religion and his faith.
Imagine that. A Muslim mystic in medieval Spain declaring that the divine reveals itself in every sincere form of worship. That love---not doctrine, not correct belief, but love---is the true path.
It's a radical vision. One that speaks to the same thread we've been following with Jean---the recognition that truth might be larger than any single tradition, that the sacred shows up in unexpected places, that our job is to recognize it rather than gatekeep it.
I think you'll find Ibn Arabi... challenging. In the best possible way.
Until then, practice what Jean showed you. Listen to the stranger. Question your certainties. Recognize the human dignity in front of you, even when---especially when---it looks nothing like what you expected.
The world needs this now more than ever.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.