Category: Suffering

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.

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.

A new year begins…

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view from the train window, somewhere in Madhya Pradesh

 

          We rang in the new year on a cold railway station platform in the middle of the night, waiting for an 11 pm train which finally arrived at 2 am.  An overnight train and an all-day bus ride later, we found ourselves in a small town in the hills of Madhya Pradesh, where we spent the next four days praying, resting, and venturing out into nature to hike. It was a welcome reprieve for our souls: sunny days in the wild under the big blue dome of the sky, instead of the cold, grey days we had been having in the city, with the clouds hanging like a low ceiling over the rising smoke of plastic and wood fires our neighbors were lighting everywhere to keep warm.  After experiencing so much of the ugliness and grime of the world, we needed to sit in a garden, surrounded by trees and flowers and birds that reminded us there is beauty in the world.  We needed this quiet, peaceful place to pray and think about God and suffering and resurrection and what it all means for us now, living in the world that is groaning for the transformation that is still out of reach.  We felt truly rested after our time there.
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a view from one of our hikes

 

          But on another cold platform at another train station on our way back, we came across a baby lying on the floor, seemingly abandoned. The shop owner who was standing within inches of the infant carrying on his business vaguely told us upon inquiry that the baby belonged to someone vaguely “over there”. We couldn’t see anyone, and after having ascertained that this guy actually had no idea who the parents were or where they had gone, we took the shivering infant into our arms and wondered what to do next. People seemed surprised at this, and other bystanders began to offer bits of information about a “husband and wife problem” and an argument during which the couple had left the baby and gone outside. Apparently lots of people had seen what happened, but no one had felt responsibility for the child lying helplessly on the cold ground while they bought snacks, sold bottled water, or sat waiting for their trains.  A moment later, a woman in a sari came hurrying down the platform. “Oh, that’s her,” the shop keeper motioned vaguely. As she approached, we saw that blood was flowing down the side of her head and dripping onto the platform.  Too shocked to think of anything to say, I wordlessly handed the baby to the bleeding woman.  Too embarrassed to look anyone in the eye, she wordlessly took him and walked back in the same direction from which she had come.  “Yes, husband and wife problem,” a man standing near me re-affirmed.  “No,” I retorted. “Husband problem.” We were sickened by the collective passivity of everyone throughout the situation, and by the total lack of compassion for either mother or child. Going outside could only have meant that this woman was probably beaten on a crowded street instead of in a crowded train station.
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weekly market in town

 

          Back home, we found our community much as we had left it nearly a week before, except much colder. There is beauty here too, in the warm welcome of our neighbors, some of children’s excitement at our return, and the invitation to drink hot chai around an open fire in our friends’ room.  But temperatures are dipping into the thirties at night now, and some of the animals (not to mention people) aren’t faring too well. There was a cow on the alleyway behind us who could understand Hindi and tell the future. Well, we never quite figured out whether she truly had some strange ability or whether her handler had somehow trained her how to respond appropriately to pretty much any yes or no question you can think of, but she did seem to know more than the average cow. This week two cows, including that strange creature, have succumbed to the cold. And this whole story would just be a bizarre side note if it weren’t for the fact that two families depended on those cows for their livelihood and will now be scrambling to find work in the midst of a cold season during which much of the community’s other work—furniture making and recycling collection—drastically slows down anyway.
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natural beauty was everywhere

 

          Life here is just so full to bursting that within the same day you can find yourself laughing with abandon, hot with rage, struck with curiosity or wonder, and later sad enough to cry (and maybe you do). This week was a little slice of everything, with the confusion, the disappointment, the joy, and the downright strangeness all thrown in together, the way real life always is.
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mother monkey crossing the road with baby in tow