Confessions of a Violent Pacifist

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“My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and that we can realize it not by saying, “Lord, Lord” but by doing His will and His work. If therefore, we wait for the Kingdom to come as something coming from outside, we will be sadly mistaken.”—Mohandas Gandhi, Young India, 12 May 1920“He or she [the nonviolent person] must have a living faith in nonviolence. This is impossible without having a living faith in God. A nonviolent man can do nothing save by the power and grace of God. Without it he won’t have the courage to die without anger, without fear and without retaliation. Such courage comes from the belief that God sits in the hearts of all and that there should be no fear in the presence of God.”   –Gandhi, Harijan, 23 March 1940

“[A]s my contact with real Christians increased, I could see that the Sermon on the Mount was the whole Christianity for him who wanted to live the Christian life… it seems to me that Christianity has yet to be lived.” –Gandhi, as quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in Performing the Faith, 2004
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I feel convicted by the words of Gandhi on the subject of the Sermon on the Mount and the pursuit of the Kingdom of God. It occurs to me that in many ways, the way of Jesus is “yet to be lived” in my own life. I haven’t yet attained the courage to free myself from anger, fear, and desire to retaliate in the face of mistreatment and violence.

I am walking down the side of the road alone. A motorcycle brushes past me from behind, much too close for comfort. Two men look back to stare at me, the foreign woman walking alone. My mind immediately begins to play through the hypothetical situations of what I would have done if they had actually touched me, what I will do if they stop to cause any trouble. My eyes fall to a brick lying in the dust ahead of me. I picture myself picking up the brick and throwing it at them with full force.

In the sea of people leaving the park, a man walks past me in the opposite direction and gropes me. I wheel around and hit him in the back with my water bottle. No physical harm done to him (unfortunately, I think to myself), but I know that it would have been my knuckles into his back if he had been any closer—my reaction was instinctive and automatic.

Crossing the street with my husband on the way to a friend’s house, a man cat-calls at me and proceeds to make animal noises. I’ve had enough of this kind of disrespect. We walk swiftly toward him (and the rest of the day laborers he’s sitting with) and confront him in Hindi: “Are you an animal? What are you making those noises for?” Before I know it, there’s a hand on my shoulder and a middle-class Indian friend who lives nearby is taking my place in front of the man scolding him about his harassment. But before she’s finished, another middle-class man—a total stranger—has noticed this gathering of important-looking people confronting some poor, low-caste riff-raff from the villages and steps forward to hit the man without even knowing what has happened (or caring to ask questions). At this point A. and I both move forward to stop the violence, but it’s too late. Policemen pull up on their motorbikes out of nowhere and similarly enter the fray, beating first and asking question later. We try to pull them back from the man, saying that there’s no need to beat him; nothing has really happened. What began as our confronting a man about his dehumanizing treatment of women has rapidly turned into the wealthy, powerful people ganging up on the poor—who, due to malnutrition and hard manual labor, are literally half their size. The man is suddenly clasping his hands and appealing to me for forgiveness—but of course, this is no heart transformation. Fear has driven out any chance of reason or reflection. He fears for his life under the police officer’s baton–the same batons that threatened women and children at the protest rally a few weeks ago. This was not a situation I had intended to create. I wasn’t happy about it. And I didn’t feel any vindication in my dehumanization being paid for with his. The same system of domination and violence was oppressing us both, and we had both become pawns in its game.

If I don’t commit violent acts but only fantasize about them in my head, then am I really free of violence? And if I don’t use physical force, but seek to demean, insult, and control others with hateful words, then can I really claim to be overcoming evil with good? Am I seeking the transformation of my own heart and the redemption of my enemy when I respond to their aggression in kind?

These stressful situations bring out parts of my inner self that might remain hidden forever in a different environment—say, my hometown. I am forced to face the limits of my faith, and the gap between my stated convictions and my actions and ingrained reflexes. It’s one thing to talk about the Sermon on the Mount. It’s quite another to find creative ways of loving my enemies, especially when they outnumber me or have superior social position and physical strength.  But surely Jesus was aware of these sorts of situations when he charged his hearers to repay evil with good and to love their enemies. I’m sure that Roman soldiers had similar tactics and maybe even similar weapons when they came down on Jewish peasants in occupied Palestine during Jesus’ days.  And even sexual violence is certainly nothing new. But creativity, and self-restraint, and even a willingness to suffer (NOT to be confused with passive acceptance of abuse) certainly take a lot of practice, and ultimately, as Gandhi says, they can be put into practice only “by the power and grace of God.”

I don’t know all of the answers, but in the active “satyagraha” (“the Force which is born of Truth or Love”) resistance that Gandhi taught and practiced—the same method of active-nonviolent resistance that inspired Martin Luther King’s “soul force” movement in our own country fifty years ago—I am challenged to pursue and experiment with Jesus’ teaching under the assumption that it is not only possible, but necessary as the only way to resist the cycles of violence in our world rather than reinforcing and becoming a part of them.

May it not be said of our lives that we have left the way of Jesus untried.

Ramazan and Eid

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          We decided to try the fast that first day of Ramazan, just to see what it was like for our neighbors. We set our alarms to wake up at 2:45 am, early enough to make breakfast and eat before the first azan, or call to prayer, reverberates through the the pre-dawn darkness and everyone stops eating or drinking anything for the next 16 hours—until the fourth call to prayer ends the fast a little after 7 pm. It was difficult to do, especially in such hot, muggy weather. We’re used to feeling hungry from time to time, but the most intense thing was the thirst. I was amazed by the way that our neighbors—and especially the women—go about their same routine of housework all day without food or water: scrubbing their family’s clothes, making food for small children or working men in their household who aren’t fasting, hauling water for cooking, bathing, and laundry, walking out in the sun to buy vegetables at the market.

Then, in the early afternoon, preparations begin for aftar (or iftar), the fast-breaking snacks that everyone eats in the evening before going to pray namaz and later having dinner. I spent hours at my friend’s house learning how to make the chana (spicy chickpeas), pakori (onions deep-fried in spicy chickpea flour), tamarind chutney, papar (deep-fried potato chips), and sarbat (lemonade) that people eat at iftar, along with fruit and dates and other tasty snacks. That evening, another family invited us to come over and break the fast with them. The mother of the family waited patiently for the azan, lost in silent prayer, while the younger children restlessly awaited the voice over the loudspeaker that would signal it was time to dig in.  The call rose from the nearest minaret in melodic Arabic, “God is great…” and along with the thousands of others sitting together in their own houses throughout the community, we broke our fast with a date, then lemonade, fruit, and all the deep-fried goodness on the plates in front of us.

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aftar (“iftar” in Arabic), fast-breaking food

          We haven’t fasted since that first day, but we have continued to be welcomed into the celebration of aftar with our neighbors. We’ve tried our hand at making a few pakori ourselves, and we’ve run around delivering fruit and pakori to different families as they send plates of their homemade aftar to our house.

One night, we were invited to the home of a wealthy Muslim lawyer who lives nearby our slum and invites anyone who wants to come—mostly poor people from our community—to eat aftar, biryani, and sweets at his house. Despite our not having fasted and our complete ignorance of how to pray namaz, we were welcomed to eat, to watch, and to talk. That open feast for the poor reminded us a bit of the kind of party Jesus describes in Luke 14:12-14.  Right after that grand feast, we had the experience of breaking the fast in a more humble setting with friends of ours who hadn’t made aftar most nights at all because of the expense. We chipped in supplies and they did most of the cooking, teaching me how to make even more kinds of ramazan treats. I love the patience and the devotion to God, the sacrificial hospitality, and the vigor of celebration that I saw in the way my neighbors observe Ramazan.

          After a full month of fasting came three days of celebration: Eid. In preparation, everyone cleaned their homes from floor to ceiling, painted their houses in bold colors, and decorated with shiny paper with designs cut into it. The women stayed up all night preparing simai (a sugary dessert), pulki (a spicy yogurt curry), and mattar (peas—also spicy), and on that first day everyone dons expensive new clothes and goes out visiting one another, dressed to the hilt. Andy and I ate in fourteen different homes that first day alone, which made us feel very included and happy—but also VERY full, and a bit sick from the ridiculous blood sugar spike that so many servings of simai brought on!
On the second day, we participated in another Eid tradition: big family outings to different parks and attractions around the city. We went with a large family to the zoo, and since one of the sons in the family makes his living as an auto rickshaw driver, all 13 of us piled into his auto for the half-hour trip!  The zoo was, well, a zoo—that’s really the best way to describe the atmosphere of noisy crowds packed in everywhere.  I think at least a hundred other people from our slum must have been there; we ran into people we knew everywhere. It was a lot of fun to go around to all of the different exhibits with these incredibly excited kids (and excited parents) who had never been to a zoo in their lives and were fascinated by each new creature.
          Eid is one of the few times that families in our community get a day off to do something fun together, and the zoo is one of the few fun places in the city that is cheap enough for almost anyone to afford, so we weren’t really all that surprised to see how crowded it was. We were a bit taken aback, though, to see how a giant playground inside the zoo drew even bigger crowds than the animal exhibits—and by the fact that most of the people making use of the equipment were teenage and adult men!
          The third day of Eid was thankfully a bit more low-key, although house-to-house visiting and simai consumption continued. We’re glad to have been able to share another important cultural experience with our friends here, but also tired enough to be happy that all the celebration is over!

We’ve moved!

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          After many unexpected twists, turns, and delays in the construction process, last Monday we moved into our new room! We’re really excited about no longer having a locked door between us and the toilet, having a bird’s eye view of the community, and having a much quieter, ventilated space than we were living in before– now our front door opens onto a peaceful roof space instead of onto a busy alleyway. There are a few things left to be done– we’re hoping to get a roof and a door added to our bathroom soon, but it the meantime I’m enjoying bathing at night under the stars.  So far this is proving to be a really restful little refuge in the slum 🙂 Here’s a virtual tour of our new place:
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A view of our front porch/roof space from our stairwell. Behind the curtain on the left is our bathing area and toilet; in front of our water storage drum is our sink/laundry area.

 

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When they finished building the room, our landlord hung up these rice-filled packets as a sort of blessing.

 

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Having an actual desk and chair is good incentive to sit down and study Hindi!

 

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View out of the window next to our desk: a beautiful neem tree in our neighbors’ courtyard.

 

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  Our kitchen
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And on the other end of the room, our bed, with storage space above and below.

 

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Our ceiling fan, suspended from a bamboo pole overhead.

 

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Looking across the rooftops through our laundry lines and power lines.

 

Taking to the streets

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          As we pulled up in the autorickshaw to the crowd of women waiting on the sidewalk, the clouds looked heavy with rain. I had come to this hastily-arranged rally with an Indian acquaintance of mine who organizes women’s groups in slums around the city, educating them about the resources available to them when they face violence in their homes and communities, and training them to work together to advocate for their rights and to support each other in making their communities an environment where women are respected, and where they are safe. She’s confident, well-spoken, and an abuse survivor herself—all of which makes her extremely good at what she does.

As the rain began to drizzle and then pour down on us, I looked around the crowd: some women in saris, others in salwar kameez suits, and a lot of women in full burqa—faces covered, but voices raised. Their courage was expressed in their presence at the rally in the pouring rain, some of them with babies and small children in tow. Their demands were written on the placards and banners they were going to carry through the flooded streets of downtown, all the way to the front gates of the parliament building. The rally was a protest against a slew of recent cases of violent rape across our city and our state in recent months, and the way that government and police alike were complicit in the terror by not only refusing to enforce laws to hold perpetrators responsible, but refusing to investigate cases and even refusing to file police reports when victims or their families turned up at police stations to seek help in the aftermath of these violent crimes.

In the height of the monsoon deluge, the group of protestors—mostly women and girls, but a handful of men and boys, too—stepped off the curb into the water and began their march. Our clothes were soaked, but everyone marched enthusiastically forward, lifting their arms and shouting together. As we neared our destination, a clutch of news photographers and cameramen appeared to snap photos and shoot footage of the event. Not far beyond them, however, the police also appeared in front of the crowd of protestors. I could see one officer alternately shouting something to the women at the front of the column, and then speaking into his walkie-talkie when those women defiantly shouted their slogans and continued moving forward. We soon saw what he must have been radioing about. Ahead of us, a larger group of police was barricading off the entire road. They were pushing the last section of metal fencing into place when the protesters reached them, grabbed the fence, and shoved it backward into the officers. Everyone poured in through the hole, and more of the barricade was knocked aside as we all made our way through. The police scrambled ahead to make their last-ditch attempt at keeping the women from reaching the parliament building. When we arrived, there was already a line of policemen blocking the gates, but that didn’t discourage the protestors from marching right up to them. Someone passed forward a microphone and a speaker which was held aloft as one woman announced why we were here and described the terrible situation of women in our society who can’t count on the protection of either their government or their police force.

A delegation of eight was allowed inside the building to present their demands (including a proposed amendment) to the chief minister; meanwhile, the rest of us waited outside. Police reinforcements had arrived and begun to surround the group. Then the army also arrived, and soon our group was surrounded on all sides by mustachioed men with bamboo sticks and guns. There were roughly a hundred protestors and a hundred police and army personnel, but this didn’t discourage many of the women from turning toward the men in uniform to talk about specific unresolved rape and murder cases over the microphone or to register their anger over police corruption and inaction.

I was impressed by the courage these women displayed, and by their solidarity with one another. The police and the army had been called up to intimidate them, to stop them… and yet here they were, facing off with power and holding their ground. Only time will tell what is to become of the demands the delegation presented to the government that day, but one thing is sure: that kind of courage and willingness to speak out about the violence against women that is routinely swept under the rug, ignored, or denied as something shameful or insignificant is definitely evidence that the tide is changing, however slowly.

Source: New feed

This night is dark

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Delhi rape protests: demonstrators clashing with police in the capital yesterday
          Yesterday Andy and I participated in a protest march here in our city. Earlier this week in Delhi, where we used to live, a young woman was brutally gang-raped on a moving bus, and this horrendous crime—an extreme case of the rape and violence against women which are commonplace in India—has aroused national outrage and a public cry for justice and change. As we marched with our flickering candles in the cold dusk, I thought about the pain and the terror that woman in Delhi had endured, the grief and shock of her family, and the trauma shared by so many other victims who have not been wealthy or important enough to garner the media’s attention when they have lived through (or been killed) in other life-shattering sexual assaults. I thought about all the women in my neighborhood who suffer violence on a regular basis, and yet were not even able to take part in a protest like this because of how strictly controlled their lives are.

Those flickering, vulnerable flames we carried as we marched made me think of Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (“…til he leads justice to victory”). These words are describing Jesus, but lately I am coming to see that Jesus himself is also that bruised reed and that smoldering wick. He is vulnerable and fragile. He himself was stripped and tortured and killed by the powers of evil in his day. Even today, his kingdom comes through the weakness of human beings, often human beings who fail or who are overpowered by the colossal systems of injustice and evil that they oppose. The strange and wonderful thing about those seeds that fall to the ground and die is that their life is actually multiplied and continues (John 12:24)! Those words from Jesus are a wonderful explanation of the paradox of resurrection.

As John chapter 1 says, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.”  The thing I struggle with is that, at least for the present, neither has the light overcome the darkness. Following Jesus is often like a candlelight vigil in the dark. The darkness of an entire room can be lessened by the presence of a single candle.  But the harder you focus on the light the more pitch-black the surrounding darkness seems, and the candle cannot completely dispel the darkness after all—only the sunrise can do that. Jesus’ life was that candle, that flame of truth to light our path through the dark; that sign of hope that the Dawn is coming and we can begin to walk in the light even now. Our lives are that fragile, flickering candle, burning with love through the night with the desperate hope that Day will come and the shadows of violence and evil and confusion will recede once and for all.

There were signs of hope in that protest. Unlike the protest in Delhi going on at the same time, the righteous indignation did not descend into violence: none of the protesters forced their way through blockades, and the police did not fire water cannons and tear gas at us or beat us with their wooden rods.  At the rally, people spoke not only of the need for police to make cities safer for women and for government to actually prosecute rapists and mete out harsher sentences. They spoke also of the need for men and women to begin to address the degradation of women in society at a root level by raising their sons and daughters as equals in the family. There were placards that spoke of how backwards it is to teach women to be careful in order to avoid rape, instead of teaching men not to rape. These messages are closer to addressing the heart level of the matter.

But there were also discouraging placards calling for retributive violence. The anger everyone feels is completely justified, but we were especially disturbed to see men carrying signs that advocated torture and death for rapists. It’s easier to completely dissociate themselves from the “monsters” who have done this than to acknowledge their common humanity—and to have the chilling realization that those roots of selfishness and lust which grew into this savage act of brutality are lurking in their own hearts, too.

We are still waiting for the dawn. In a society where domestic violence, rape, commercial sexual exploitation, and routine sexual harassment of women are a virtual pandemic, it would be more useful for men to examine their own role in creating this unsafe atmosphere for women than to demonize the few men who have acted out in an extreme way. As long as women are objectified for male consumption, as long as their bodies are turned into sexual commodities, and as long as they are denied equal status in marriage and the family, we can’t honestly claim to be surprised by horrific rapes like the one that has turned India upside-down this week. But we raise our candles and we renew our commitment to throw our lot in with the Bruised Reed who could not be broken, and the Smoldering Wick who lit the world on fire.

Toxicity

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          Andy and I just returned from a two-week trip to Los Angeles to visit friends from Pepperdine, our “family” in Watts, and some biological family. We graduated from Pepperdine two years ago, so the people we knew as freshmen and sophomores when we left are now juniors and seniors about to graduate! It felt good to be able to return to a place that had been so meaningful to us in a formative time of life, and to still run across so many familiar faces. We were even able to meet up with some of our mentors, people who taught us about marriage and Following and have therefore shaped our lives forever. And it was good for our spirits to get to spend time with so many of the close friends that we graduated with, who are still living and working in the L.A. area. Thanks to them, we traveled all over L.A. county without once having to rent a car or even use public transit, and we always had a place to stay. Thank you Christine, Dave, Thomas, Becca, Lauren, D’Esta, Stuart, Grant, Paul, Jen, Bryan, Steph, Michael, Gary, Adam, Daniel, Genieve, Brittany, Shelby, Dusty, Cecily, Jon, Rose, and everyone else whose hospitality fed, sheltered, and transported us during our stay! There are even more people whose conversation fed our souls with good questions and insights and stories. Now add perfect Southern California weather to all of that and you can see just how good we had it.
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an aerial view of Pepperdine’s campus
           At the same time, however, there was one aspect of the trip that was discouraging. For several years now, an injustice that has weighed heavily on my heart is the way that our culture objectifies people, particularly women. I would venture to say that this plague is nowhere more evident than in Los Angeles, where a lot of trends begin and a lot of destructive mass media is produced. Pepperdine’s campus is a microcosm of it, and you can tell by the way that a lot of female students dress (or don’t get dressed) that they have completely bought into our society’s lie: that women are primarily sexual objects who exist to meet others’ needs and whose value and worth depends on their sex appeal. Now some may think I’m being dramatic, until they see a lecture hall emptying out and find themselves wondering whether students forgot to change out of their clubbing outfits from the night before, or whether some of them might have lost their pants while walking to class.          But I can’t rag on them too much, because I know the positive reinforcement they get from the guys around them, and I know the unhealthy lengths that I and other women I know and love have gone to in order to meet those same unreasonable standards of beauty. It’s easier in the short-term to deprecate the women who annoy the rest of us by putting themselves on display, but when I recognize my own weaknesses and fears in them, I can empathize with them and feel the compassion that their situation ought to evoke in us. It makes sense to try emulating air-brushed, soft-porn advertising perfection, if you believe that your identity and the security of your relationships depend on it.

But the truth is that we women don’t have to get on that exhausting hamster wheel of comparison, jealousy, and insecurity, and that we don’t have to devalue as we age. The truth is that our dignity has nothing to do with our sex appeal and everything to do with the Image that we bear and the Love that created us. And the truth is that men don’t have to chase the phantom promises of lust and dehumanize themselves by cultivating selfish and distorted appetites.

In a culture as toxic as the one we live in, that kind of radical message needs some reinforcement– because the opposing lie will be reinforced with every billboard, commercial, and magazine we see. Its important for brothers and sisters  to look out for each other’s spiritual and emotional well-being, and to protect each other from the lust and the insecurity that have become so normal and accepted in our society. I really believe that viewing other people (and ourselves) as objects to be consumed is the root of so many other, more obvious evils: eating disorders, pornography and other sexual addictions, prostitution, human trafficking. All of these big things begin with a small, personal belief that is based on a lie, so the best way to start addressing any of them is to pull out that lie by the root. So men and women, knowing that our struggles fuel one another’s struggles, how can we stand out from the world by treating ourselves and one another differently? How are we reinforcing or challenging the sin in each other’s lives, and how can we draw each other toward wholeness?

The generosity of the poor: friendship at the margins

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          We’ve now spent just over a week in our new community, but it feels like we have been there much longer.  For the first few days, we had a constant stream of children and adults visiting our room, giving us suggestions on how to set things up, watching to see how we would make food, and asking us how much we paid for each thing we brought home from the market (we usually paid too much, and they were sure to let us know!).  One day, to make sure we got a fair price, our landlady took us to the market to bargain for our wooden bed platform.  She drives a pretty hard bargain.  After we bought it, the bed was loaded on top of a cycle rickshaw, we sat on top of it with our landlady’s 10-year-old daughter, and the three of us rode down the main road all the way back to our community, like a slow-moving parade float in the midst of car, bus, and motorcycle traffic whizzing past us!  Slowly, we’re learning how much we should bargain things down in the market, how to knead dough for chapatti with the perfect ratio of water to flour, which spices to crush together for a meat dish.

We’re also getting to know the people who live around us, their families, and their stories.  Many of those stories involve loss, because sisters or daughters have died in childbirth, parents have died in the prime of life from disease, and family members have been injured in accidents or suffer from chronic health problems.  We are amazed by people’s resiliency as they deal with so much tragedy and death, and by the strength of the families here and their ability to care for the orphans, the elderly, and the otherwise vulnerable people among their relatives.  It’s not uncommon to see a single son supporting his mother and sisters, saving up his earnings to pay for their dowries one at a time, or a single mother taking a job as hired help in a rich family’s home to be able to keep sending her children to school.          Andy has spent a lot of time wandering around with the guys in our neighborhood, drinking chai and visiting their workplaces—most of which are recycling-collection stands or workshops where they make beautiful wooden furniture by hand.  I’ve spent a lot of time visiting women, many of whom are literally hidden away from the outside world because cultural tradition, a conservative mother-in-law, and/or fear of sexual harassment (a threat which has some basis in reality but which is also trumped up and used as a means of control) keep them from ever leaving the house.  We’ve both spent time visiting the families who live in crowded plastic and bamboo tents on the alley behind us, several feet lower and closer to the black river which surely expands during monsoon.  As we fill our water drum from the leaky hose in the morning, we watch women and children from that alleyway haul water back and forth by hand in small containers because there’s no morning hose service to their homes, and they’re too close to the sewage canal to dig a well.  And when we head over to our landlady’s back courtyard to use the toilet, we look over a low wall into that same alleyway where we know that there are no toilets at all.

There’s a custom in Indian culture that when guests are invited over for dinner, they eat first while the hosts watch.  The hosts actually don’t eat until after their guests leave.  When we first came to India, we found this an awkward and obnoxious arrangement, but the longer we’re here the more we come to appreciate it.  In our community, a dinner invitation from a poor family is a big gift to begin with.  Offering the guests food first—after you’ve already spent hours preparing it and are feeling hungry yourself—is sacrificial.  You’re making sure that the guests eat until they are full, even if it means that there may not be enough left for you and you may go hungry, and even though you’ve just spent a large percentage of your income on that meal.  In the past week and a half, we’ve already received this sacrificial gift many times over.  We still don’t feel comfortable being given food first, but it has challenged us to give to others more sacrificially than we are used to doing.

The more we learn, the more we realize there is to learn, and we feel honored to be welcomed into our neighbors’ world.  We feel humbled by how much more our neighbors have been able to offer us and to teach us in the past week and a half than we have been able to offer or to teach them.  Coming as outsiders with nothing, as yet, to contribute, we have no claim on their generosity and friendship, much less their patience with our own ignorance and unintended faux paux.  But if grace is undeserved favor, then our Muslim and Hindu neighbors are mediating our Father’s grace to us in abundance, and teaching us a lot about Him in the process.

Pursuing the Kingdom of God: The battle without and the battle within

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          Andy and I are in Colorado Springs for a few days after a twelve-hour drive from northern Arkansas, where we spent three weeks with his family.  We haven’t been doing much, besides sitting around talking with people and trying to keep warm around wood-burning stoves, heating vents, and fireplaces.  But these weeks have left a lot of space for reflection, and He seems to be raising new questions and insights in our minds all the time.  At this point, we have far more questions than answers, but here is a bit of what’s been on our minds.
What a paradox it is that we as humans dread and crave God’s judgment at the same time.  We dread His judgment when we call to mind our own guilt and shame over wrongful actions, evil thoughts, and selfish desires.  We crave His judgment against those who have wronged us or who have wreaked havoc on our society by perpetrating horrible crimes like rape, murder, or other kinds of heartless oppression against innocent, vulnerable people like women, children, and the elderly.  I have been recognizing these two impulses within myself recently: burning indignation against injustice, and yet thankfulness for God’s mercy when I soberly realize the roots of those outward expressions of evil within myself– pride, anger, jealousy.  In Vancouver, it was easy to feel outrage towards a man picking up a desperate woman who was prostituting herself on a street corner, or towards busy shoppers who avoided eye contact with the panhandlers on the sidewalk.  But if I am honest, then I must admit how easily the impulse to pursue what I want ahead of the best interests of others rises within my own spirit, or the way that apathy often finds fertile soil in my mind.  In pursuing the Kingdom of God, we must be willing both to fight for justice in the world, and to courageously face the evil within ourselves and invite God’s purifying flame to test our hearts, separating out the wheat from the chaff.  After all, it is only the pure in heart who will see God.

Patience or just long suffering?

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Digging out a pit and building a septic tank.
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Building a stairway to replace the bamboo ladder that once led to the roof.
          These pictures document the slow and sometimes painful process of waiting for the pieces to come together. Most immediately, we are waiting for construction to finish on our new roof-top room so that we can leave our current home– the humid, ground floor room whose prominent location perpetuates a constant stream of visitors at all hours, and reminds me of a dark cave with its lack of natural light. But in a deeper sense, we’re waiting for the pieces of life here to come together. We’re looking for what the next step is—what kind of roles and work we should take on, and how to begin to put our skills and ideas into action to respond to the needs we see around us. And yet we know that the “next step” flows out of exactly what we’re doing now—getting to know people, studying verb conjugations and vocabulary lists, and all of the unspectacular daily moments, tasks, and conversations that comprise our being present and available exactly where we are, right now.

I usually don’t think of patience as a virtue. I equate it with tolerance for wasting time. It is a void of passivity, a willingness to be unproductive or to carry on with a bad or fruitless situation longer than is necessary. But seeing as the Holy Spirit herself (the Hebrew word for spirit, ruach, is indeed feminine) works with extreme patience in human hearts through millennia of obstinate and destructive human behavior, patience is probably a virtue worth revisiting—because I don’t have any patience at all.

It’s probably true that at times the justifying label of “patience” has been slapped onto exactly the kind of laziness or passivity I described a moment ago. But perhaps a more accurate way to think of patience is to connect it with perseverance: a courageous, stubborn, single-minded determination that is bent on accomplishing some purpose or at least bent on holding one’s ground and keeping the faith, no matter how much time it takes to accomplish, or to come into being. Patience is often a willingness to actively wait for something that we really have no power to bring into being ourselves; something that God must accomplish, or something that God has already finished, but the outward evidence of which is not yet apparent.

We need the kind of tenacious patience that can bear the present difficult circumstances without skipping ahead to the future to either catastrophize about how badly everything might turn out, or to dream up alternative plans and means of escape from the present difficulties. We need fierce patience that refuses to give up because of lack of results or weight of disappointments in the short-term. We need tender patience to continue to journey alongside the people in our lives even when they take destructive actions and make destructive decisions, when they manipulate or get angry with us, when they act in self-interest instead of in friendship, when they fail to change or to meaningfully respond to what we’re hoping to model and teach and draw them into.

Isn’t that what She does with us, Ruach Ha Kodesh, the Spirit of God?  Isn’t that the way that She picks up the pieces again and again and re-imagines the path to wholeness as she labors over us individually, and as the Church, and as humankind? I want to be patient as She is patient; longsuffering and uncomplaining like She is in her relentless love of each one of us. I’ve got a long way to go.

Back to reality

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          Our room basically self-destructed in our absence. We stepped inside to be instantly entangled in the cob webs that filled the whole space, and found that ants had eaten away so much of the brick in the walls that there were piles of red dust all over. It was as though the walls and the ceiling had begun to close in on themselves by decomposing into dust. Spiders the size of my hand skittered across the walls, and as they receded into their respective caves, we realized again how porous those walls really are There was no electricity, so we cleaned out the humid, dark place with the help of our extremely eager ten-year-old neighbor, who was so excited about our return that she went into a frenzy of haphazard sweeping and scrubbing. Hours later, we realized where the wire was disconnected and were able to fix it.  The ceiling fan whirred to life and the light blinked on.

          In spite of the initial shock of our room, however, we were warmly welcomed back into the community. As word spread about our return, people came from all over the neighborhood and crowded around our doorway to see us. “Where were you?” many of them said. “We expected you two days ago!” We had never expected that people would remember the exact date of the train we had told them about three months before! Our landlady had thoughtfully filled several buckets of water for us and stored them under her bed, so even though we had missed water distribution for the day, we were able to do some laundry and bathe in addition to wiping down every dusty surface in our room.

          Over the past few days, we’ve been easing back into the routines of daily life: cooking, doing laundry, buying vegetables at the market, drinking chai with friends. We’ve been busy making the rounds to visit everyone we’ve gotten to know over the past few months, but it will probably take several days more to see them all. There’s a diverse mix of emotions during all of this transition. We’ve felt stressed out by the constant stream of visitors, and the ebb and flow of children at our window and at our door, staring at us while we wash our dishes and brush our teeth and make our coffee, and coming to tell us that their aunt or grandma or father is “calling us” (which means, “Drop what you’re doing now and go see them!”). We’ve been happy to catch up with friends, to see that babies who were underweight newborns when we left are plump and healthy, homes that were under construction are finished, and the row of the bamboo and plastic homes that we worried might have to be torn down to make room for a sanitation improvement project are still standing. But monsoon is a messy season, so it’s also been sobering to see the muddy filth that many of our neighbors have to endure during these rainy months when the dirt paths turn to sludge and the rising drainage canal threatens to enter their homes. Their homes make our room seem like a sanctuary of order and cleanliness. Rain means that temperatures are lower than they were during the hot season, but most of the time the humidity more than makes up for those few degrees in sweat and heat rash.

          I think seeing the conditions everyone is living in now, coming straight from America instead of after 6 months wandering around India and seeing all kinds of different slums, puts everything in more stark relief than I saw it before. Where I grew up and where I live now are different worlds for sure, but out of the two, this seems to be the one that’s more real. No A/C to shelter us from the elements, no trash collection service to disguise how much waste we’re actually generating, no separation to distract us from the poverty that most of the world lives in. When you consider the fact that more than 80% of the world’s population lives in the 100 countries that make up the developing world, and that only 15% live in developed countries like the U.S. and Europe, it becomes clear that as challenging as it is for the two of us to try to adjust to life in India, these realities are more representative of the universal human experience than the comforts of our home country are.