The Long Way Back

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          3:30 am: we pull ourselves out from under the covers and into the cold of the room that propels us into wakefulness as we get dressed and boil eggs to take with us for breakfast, once it’s late enough in the morning for our stomachs to settle and eat. We make the final preparations on our room– bringing our “kitchen sink” and other buckets inside, taking books off the shelf underneath that leaky section of roof– and head out the door with our backpacks.

Walking along the side of the road is strange at this time of night. I’ve never seen it so utterly desolate and quiet. It feels as though the city has been emptied of its entire population. Fortunately, before we have to walk too far down the road, an auto pulls up and we climb in to ride the rest of the way to the train station. The station, by contrast, is as busy as we’ve ever seen it: a colorful swarm of sleeping bodies covered head to toe under thick quilts and blankets take up two-thirds of the platform, making it difficult to squeeze past. Around 5 am, our train arrives, and there’s confusion as we all crowd around, trying to board. All the doors are locked, so following the usual protocol, one or two passengers force open a window and climb through to liberate the train car from inside. Then we’re all pouring in, but there are no lights on so we struggle to find our assigned bench in the dark, while other passengers merely look for whichever seats aren’t occupied yet in order to claim them temporarily with their luggage. Even though we bought our tickets a month beforehand, the only thing available was this “bench” class: berths of hard, straightback pews facing each other, designed to fit three to a seat, but bound to be stretched beyond their official capacity because every person holding one of an unlimited number of “general” (read: “standing”) tickets being sold will also be accommodated in this train car. For awhile, there are just the two of us sitting on our bench, and we are naively hopeful. Perhaps our main challenge over the next 10 hours will just be existing on this uncomfortably hard seat and maybe managing to fall asleep for part of it!

Then comes the next station. And the next. People fill in the aisles, and then flow in between our benches, standing in the spaces between our knees and leaning over us to support themselves with their hands on the backs of our benches. Eventually the car is full, as far as we can tell. Even making it to the toilet at the end of the car is a pipe dream, unless you want to be crowd surfed to your destination. And yet somehow people continue to pile on– they find space for new people long after Westerners would have declared that an impossibility. Now we reach the stage where there’s a fight at the door every time we reach a new station. The least fortunate of the new arrivals merely hang out of the open door with their luggage on their backs as the train accelerates out of the station, and eventually, they are absorbed into the car. But finally, even this magic runs up against the laws of physics: a young man with a big backpack sticking out behind him is stuck outside the door as we pull away from the station. He’s just an inch or two away from running into the signal poles each time the train passes one of them, and five minutes after leaving the station, he is yet to move one inch into the interior of the train. As we look out the window, we can actually see the backpack of the person ahead of him also sticking out of the train door, in front of his face. We call out to him and A. reaches through the window to relieve him of his bag by tying it to the bars of the window from the inside. The bag and the man stay where they are for the next hour or more, until they reach their final stop.

Sitting next to A. during this whole ordeal is a grey-haired Indian man who seems wealthier than the usual bench-class passenger and seems to be taking it all in as an adventure. He’s generously inviting more people to come and stand in between our benches, or sit on the edge of our bench, or to pass their babies and small children into our compartment to sit on someone else’s lap while their parents stand wherever they find room. He’s obnoxiously friendly like that. Meanwhile, I’m becoming internally militant over defending my shrinking space as another grateful passenger squeezes onto the seat and my shoulder presses harder against the bars of the window. By this point, a couple of people have stowed their seven- or eight-year-old boys on the luggage rack overhead, and I envy their apparent comfort. Observing the general scene, the overly-enthusiastic passenger turns to A.: “It’s miserable, isn’t it?” he says happily. “Why did you come to India?” he wants to know. A. bursts out laughing. “It’s very discomfortable,” the man continues in English. “Everyone is discomfortable.”

“Discomfortable” indeed. But whereas most people in the train car were expecting the journey to be exactly like it was, we were comparing the experience to the thousands of other journeys recorded in our memory which were faster, easier and just more comfortable than this one. When a young woman in a sari sat down in the floor directly in front of my seat where my legs should have been, she was probably thinking, This is how it always is on the train. But as I resigned myself to the lost leg-space and curled into a vertical fetal position on my last square foot of bench, I was thinking, This is the worst trip of my life. Expectations are everything.

It was a small comfort to think that we were sharing in the experience of the Majority World by traveling the way most human beings in the world do—I was reminded of this every time I looked out the window to avoid mounting claustrophobia and saw motorbikes, buses, and jeeps that were just as packed full of people as our train was.

Still, we were eager to get off the train. We spent the night at a cheap, grimy hotel in Delhi, and the next morning the second leg of our journey began. Arriving at the airport, we already felt that we had crossed into another world. It could hardly be imagined that the air-conditioned spaciousness of the airport with its glossy surfaces and orderly lines and uniformed personnel was really India, separated by just a few yards of space from the messy, pulsing life continuing all around it. Stepping into that other world felt like a relief, but it was also very strange. This surreal feeling continued as we boarded the plane, settled into comfortable chairs reserved just for us, and watched movies for a few hours before touching down in Istanbul. Our minds couldn’t keep up with the distance our bodies were traveling at such an incomprehensible speed. The Turkish airport was like an upscale shopping mall. How could Turkish coffee and baklava and Western fast food chains really be just a few hours away from chai on the train with snatches of rural Indian life flying past the window outside: villagers plowing their fields with oxen and harvesting crops by hand; entire families working at brick kilns with the tall smokestacks in the background, just like you see in those documentaries about modern-day slavery. Then we board the next flight: plastic-wrapped blankets, plastic-wrapped headphones, plastic cups for water and juice and coffee. Complimentary socks and slippers and warm towels and entrees containing more meat than we’ve eaten in the past month.

Things get stranger still when the in-flight map shows that we are no longer flying over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, or France but over the American South—yet by now we have accepted this liminal space that defies comprehension. We land in my hometown, are greeted by family and a peppermint mocha from Starbucks, and minutes later we’re cruising down the open highway in an SUV, trying to get our bearings as we take in the big box stores, billboards, and miles of open space. Christmas lights. Suburbs. Indoor grocery stores full of flawless, giant fruit and food imported from around the world. It is just 48 hours since we set out from the slum.  The geographical distance we have just traveled doesn’t even begin to represent the full distance we have covered.

Outsiders

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Around our little perch, rockets explode, shaking our thin brick walls. The smoke is so thick that you can’t see where any of the sounds are coming from, but the crackling and booms coming from the narrow alleyway below sound like they could be directly under our floor. All of this is punctuated with children’s shrieks. But this is not a war; it’s Diwali, and it’s being celebrated the same way it has been for years and years. It’s the same with the festival of Moharram. Deaths, births, weddings, fights, crises, hopes and disappointments come and go, but like a primordial clock ticking, the calendar always swings back around to this day, and everyone puts up the garlands of tinsel and beats the drums and cooks up enormous pots of food over wood fires in the alleyways right on cue. The celebration goes on, come what may.

There can be something comforting and inspiring about this: the discipline of setting aside times for celebration and following through with them knowing that the bad things in life are going to carry on anyway so the party should, too.

There can be something deeply discouraging things about this: the way that outsiders and interventions come and go and yet everything stays the same.

This week, there was an ill-thought-out “medical camp” in our slum that was sponsored by a well-intentioned organization with a hotline people can call to report children who are in distress (abused, abandoned, etc.)  The staff came to offer free medical care for a day and to distribute literature about their group’s services for vulnerable children. Of course, none of the people they were targeting could read the flyers they handed out, and their free medical camp only played into ideas of scarcity as people lined up frantically, regardless of whether or not they were sick at the time. Most of our neighbors have very little understanding about what makes them sick, or about how medicine works—but it does work, sometimes. And who knows when you’ll fall ill again, and whether or not you’ll be able to afford more medicine when it happens? Might as well get some free stuff now to have on hand. Many young children were even lined up to see the doctor all by themselves—which is absurd. How can a five–year-old accurately describe symptoms, understand a diagnosis, or remember which pills to take when and for how long? Medical camps like this one also discourage parents from taking their children to one of several private clinics or public hospitals nearby, and serve as a stop-gap method that delays the real change that is so badly needed to make the existing facilities work.

Nonetheless, one of the staff members’ only job was to run around photographing impoverished children receiving free medical care, and I’m sure that will be quite moving on the group’s website, or in their newsletter, or whatever. But because there’s no follow-up to these kinds of feel-good projects, Child Helpline won’t realize that their credibility in this community was completely destroyed within a few hours of their leaving. Someone had an allergic reaction to one of the medicines she had received from the doctor, and as I rushed to the ER with this panicked woman who was struggling to breathe, her sister was announcing to every person we passed on our way out to the road: “Throw all your medicine away! Those people gave us bad medicine—look what it’s doing to her!” And nearly everyone did—thousands of rupees of medicine, thrown away. And trust of this charitable organization was turned to suspicion and anger, just like that.

But the conundrum didn’t end there. Because when we arrived at the ER and showed them the medicine that she had taken right before beginning to feel mental confusion and her throat and airways tightening up, the interns who were staffing the place without supervision from other doctors promptly gave her an injection that caused a second reaction and sent the woman panicking and literally running out of the hospital, refusing to accept the oxygen mask they wanted to give her with medicine to open up her airways. The medical students assumed that she must be a mental patient and sent her home with a couple of antacids and some pills for anxiety.  I’m ashamed to say that I was inclined to agree with them about anxiety being the cause of her irrational behavior—until we were walking out of the hospital, when I got a second look at the box of medicine she had taken and it dawned on me that the drug they had injected her with was the same one that had caused her allergic reaction in the first place. Having disregarded what she was telling them, the staff at the ER had made the sloppy mistake of trying to “treat” her by giving her a second dose of the medicine she was allergic to.

At 3 a.m. the next morning, when one of our neighbors caught a young teenage boy in the act of breaking into his house to steal, a crowd of angry people quickly formed, mostly people whose homes had also been recently broken into, and we were woken up by the ruckus. There has been a string of such nighttime thefts in our community lately. People here own so little that they are hit hard by the theft of a cell phone, a wad of cash, or merchandise for a small store they run out of their home.  And our neighbors’ poverty ironically makes them especially vulnerable to thieves.  Even though rich people own more that’s worth stealing, they have the means to protect it with guards and gates and high, sturdy walls; the poor may or may not have a door on their shack, or the ladder or staircase going up to the roof may provide a way into their rooms from above. In our neighborhood, most people’s homes are packed so close together that many of the roofs are connected, and without access to bank accounts, a lot of people store their life’s savings in their homes.

So all of that pent up fear and anger about the multiple robberies of the past two weeks was directed against this boy. He was certainly a child in distress, but we feared that the hotline staff’s presence might just stir up more wrath from the community since the memory of the “bad medicine” they had handed out was still fresh on everyone’s minds.  And we knew from past experience that it was a coin toss whether police would escalate the violence or restore peace. Following our desperate attempts to intervene and to reason with the crowd, and a few other voices calling for restraint, another neighbor who felt conflicted about the direction things were headed eventually did call the cops. But the boy was pretty roughed up and humiliated by the time they arrived, and just as everyone had predicted, they did nothing to help. After hauling the kid off to the station, they demanded a bribe from the man whose house had been broken into, and when he refused they simply let the thief go without even filing a report of the incident.

It’s no wonder that people take the law into their own hands when there’s no higher authority to appeal to for help. And I shudder to think what kind of situation this poor child is going back into… probably back into the custody of adults who force him to risk his life to steal for them by climbing into houses at night, through the holes too small for them to fit through themselves. The police are as much to blame for this situation as the thieves themselves.

The next day, fears of theft continued but everyone went on with life as usual, and people prepared for the festival. They beat the drums. They hung up decorations. They held a community event in the square where the thief had been tied to a pole and interrogated the night before. It seems that the outsiders who interact with our community—the social workers, the loan sharks, the politicians, the police—either come in with open contempt for the people here, wearing contempt and indifference on their sleeve, or else arrive as “helpers” harboring a more subtle form of disdain that manifests as pity and condescension.  It’s as though none of these people speak the language of the locals, even though their attempts to communicate are made in Hindi. Meanwhile, the people who live here know that they can’t trust doctors, or charities, or government officials, or police—but for them this is nothing new. They’re used to that. And so they don’t set much stock by what any of those people say. The only people they can depend on are each other. They stick to what they know, and nothing ever changes.

Being outsiders ourselves, but wanting to carve out a completely novel role for ourselves, leaves us with a very thin place to stand. We have white faces and foreign passports and Hindi is not our first language, so we will never be able to dissolve into our neighbors’ society as completely as we would like. But it’s clear that whatever slow change we hope to catalyze, we won’t be able to do it as outsiders—or at least, we will have to be a very different kind of outsider than people have encountered before: the kind who are interested in listening and learning from people on the inside, and the kind who are willing to stick around long enough to become quasi-insiders ourselves.

The Ugly Truth About The Beauty Myth

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          A few months ago, I read Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth and it felt like a missing piece sliding into place, naming that vast and vague sense of unfairness that I have instinctively felt since childhood. It’s the reason that as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by private and public conversation that centers on the pitiless appraisal of women’s bodies. The reason I was able to so easily detach from my real appetite for several years in order to hinge my hunger instead on whether or not the reflection in the mirror deserved food or not. The reason why I have so often fallen into the catch-22 of aching to hear that I was beautiful, only to find that the judgment, having been passed, reaffirms my precarious position more than my personhood, and that I feel resentful towards the man who has power to pass such a judgment in the first place without needing mine in return.

If you’re a woman, you can probably relate to these kinds of experiences. If you’re not a woman, ask one who’s close to you about this and she can probably tell you how this same undercurrent has pulled at her throughout her life. ­But I have hope that if this thing has a name—if it is a man-made construction rather than simply “the way things are” or, worse, “the way God designed things to be”—well, then it’s a system we can climb out of to claim our freedom.

The book explains the myth that our society has constructed: that beauty is a universal, eternal, and unchanging quality, and that possessing it is the only way for women to obtain worth, love, or power in society. Any cross-cultural experience or historical research quickly reveals that standards of beauty are diverse and contradictory throughout time and across the globe. While I grew up always trying to get a tan in the summer, my Chinese friends were horrified at the idea of ruining pale skin with sunlight, and while women in the U.S. diet to stay slim, my Indian friends tell me I’m too skinny and encourage me to get “nice and fat.” Think of foot binding and corsets and all the other strange things women have done over the centuries in pursuit of “beauty”. Nonetheless, the current beauty myth has been retold with such an alloy of fervor and monotony in advertisements, literature, film, popular culture, and even scientific journals that it has convinced most women, either consciously or unconsciously, that their worth lies in their sex appeal.  With that in mind, women are essentially doomed to an endless treadmill of buying products and disciplining their bodies as they strive toward an ideal of “beauty” which, with the advent of photoshop, airbrushing, and mass media, is based less on the human form than on the humanoid creations of advertisers and pornographers.

The belief system inspired by the myth explains why, despite the fact that women are more educated, enjoy better health, and have more legal rights, professional opportunities, and influence in wider society than at any other time in history, we’re in a worse state than any previous generation of women “in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically.”  Writing in the early ‘90s (and all of these trends have surely intensified since then), Wolf points out that over the last few years, “eating disorders rose exponentially… cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty… pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.”

Wolf maintains that this unrealistic ideal and the unhealthy lengths women go to in order to achieve it have not come about accidentally. This situation has been invented—by advertisers, among others—in order to keep women more concerned with maintaining their appearance than with bringing the full power of their energy and intellect to bear on the world. Who knows what kind of upheaval might result in society from women collectively unleashing their full talents for the first time, after centuries of restrictive roles and separate spheres that have prevented them from participating fully in human history?

The beauty myth creates a caste system which offers social rewards sporadically and temporarily, but playing by its rules, even the most beautiful woman ultimately loses (it’s no coincidence that to be a model, an eating disorder is basically a prerequisite). Whatever fleeting admiration she gains through the system feels like love, but it blocks the real thing by never allowing a woman’s true self to be recognized and loved for who she is. And eventually she will grow older, the lines and marks of lived experience on her body disqualifying her for “beauty” and taking away all her power and worth in society. Wolf suggests that the way out of this mess is not to scramble towards the top of the heap, but to refuse to be locked inside of a caste system at all.

How have we bought into this lie and perpetuated its power in our own lives and the lives of others? What does it look like to break free and to help others do the same?

Source: New feed

Only One Thing is Necessary

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Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.
Luke 10:38-42

          I’ve usually identified with Martha in that famous story—despite her unflattering portrayal as a complaining, somewhat self-righteous woman whose concern for superficial domestic details distracts her from Jesus.  More recently, I even started to question the moral of the story. Fine and well for Mary to soak up Jesus’ wisdom while her responsible, hardworking sister takes care of the rest, but really—what would the three of them have eaten for lunch if both sisters had been passively basking in their guest’s company? To broaden the sweep of my question, exactly who is supposed to take care of starving children and trafficking victims and do something about all of the injustice in the world if we’re all just contemplative hermits or church people who spend more time singing praise choruses and studying the Bible than we do engaging with the world outside our religious enclave? Maybe now a few others can identify with my defense of Martha.

But in response to these questions has come the gentle whisper that perhaps this story is not the simple dichotomy of practical action vs. pious devotion that is often taught, on Sunday school felt boards as well as in sermons intended for adults. I’m beginning to recognize the Mary in myself, too—the part of me that does want to just sit with Jesus and be still and be loved. And it occurs to me that the Mary in the story might have felt the same ambivalence and tinge of guilt while she sat there as I do. Maybe when Martha appealed to Jesus for some help with her “lazy” sister, her accusation tapped into that inner guilt and caused Mary to expect a rebuke from Jesus rather than the reassurance he gave her that she was justified in her stillness.  Perhaps Jesus’ response was a surprise to both sisters, rather than being a rebuke to either of them.

The more I reflect on it, the more I become convinced that the condition of distraction or of presence with Jesus is much more a matter of the heart’s posture than it does with external activity. It’s clear from Jesus’ life and teachings that there is a lot of important action that needs to be engaged in—he spent himself on behalf of the poor, healing the sick and shepherding the harassed crowds of the oppressed. But the equanimity with which he was able to meet both acceptance and rejection; the infinite patience and compassion he demonstrated for the mobs of needy people that followed him wherever he went—all of this leads me to believe that even between his times of obvious solitude, Jesus never really left his Father’s caring embrace. He was somehow fully immersed in the suffering of the world while managing to sit at the feet of God the whole time. He offered love, acceptance, and peace to the people around him out of the vast supply of what God was breathing into him on continual basis.

I feel attracted to this possibility growing in my own life. I hear Jesus’ invitation to sit contentedly with him in the hours of waiting in crowded hospitals and the scenes of violence in my neighborhood as well as in the quiet moments of prayer in the morning with my door closed. Paradoxical as it sounds, I believe Jesus when he says that he has called me to live in this crazy place and to do nothing but sit at his feet. It may take more time of focused sitting before we’re able to multitask with all the buzz of the realm of action and external events, but that inner stillness is the only thing that will sustain our action over time and give it significance. No point in running ourselves into the ground if we’re forgetting the one thing that is necessary.

Comfortable Crucifixion 

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art by Banksy
          I’ve been contemplating this image a lot since I came across it a few weeks ago, thinking of how poignant it is for the nails in Jesus’ hands to be represented by shopping bags; for the sin nailing him to the cross to be the greed and excess of consumerism.  More specifically, of my consumption.

Living “simply” doesn’t mean I’ve conquered that internal drive to pursue comfort by acquiring more. I realized the other day that when I think of my home country, for example, what often come to mind are the products that I miss. Jamba Juice. Peppermint mochas from Starbucks. Scented body wash. Comfortable furniture. And I suppose that’s not bad in itself, but why are those the things that come to mind when I’m feeling tired and discouraged? The other day I thought about wandering around the supermarket in my hometown and just the idea of leisurely browsing aisle after aisle of specialty foods in air-conditioned comfort with endless options and variety and a massive supply that never runs out sounded so good to me. I found myself daydreaming about just walking around there, not even buying anything.  I mean, I like eating hummus and cheese and Fritos and all those things you just can’t get easily in Northern India, but even just shopping for them sounds comforting and familiar. The idea of the glossy lights and colors of the cosmetics section brings up similar feelings, even though I hardly own any makeup and am usually turned off by all of the advertising when I’m actually near it.

The Kingdom of God that Jesus is constantly talking about in the Gospels encompasses God’s vision for humanity to enjoy freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and inclusion in a community of love. In first century Palestine, the powers of evil which killed Jesus were embodied in the brute force of Rome and the religious authority of the Pharisees, whose legalistic, judgmental, and top-down religious system was set against everything his Kingdom stood for. In the same way, perhaps a big part of the Empire and religious establishment of our day is the soulless system of materialism, consumption, and ever-increasing wealth in which we are all enmeshed in some way or another, whether we realize it or not. Globally, this system values profits and products over people, exploits the poor and vulnerable with low wages and unsafe working conditions to create cheap, mass-produced commodities for the wealthy, and often involves the degradation of the natural world in order to create these disposable items that will one day become trash in a landfill.

And this impersonal system of commerce not only harms our neighbors—it eats away at our own souls as well.  We consume to feel beautiful, important, safe, impressive, comforted, or just distracted from the needs of the world and the inner turmoil of our souls.  Maybe we even pursue more and more external stimuli and experiences and possessions in order to be distracted from the gaping fear that if we ever stopped to look too deeply within ourselves we might find that we are not who we present ourselves to be, or—worse— that there is nothing of substance within us at all.  There are a lot of buoyant memories from my younger years of happily buying a new outfit or accessory or CD and feeling a sense of fulfillment with the new appearance or experience I was instantly gratified with, but I remember too that none of those times ever felt like the last time I would need another stick of eyeliner or some new music. There was always more out there that I didn’t have, and as trends changed I would inevitably want more or at least something different than what I already had. Seasonal fashion and planned obsolescence and insecurity  in who we are can fuel continuous consumption that makes us feel like we’re on the way to being a happier person by satiating ourselves or achieving a certain image, but we never seem to arrive. I still find this mistaken belief system at work in my heart.

As I consider this unorthodox but rather profound image of Jesus on the cross, the thought strikes me that this carefully-cultivated superficiality needs to be crucified before authentic life can grow in its place.

Blessed are those who mourn

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An oil pastel reflection on Rachel’s lament (Matt. 2:13-18), inspired by recent events in our neighborhood.
          Last month there was a very sad day in our community when two children—a one-month old baby and a two-and-a-half year old boy—died suddenly of fever and diarrhea within hours of each other.

On this particular day, I sat under two white funeral tents, one after the other, staring at two tiny, motionless bodies with perfect, chubby baby faces that looked as though they might only be sleeping. I sat with the grieving mothers and siblings and aunts and grandmothers and felt their sadness seep into me. My husband went with the men twice to the graveyard, helping to carry the bodies which felt much too light, watching over them while the other men went into the mosque to pray namaz on the way to the cemetery, and helping to bury them as each of the men poured one or two handfuls of dirt into the grave. No one will ever know what these children actually died from. Were their mothers anemic during pregnancy? Maybe, but nearly three quarters of poor women in India are. Was it dengue, or some other mosquito-borne illness? It could be—others are dying of that this time of year. Maybe it was as banal as dehydration. But it’s unlikely that their births were ever officially registered, so their deaths won’t even contribute to statistics of child mortality, and there certainly won’t be any information on how to prevent future deaths, if these deaths were indeed preventable. Both mothers have lost children before, in what could only have been similarly baffling circumstances. I used to be confused by my neighbors’ apparent paranoia with taking their kids to the doctor for every little cold and cough, but now I understand—with every illness, no matter how minor, memories of other children remind parents that this could be the fever or the cold or the cough that suddenly ends their child’s life, for reasons that they don’t understand. I have spoken before about poverty of relationship, but poverty is also about lack of information, lack of control…

In this culture, a bed will be carried outside of the house into the alleyway, and the body of the person who has died will be laid on it. Then someone will set up a white tent over the area (for white, rather than black, is the color of death in Asia). The viewing goes on all day, and there is a custom of women sitting together, gathered around the body for hours and hours, not really saying anything to console them but just bearing witness to the grief of the person’s family, crying with them, and being together. Then the men carry the body to the graveyard for burial. When they come to wrap the body and take it away, a wail goes up from the crowd of women and the mourning reaches an inconsolable crescendo. This is the moment of final separation from faces never to be seen again. Sometimes people don’t even own photos of their children.

At first, I was uncomfortable with these rituals that center around crowds and noise when my culture treats grief with such distance and silence. This was not the reverent hush of a funeral home, or the solitary contemplation of a graveside service. Funerals here are crowded, and between all the stories being passed from one person to another about the circumstances surrounding the death, all of the ruckus of the babies on hips and children running around underfoot, and all the vocal lament of those closest to the deceased, funerals here are loud.  But I am coming to understand the value of this type of mourning process. My neighbors are well acquainted with grief, but that doesn’t dull the pain. Sitting together, each is able to enter into the sorrow of the other through the door of her own experiences with loss. No one tries to hide their sadness. Emotional demonstration is accepted and encouraged. There is power in that kind of solidarity where one is sure that all of the people around her truly understand what she is going through and that she is free to express it, because their pain resonates with hers.

I keep thinking of Jesus’ words: “Blessed are those who mourn” (“for they shall be comforted”), and I wonder: what did he mean? Perhaps those who mourn are also connected with God’s heart in an intimate way because God also mourns—She knows what it’s like to lose a son. God knows the grief of watching powerlessly every day as precious children die of preventable disease, violence, and poverty. Perhaps Jesus is also alluding to the coming of his Kingdom in which thing will be set right, people and families and societies will be restored, and life to the fullest will be the rule instead of the exception. But I think part of Jesus’ meaning must have been for right now. Maybe it’s that we can’t receive comfort until we’re willing to face our loss, share our pain with others, and actually go through a process of mourning—no stiff upper lip, no denial or repression. Mourning invites people to come and comfort. It invites community. If this is the case, then I am realizing how often I have missed out on the blessing that is meant to come in the midst of pain.

Blurring the Lines (guest post for D.L. Mayfield)

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D.L. is a kindred spirit who is living incarnationally among the poor in the American Midwest. I “met” her a few months ago through her writings online, and her blog continues to be a source of insight, inspiration, challenge, and commiseration for me as she wrestles through the tough questions that come with a messy life of following Jesus into the margins of society and the lives of people who do not share our cultural, religious, or economic background. I have come to appreciate her willingness to be honest and vulnerable about the journey, and I was honored when she asked me to contribute a guest post to her series on downward mobility.

Head over to D.L. Mayfield’s blog to read my post!

Why Do I Keep Referring to God as “She”?

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          Recently many of you have noticed that my language around God has changed. A couple of people took the initiative to ask me about it and were brave enough to voice their concern—thank you! I’m glad to hear what’s on your minds so that I can respond to those questions here.

Right there at the beginning of the Biblical narrative in Genesis 1:27, we are told that both male and female were created in God’s image. This leads me to believe that as Creator of both femininity and masculinity, God both includes and transcends the categories of gender entirely and to describe God as either male or female would be inaccurate and incomplete. So, my purpose in referring to God with feminine language is to draw attention to the feminine attributes of God that are often left out of our discussions about God in order to correct a lopsidedly male image of God and encourage a fuller, more accurate picture. I have no problem referring to God as He—males are most certainly made in His image! Likewise I have come to feel equally comfortable referring to God as She—because females are most certainly made in Her image.

The most common metaphor for God throughout scripture is that of a Father, but there are also metaphors which convey God’s tender love through the image of a Mother. When Jesus is weeping over Jerusalem, he says that if they had been willing, he would have gathered the people under his wings like a mother hen does with her chicks. Psalm 17:8, Psalm 57:1, Isaiah 42:14, Isaiah 66:13, and Isaiah 49:15 all invoke feminine descriptions of God as a mother bird, a woman in childbirth, a nursing mother, or a woman comforting her child. Both fatherhood and motherhood, however, are earthly concepts: they’re too small to contain the fullness of God’s being, but they can be useful symbols to teach us about God’s character in the same way that Jesus’ parables use symbols and stories from daily life to convey deeper truths. Other metaphors used to describe God throughout scripture include a jealous lover, a vine with branches, a mother hen, a king, and a sacrificial lamb, just to name a few. All of them are helpful and descriptive in some way, but none of them could stand alone to fully describe who God is.

So, I am not claiming that God is female, but merely suggesting that changing up our language may save us from falling into the habit of thinking that God is male. God is both/and, not either/or.

The gospel dance

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A guest post by my husband:
As I (Andy)  have been sitting this morning thinking about how our world works I looked up and saw tiny little particles of dust swirling under the fan.  We have a little “skylight” in one wall that shines a brilliant beam of sunlight into our room in the morning.  And for maybe the first time I noticed what is only visible while that sun beam is shining through.  It makes all the dust visible as it swirls around our room.  And as I watched it, I noticed it is a bit chaotic but also beautiful, kind of like a strange dance.  Then looking out the window I saw our neem tree with all its little green leaves blowing back and forth in the wind and realized that the tree too is dancing.  And as I think about more and more aspects of life I realize that life itself is like a complex, beautiful, tiresome dance.  The world is engaged in a perpetual dance of life, death, joy, mourning, beauty, corruption, light and darkness.  The dance is easy to catch glimpses of in the natural world but it seems descriptive of our human experience as well.  The way we interact with one another, the way God interacts with us.  We take turns initiating, being lead, being spun into confusion and glory, and taking moments of pause and stillness.  It seems the Gospel call is not just to follow a set of rules or getting as many people to believe the same narrow doctrine that we do (and exclude those who don’t!) but rather to be the dancing feet of Christ inviting others to partake of his love, joy, truth, life, and beauty.  To ignore the dance is to ignore our raison d’être.

Eyes to see

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          A few days away in the mountains was the perfect retreat after a busy month of hosting visitors. The first day when we arrived at the remote ashram in the forest, we were overwhelmed by the natural beauty around us. When the silence wasn’t making our ears ache, the gentle music of birds and insects in the trees was reminding us of life’s original soundtrack—one that we had nearly forgotten amidst the mechanical roar of city life. We sat through a rainstorm marveling at the genius of evaporation and clouds condensing and water falling out of the sky to water acres or square miles of plants at a time. I literally started crying thinking about the goodness of God while we watched the water falling in sheets over the unspoiled wilderness and the emerald lakes in the valleys below. At nighttime, we remembered how many stars are in the sky, because for the first time in months they weren’t obscured by city lights.
          Sometimes it’s easier to feel that God is present in all of Her gentleness and goodness when I’m surrounded by the beauty that She created. God is still present in the city and in the slum, of course, but remarkably it is often more of a challenge to recognize God among the human beings in which She resides than it is to recognize Her in the breathtaking vistas of the mountains, or the beach, or pretty much anywhere else where human civilization hasn’t crowded in. They belong together, of course, nature and human civilization, but they rarely coexist well… the trash-clogged, black, sludgy waterways, the polluted air, the dismal lack of color in many of the big cities I’ve visited around the world comes to mind.  Feeling the peace of the mountains, it occurred to me that our alienation from nature in the city is no small thing.          Back in my room in the slum, listening to the whir of the fan and the distant horns of traffic and the wail of a toddler in the alley downstairs, I realize that living where I do is a kind of fast—from external silence (though we can’t really live without finding a silent space within ourselves), from stars. I almost think, it’s a fast from beauty, too—but I have to stop myself there. Because there is beauty in the slums, and God’s goodness is still there to be seen. It’s more of a challenge to recognize it, though, because it is hidden amongst the ugliness of poverty, and violence; amid broken systems and relationships that leave trash lying everywhere, leave poor patients at the hospital lying in their own blood for hours before any doctor or nurse pays attention, leave children crying alone in the street with no one to comfort them. There’s a reason that Mother Teresa calls poverty Jesus’ most distressing disguise: in that filth, noise, and desperation, it’s possible for us to miss recognizing him altogether.

But God’s goodness is there in the generosity of our landlady, bringing us some of the hot meal she’s just prepared for her family because she wants us to share the experience of a traditional food we’ve never eaten before. I see Joy in the smiles of our youngest neighbors; I see Mercy in the love and concern that young mothers demonstrate in responding to the feeble cries of their helpless newborn babies who rely on them for everything. And I experience Grace when God carries me through days of anger, stress, exhaustion, or sadness through the support of my husband and my friends. Sometimes it takes a different kind of eye to recognize God With Us in the places where human brokenness has taken its toll, but when we find God there, we have found Her in the place She most desires to dwell with us.

          I want eyes to see that beauty. I want the will to create more of it; to bring it to greater fullness. I want to uproot the weeds of injustice and fear that are obscure that greater Reality in the same way that streetlights obscure the stars that are still there in the sky. When I think of God’s beauty in that way, then planting a garden, cleaning up trash, sharing a meal, or working to reconcile people to one another all seem like part of the same thing.