Tag: love

The pixels in the big picture

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Helping families pick out second-hand cutlery and put together almost-matching sets of used living room furniture. Moving heavy boxes of someone else’s stuff until I’m left with sweat-stained armpits and regrets about my business casual decision that morning. Sitting in living rooms drinking tea, or sitting in high-rise law offices downtown—sometimes just observing the legal appointment, other times interpreting for the clients.

My job is an eclectic mixture of activities, many of them strange: I rummage through a cabinet of donated toys, looking for anything that isn’t gendered with an angry facial expression or the color pink, and wrap it for the birthday party we’ll hold that night. Or I sit with a grown woman and make up simple math problems with coins to help her learn to identify Canadian currency so she won’t get fired from her new job as a cashier. I once got lost inside a huge mall after going with a client to pay for another month of cell phone service so we could communicate about her appointments.

There are emails and letters to advocate for bank accounts to be opened, for exceptions to be made, for families to be reunited.  There are endless, tedious forms to be filled out for housing and status and permission to work. Sometimes when I make appointments to fill out this paperwork, I end up wondering how much more mindless admin I can stand, but other times the paperwork gets shoved aside for impromptu marriage counseling, or the sacred gift of a deeply-held story.

Sometimes, the absurdity of my work is in the wild swings between the momentous and the mundane. There is the day when we receive news that one of the refugee claimants whose deportation we had fought so hard to prevent had died halfway around the world. Tears. Staring at the floor. Feeling that powerless sadness and rage all over again. Ten minutes later, I am in my supervisor’s office discussing registration papers for a contraband kitten—the family it belongs to has already lost so much, and I am not about to let them lose the one cuddly thing that is going right in their lives because of technicality.

In this job, the big picture is the very exciting aim of extending radical welcome by journeying with people through the refugee claims process and through their first few months or years of creating a new life in a strange country. Close-up, this picture is made up of a billion tiny pixels of day-to-day, not-very-significant-feeling details. It’s made up of repetition. Of boredom, even. But I believe in the big picture, and there are times when I get to see the whole image reflected in the microcosm of a single moment or conversation. Those are the flashes of light that remind me where all of this is headed, and drum into my soul the long-resisted truth that small things with great love is the only greatness possible.

 

photo credit: brianfagan <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/52231465@N06/28615442915″>Week 30: Patterns</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Good News to the Poor: What I Learned From an 80-year-old Nun in India.

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During the time I lived in the slum, I sometimes interacted with other Christians who viewed Muslims as spiritual projects. They were confused about why I would choose to live with people in poverty and/or people of another religion for any reason other than to use cloak-and-dagger evangelism to convert them.  If I responded that following Jesus compelled me to love my neighbors and seek to work for justice alongside them, other Christians sometimes concluded that all that neighborly love must be a way of warming up the crowd for the REAL message of Jesus later, and it seemed impossible to explain that–as far as I was concerned–love, justice, community, and belonging in God’s family WERE the message.

At a time when these sorts of conversations had left me feeling discouraged and misunderstood, I met an octogenarian nun with a crinkly face and a compassionate heart. Her understanding of my strange life was a much-needed comfort at the time, and to this day I continue to unpack the wisdom she shared with me in our conversations under the neem trees.  This month, I got to write about my friendship with her in an online article for Plough Quarterly. Here’s an excerpt:

“There were the unjust laws and corrupt officials. There was drought and impoverished soil in the villages our neighbors hailed from, where fields could not be endlessly subdivided between generations of sons. The education and healthcare systems were inadequate. And among those we got to know, malnutrition, family cycles of violence, and psychological trauma all took their toll. Generations of discrimination too often meant that people in poverty didn’t expect much from themselves.

We were discouraged not only by the enormity of the problems faced by our neighbors, but also by the church’s failure to respond. Of the local Christians with whom we interacted, many seemed focused on a “spiritual” agenda – gathering adherents – though to be sure, they had material concerns as well: maintaining historical church buildings and air-conditioned auditoriums…”

Head on over to Plough to read the rest!

 

Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

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Thanksgiving is coming up this week, and yesterday SheLoves magazine published a piece I wrote about my childhood memories of Thanksgiving dinner and the cultural myth of scarcity that I grew up with. In light of world events over the past few weeks–violent attacks and decisions about whether to welcome refugees in the wake of that tragedy or not–the choice between living with a mindset of scarcity or a mindset of abundance has never been more crucial. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Growing up in upper-middle class American suburbia, Thanksgiving was usually the day that we ate so much our stomachs hurt—seconds and thirds and dessert, as much as we wanted, because it was a feast day. And although Thanksgiving was a special meal because it brought my extended family together for a big party, it wasn’t like we were leaving the dinner table less-than-full on other days.  I cannot remember there ever being a time when we did not have enough.

I learned early on—in school and everywhere else—that being successful required that I “get ahead.” I learned that the economy and other national interests needed to be protected at all costs, whether that meant bombing our enemies or building walls to keep them out. If they came in, they might suck away our prosperity, leech off our system or, even worse, threaten the affluence and convenience that we had come to jealously guard as our way of life.

Still, we always had more than we needed–everything in abundance–but we did not believe in abundance. Scarcity, or the threat of scarcity, always cast its shadow over our lives…”

Head on over to SheLoves Magazine to read the rest!

 

Things that happened while I was gone

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Over the weekend, Andy and I celebrated our five year wedding anniversary. We were out in the woods on a small island off the coast of BC, building small cabins that will serve as “hermitages” for people on silent retreat who need a place for deep solitude and prayer. It felt good to do some manual labor, to see tangible progress as we worked, and to feel good and tired by the end of the day, in a sore-muscle rather than a screenburned-eyes or overwrought-mind sort of way. Our motley construction crew was made up of people from all over the place, some in their teens and some in their fifties, and it was fun hanging out with people of all ages—that doesn’t happen very often outside of family reunions, and intergenerational friendship is one of the things Andy and I had enjoyed so much about living in India. After spending a long Saturday on the work site, we enjoyed a brisk swim at an isolated beach. There were Canadian geese sitting on the water around us, so it definitely stretched my idea of what summer at the beach looks like!

Apparently while we were hammering away in the woods and sleeping in rustic cabins without electricity and running water, a lot was happening back in civilization, and particularly in the country of my birth.

There was the courageous act of protest by a brave woman named Bree Newsome, who scaled the flag pole in front of the state capitol building in South Carolina to take down the symbol of white supremacy and racial violence that had flown over the seat of the state government there for more than a hundred and fifty years. Civil disobedience is intended to show the moral absurdity of laws through breaking them and willingly suffering the consequences of one’s actions. Bree’s action did exactly that: South Carolina police (including a black officer) were forced to arrest a peaceful black woman, who quoted scripture aloud as they handcuffed her, for the “crime” of removing a banner under which black Americans have been enslaved, raped, murdered, beaten, intimidated, and systematically oppressed for over a century. No scene could have more pointedly demonstrated the righteousness of her cause: the law was against her, but justice was certainly on her side. She now faces up to 3 years in prison and a fine of up to $5000 for her heroic act. All of us who follow Jesus can learn from this woman’s sacrificial example.

Also over the weekend, President Obama delivered a eulogy for Clementa Pinkney, a black pastor who was among the slain in Charleston on June 17. I don’t know what opinion you hold of Obama as a person, or a politician—I can’t think of him without remembering the countless drone attacks he has authorized against innocent civilians in the Middle East—but his eulogy for Pinkney is one of the best sermons I have ever heard, and is probably THE most powerful speech I have ever heard from a head of state. Perhaps the fact that, as President, he has made important public decisions with which nearly every one of us has disagreed at some point or another makes him exactly the kind of flawed, imperfect human being who can speak with authority about grace. Seriously, if you haven’t yet listened to the speech, please, please do. It is a heartfelt lament of the ways that we have deeply wounded one another in America, an inspiring reminder of the resilience and love that have continued to grow even in the midst of violence and oppression, and an eloquent call for us to move forward together as a nation towards forgiveness and justice, extending God’s grace to one another in every facet of our lives.

“Justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other,” he remarks at one point. “My liberty depends on you being free, too.” One can hear in these words the echoes of both Jesus’ call to love our enemies, recognizing our neighbor-hood with them, and MLK Jr.’s assertion that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The other big national news of the weekend was the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States. The reactions of many American Christians have already become an embarrassing adventure in missing the point, but I still hold out hope that we as a Church will be able to let go of our fearful siege mentality and recognize this opportunity to love and extend grace to people who may not share our sexual orientation or our theology. I’ve always been confused by the political kerfuffle over trying to legislate a Christian lifestyle into the laws of the state, since God has never called the Church to control the government. We have been given the task of modeling the Kingdom in our own lives, creating a community that images God’s hospitality and love, and inviting others into freely-chosen, loving relationship with God.

Using legal means to force non-Christians into choices and behaviors that Christians have specifically chosen as disciples of Christ seems not only pointless, but controlling and counterproductive to our true mission in the world. If we send the message to the people around us that we are more concerned about policing their sex lives than about caring for them as people, then we’ve not just lost the “culture wars”—we’ve lost the respect and trust that would have laid the foundations for any relationship with people outside the church to grow. We’ve lost our credibility as God’s ambassadors of love. We’ve lost our purpose as a community.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be involved in wider culture—we certainly should. But even in the realm of sex and relationships, why not concern ourselves with the destructive forces of pornography, trafficking, sexual abuse, and domestic violence that are destroying vulnerable individuals and families and marriages? Which will give a clearer picture of God: a Christian reacting with fear-mongering and angry statements in protest of same-sex marriage, or that same Christian instead demonstrating a mature ability to be gracious with people who disagree with them, whose lives and choices are different from his own? Some Christians have compared homosexuals with Hitler, referred to them as “Gaystapo,” or likened the court’s ruling to the 9/11 Terrorist attacks. Regardless of what we believe about homosexuality, angry antics like these should offend our consciences as Christians. Would Jesus be stirring up fear and hatred at a time like this? Or would he be inviting a same-sex couple over for dinner to hear their story and get to know them as people, refusing to reduce the complex beauty of their humanity down to a single political issue or life decision? I get the sense that he’s probably prompting us to do that right now.

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When we landed in Delhi, we noticed the usual things first: the crowds, the grime, the thick smoke hanging in the air from the little fires everyone burns this time of year to keep warm in the mornings and evenings. The area around the train station isn’t necessarily a fair representation of the country, because parts of India are beautiful, peaceful, and clean, but this was the gritty neighborhood where we took a small, dingy hotel room to await the departure of our train a day and a half after we flew in. The train was of course delayed, but this time we had bunks to ourselves and the car wasn’t nearly as crowded as the one that had taken us to Delhi two months before. I was feeling irritated by the delay and by the grimy railway station platform where we had waited before even boarding the train. I was also irritated that someone had stolen A.’s shoes on the train while we were sleeping, so that on arrival he walked off the train barefoot like an Indian holy man. But as we left the train station I felt my spirits lifting in spite of myself. It was sunny and cool, and as we sped along in the autorickshaw, I had to smile at the familiar scenes of street life that we breezed past: chai stands, laborers waiting for work, goats, cows, rickshaws, and pedestrians everywhere—chaotic and pulsing with life, the way that all of India is, with an energy that makes you excited and makes you want to be part of it all. It was less crowded and more laid-back than in Delhi. And the sky was actually blue.

Then back into our community: smiles, laughter, holding new babies that were born while we were gone, and somberly receiving news about the old men who died in our absence. People are happy, people are sad; some are healthy and some are sick. People have engagements and sorrows and secrets to tell us about, and we are part of it all, again. Everyone is telling us how much they missed us and how glad they are that we’re back. Our landlord’s two-year-old son started talking since we left and one of the few words he knows is my husband’s name, which he apparently began calling out at our door while we were gone and which he now happily yells up the stairwell when we are sitting in our room with the door open. I feel a sense of belonging that I have missed without realizing it; that I had been searching for without realizing it was here. I make roti in my simple kitchen, looking at the happy colors of the fresh green peppers and orange dal and red and yellow spices sitting in glass jars on my counter. I savor the familiar sound of the call to prayer, I rediscover the taste of chai with salt, I get my tongue around those strange d’s and r’s again and remember what things are called in Hindi. I wonder how we ever slept through all the night noises, but then I do. I feel a sense of peace and gratitude that I haven’t felt for a very long time, even before we left for the States.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. In fact, while we waited in limbo for our visas I had gone back and forth many times in my mind over whether or not I could really survive in India, or whether or not I even wanted to—you can survive a lot more than you would like to, sometimes.  These were questions I was afraid to even ask, feeling paralyzed in both directions if I were actually to make a decision. Or be told what to decide. If God asked me to stay, then I would feel trapped; if He asked me to leave, I felt I would be a failure. To my surprise (and initial horror), God turned the question back around on me and asked me what I wanted. After it became quite clear that He had no intention of making the decision for me, that there could be good and fruitful outcomes no matter what, and that I had complete freedom to do as I pleased, I initially felt more confusion than relief. But this realization then launched me into several weeks of contemplating the future without guilt or fear to drive the process.

I eventually found that in spite of my stressful experiences in India thus far, my uncertainty about what the future would hold, and my doubts about how much I can handle, I really wanted to go back to my community in India– not out of duty or guilt or fear or anything else, but out of love. I want to see some of my hopes for this place realized. I want to be there for people over time. I want to press on, for the first time in my life, past the restlessness and boredom and difficulty and frustration that so often tempt me to distract myself with something new and exciting. I do enjoy all of the great food, comforts, conveniences, and familiar cultural experiences that India does NOT have to offer, but I want to experience the deeper joy that comes from committing to a particular place and to particular people past the point where it’s just fun and convenient. I want to stick around long enough for me to actually change, instead of just opting for a change of scenery. That’s not easy when I have friends scattered around the world and can travel between nearly any two points on the globe in 24 hours. All that mobility and connectedness gives me the sense that I could go almost anywhere and do nearly anything (all the while comparing my situation side-by-side with others’ on social media), but I believe that committing to throw in our lot with a particular community—limiting ourselves to one choice among all the hypothetical possibilities that remain—is a universal challenge we all must face. In my own life, I am convinced that my spiritual growth depends on it.

So we’re back in our “village” again, and this time it feels like a gift. That has made all the difference. The air is thick with possibilities, and yet the present moment itself is full.

The Bad News is Over

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          As a mentor of ours in New Zealand likes to say, “The Good News is that the bad news is over.” He says that to discover what Jesus’ message is for a given person or society, you first have to find out what the circumstances of that particular person or group are: their motivations, their hopes and fears, their problems, and their life experiences. What is it that is keeping them from God? Where are they in need of hope, or healing? The amazing thing about Jesus is that even while he proclaims universal truths about what it means to be human, he also approaches individual human beings with a personal message of truth for them. God is one, yet he meets each of us on different journeys and in different ways.

To the rich young ruler, the good news is that Jesus is inviting him to cast off all of the wealth, possessions, and comfort that have blocked him from experiencing real life with all of its joys and sorrows, and he lays before him the opportunity to commune with God through loving service and relationship with other people. To the impoverished paralytic by the side of the pool of Siloam who has never known comfort or riches, who has spent years waiting for someone more powerful than himself to rescue him, Jesus speaks words of healing and empowerment: “Get up and walk.”

To the Pharisees, who have spent their lives pursuing the spiritual disciplines of fasting, pious works, and thorough obedience to religious law, Jesus breaks through the delusion that they have achieved true relationship with God by denouncing heir false piety and pointing them toward the path that would rescue them from their particular bondage: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” His repeated, harsh rebukes of these arrogant men are actually a loving and persistent call for them to embrace the only change that could save them. But with those who are buried in shame and guilt rather than pride and apparent righteousness, Jesus takes a different tack. There is no rebuke from him for the woman caught in adultery. Jesus never snuffs out a smoldering wick or breaks a bruised reed, and he recognizes the poor in spirit when he sees them. In this case, it is the self-righteous accusers who are shamed out of following through with the punishment they had planned, and Jesus offers that fallen woman the surprise of mercy and a fresh start instead of the anger she expected from God and society alike.

Everyone’s journey is different. Some people come chasing after Jesus with a determined hope that refuses to be turned away—think of the blind man crying out to Jesus over the demands of the crowd for him to shut up, or the guys lowering their disabled friend down to Jesus through a hole they had dug in a stranger’s roof, because they were determined to get to Jesus in spite of the long line of people waiting outside. Other people are just minding their own business, or even hiding from Jesus, when he begins pursuing them: that’s the Samaritan woman at the well, who’s taken off guard by the man who strikes up conversation with her in spite of the taboos which divide their genders, their religions, and their races. That’s also Zacchaeus, who thinks he is inconspicuously observing Jesus from the safe distance of his tree branch when Jesus puts him on the spot and invites himself over for lunch.

And so it is with our journeys: different people, different seasons, different truths which Jesus speaks into our lives to guide us down the particular path which will lead each of us to God. I’m trying to get better about accepting that, so I can stop judging other people according to the truth that has been give to me. Like Peter on the beach with Jesus, hearing that the road ahead of him will include suffering and a sacrifice of his personal freedom, I turn to others and want to know, “What about these guys? Are they going to have to give up as much as I do to follow you?” And Jesus, still the same 2,000 years later, replies simply, “What is that to you? You, follow me.”

It is probably my growing awareness of the unique and personal nature of journeying with Jesus that has me so frustrated with the spiritual formulas, the moral rules, and the angry God of judgment that I so often hear proclaimed in churches as supposedly “good news”. This message of fear and judgment does nothing to cure the disease of the righteous religious people who already know the formulas and keep the rules, and it crushes the people who are already “bruised reeds”–the sexually broken, the abused, those who already hate themselves and expect rejection from God with equal intensity.

I think the Good News is love—in all of its universal truth and individual expression. Love was what Jesus offered to pharisees, paralytics, and prostituted women alike, but because he knew each of them down to the very core of their being, the path toward God he offered to each of them was unique. The good news for each of them, and for each of us, is that the bad news is over.

"Who is my neighbor?"

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water buffalo and laundry hanging out to dry… it’s another beautiful day on the riverbank.

 

          Traffic. Birds chirping. Neighbors’ voices through the walls. Sitar and drums blaring out from someone’s cell phone as they walk past our room playing music from the latest Hindi film. Cows mooing. People shooing cows away from their doors (“Hut! Hut!”). Children’s laughter. Hammers and saws at work in the woodshop across the alley. These are some of the sounds that greet us when we first open our eyes under the mosquito net in the morning. Our community is a noisy place, and the longer you lay in bed in the morning, the more sounds join the chorus. Sometimes we love all the noise, and other times it drives us crazy, but either way the cacophony reminds us that there’s a lot of life going on out there.

More and more life all the time, actually– this week, two new babies were born in our community. Yesterday afternoon, drummers came to pound out a beat in front of one family’s house; an excited crowd gathered in the alley around their door, and the new baby’s relatives took turns dancing in the middle. That night, the other family hosted a party and gave out dinner and sweets to celebrate new life. It seems that whatever is going on in people’s lives and families, whether deaths or births or weddings or arguments or celebrations or grief, it is usually shared with others.

In Luke chapter 10, Jesus is cross-examined by an “expert in the law” who wants to know what he must do to “enter into life.” Jesus’ reply is simply to direct the man back to the words he has already read hundreds of times in the law: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”; and, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The man had intended to engage Jesus in a theological debate, so he is disappointed with this straightforward response. Flustered, he searches for a way to make things more complicated—and to relieve himself of responsibility: “Who is my neighbor?” he asks.

This morning, for the first time, this man’s question struck us as odd. These days, waiting in line for the outhouse together, sharing laundry line space, talking at the doorway and through the walls, eating together, experiencing the rain and the power outages and the festivals together, there is no way that we could ever be confused about who our neighbors are. We often fail at loving our neighbors as ourselves (particularly the ones with whom we share the closest quarters!), but our lives are so intertwined with theirs that it would be impossible for us to ask who our neighbors are. This man’s question to Jesus reveals that he was probably living in such isolation from the people—and the needs—around him to the point that he could really look around without seeing any “neighbors”. Put enough walls and busyness between you and the people around you, and you will become oblivious to the demands and joys of neighbor-hood with other human beings!

As humans, we are dynamic rather than static beings, so learning to recognize our neighbors and become neighbors to other people is not a matter of static location somewhere on the continuum between solidarity with our neighbors and isolation from them. It is a question of movement—with each decision we make, about where to live, and how to live, we can move either toward greater solidarity with others, or greater isolation. There is no set expression of what this movement will look like for each individual, as we all begin in different places (and even living in a slum does not guarantee that we will consistently choose to move toward solidarity rather than toward isolation). But the movement is the important thing.

SOLIDARITY <—————————————————————-> ISOLATION

We are learning that Jesus calls us to live life in such a way that the question of, “Who is my neighbor?” becomes irrelevant because we are already living life alongside the diverse lot of strangers, enemies, and friends whom we have recognized and accepted as our neighbors.

Who is my neighbor?