Tag: resurrection

Remnants: an interview with Jenny Hawkinson

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Back in June, I interviewed my talented friend Jenny Hawkinson for an article with Cordella Magazine, an online quarterly featuring women artists and writers,  and the piece has just been published today. Jenny is a visual artist in the downtown east side of Vancouver, the same neighborhood where Andy and I lived in an intentional community for the first few months after we moved to Canada.

In the past, I never had much appreciation of art for its own sake–art sometimes struck me as irrelevant or elitist; an impractical luxury when there are so many “real” issues going on in the world. But I’ve learned a lot from Jenny about the importance of art in cultivating hope, building community, and imagining the kind of world we want to work toward. Her life is a beautiful example of what it looks like to share life with people on the margins of society, and to engage with the brokenness of the world through art.

Click on over to read the interview and see some of Jenny’s beautiful work!

The story I carry inside me

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bowen island

“The past year has perhaps been the most difficult one of my life.”

So begins the blog post I’ve written for The Mudroom today. It’s the most vulnerable thing I’ve written recently: a reflection on the experience of deciding to leave India and then struggling to find my feet again in the West. The piece is a very brief snapshot of what has been and continues to be a difficult and beautiful journey for me.

For the past 10 months in Vancouver, I’ve been prevented from working or beginning grad school because of a lengthy immigration process. I’ve often felt trapped by my powerlessness to do anything about my permanent residency, and I’ve been frustrated by having so much time at loose ends. I said when I came here that I was looking for a season of rest and healing, but I have continued to fight that every step of the way, wanting desperately to jump into another busy season and another purposeful role that might provide a new identity for me instead of allowing my identity to be completely separated out from what I do. Who am I when I simply am?

When I allow myself to accept what is happening instead of trying so hard to change it, I recognize the gift of this time. I was able to go to counseling for several months to process my experiences in India (and my life up to this point); to gain valuable insights and skills. I took advantage of the opportunity to go on a few days’ silent retreat during Advent, and I’ll be returning to the same tranquil island for a 10-day silent retreat at the end of this month (a prospect which both thrills and terrifies me). I’ve had the time to get to know refugee claimants at Kinbrace, holding babies and cutting birthday cakes and eating delicious foods that remind my new friends of their faraway families and homes. Andy and I have been sheltered by a church community and befriended by a circle of wonderful people who make Vancouver feel like home for us weary travelers.

One of the biggest gifts of my enforced joblessness has been the freedom to write for long stretches of time. I’ve written a few freelance pieces here and there, but mainly I’ve been writing my book. I had no idea how long it would take. When I finished my first draft after six months, I remember thinking, “How do people spend years writing a single book?” Now I understand. Though not as much as I’m sure I will understand a few months from now, when I realize (again) how many steps I didn’t know about!

The process of writing a book has often felt like bushwhacking a trail through the jungle; I’m never sure what lies ahead or how far away my destination is. But without fail, at every moment of uncertainty a sign has appeared—in the form of a person I meet, a conversation I have, or a piece of information I come across—to direct me a few paces further. It has been by turns exhilarating, tedious, and discouraging. I’ll work on one part of my manuscript and think, Damn, this is good. Then later I’ll come back to it and think with alarm, This will never turn into a book.

I didn’t realize what a deeply personal and reflective process the writing would turn out to be. I didn’t realize how much of my own story—before, during, and after India—I would have to be willing to spill onto the page. I’ve had to face my fears of failure and of vulnerability again and again, but here—on the third draft—I’m feeling a growing confidence that there will actually be something to show at the end of all this craziness.

“The end” hasn’t yet been assigned a fixed date on the calendar, but it’s probably a testament to the growth of the past few months that the uncertainty no longer destabilizes me. In the meantime, click on over to The Mudroom to read more about the journey that is continuing to shape me, and my book.

burnout recovery process

I am writing a book.

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Three days ago, we had the first snowfall of the season, and it’s still on the ground. Here in Canada, everything is cold and white right now, and I sleep under thick blankets, type next to a space heater during the day, and try to learn how to dress properly with layers and layers of wool. I still remember those TV infomercials a few years ago about “Snuggies,” the blankets with arms that looked like cultic robes when the ad showed what looked like a family of suburban Druids enjoying a nighttime camp fire in their matching fleece ensemble. Now I am cold enough to wear a snuggie around the house without shame, cold enough not to care whether I look like an infomercial from the last decade or a member of a pagan cult.Advent has just begun: the season of waiting for the first spark of hope in the dead of winter, of looking for signs of life in the midst of death. Even Christmas itself will not the triumphant victory of Easter–it will be the quiet celebration of hope born into the world, even while oppression reigns. Shepherds and wise men visit this child in secret, because baby Jesus will still have to flee Herod’s genocide and grow up under foreign occupation before he leads justice to victory and inaugurates the Kingdom. I feel the tension and the hope of this waiting, this hope that is stubborn but uncertain of when fulfillment and completion will come.

I look at squirrel and bird tracks in the snow on the roof outside my window as I edit the manuscript of my book. The scenes outside are so different from the ones that linger in my mind. I’m writing about my life in India: what it was like to be an outsider accepted into community across boundaries of race, religion, culture, and socioeconomic background. I’m writing about how life with Muslim friends shaped my own faith, and how confronting suffering in the lives of my neighbors who were materially poor has challenged me to make sense of where God is in the midst of all the pain. I’m writing about how Muslims and Christians and rich and poor need one another, about what it means for us to love our enemies, and about the changes that community brings in us as individuals and in our world. I’m primarily writing about my own journey, and the love that I have continued to discover no matter how far I travel in any direction.

The process of writing has been good for me. It forces me to be present to process rather than destination, and this is certainly a process over which I have only limited control and knowledge about how long it will take or what the final result will be.

But it’s difficult, because sometimes spending my days writing feels like living with ghosts—not only of my friends and neighbors in India, but of many of my own dreams, expectations, and self-definitions as well. Aside from that, daring to ask for help, to show my writing to others, or to even say out loud that I am working on a book brings my insecurities out of the shadows, revealing my fears about whether this story really will come together in the end, whether it will get published, what people will think about it (and about me) if it is published.

But I believe that it is a story worth telling, even a story that needs to be told, and so I keep on writing. I am struggling, not to bring characters to life, but to allow the vibrant life of the real people I have known to shine through the pages. I want you to see them, to care about them, to learn from them. I am still learning from them myself.

Advent has begun: the season of waiting, expectation, and hope. Whispered promises of new possibilities to come. I am living towards these possibilities, working towards what, as yet, I have never seen but still believe is possible. I struggle on despite my fears, my fresh memories of loss, and the uncertainties of the future.

I trust that new life can begin even in the dead of winter, that those whispers of hope are trustworthy, and that we are but the midwives of the dreams God wants to birth into this world.

Stay tuned.

A new beginning (and a poem from the ashes)

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We’ve been in Canada for a month now. In some ways, it feels that we’ve been here much longer: we have been the eager recipients of hospitality in a loving community that has sheltered us and softened our landing in this new country. Even as new arrivals, we have shared most meals with friends, entered into daily and weekly rhythms of prayer and worship with others, played with children, and felt at home. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this as we begin to get our feet under us again. Just sharing the domestic sphere of cooking, cleaning, and common space with others brings a sense of belonging that is rare to find so quickly when one shows up in a new city without an existing network of relationships, or even a job. It’s ironic to think that we’ve moved into a “joint family” living situation only after leaving India, where we were surrounded by people who found it strange for the two of us to be living “alone”!

This community is centered around hospitality. When we briefly passed through this community several years ago, we were inspired to participate in extending this invitation of hospitality to neighbors who often brought their struggles with mental illness, addiction, prostitution, homelessness, or poverty into the house. Some of them are refugees and migrants. Others have been internally displaced within their own culture and society.

This time, however, we’ve returned to the community as strangers and foreigners in need of hospitality ourselves. This time, we feel most inspired by the hospitality that has been extended to us, from community members and neighbors alike. Community dinners at our house bring the whole diverse and quirky lot of us together, and it can be quite the adventure. The lines are blurred between who is hosting and who is being hosted; who is extending grace and who is receiving it. Several people from the neighborhood are long-time friends of the community who know what it’s like to live on the streets or to fight through an addiction, and they have become important partners in extending hospitality to others—they are some of the best cooks we have, they share their insight and their stories with us, and they offer compassionate, listening ears to newcomers.

***

We have yet to really process what it means to have uprooted ourselves from the slum in India and moved here. It will take time to unpack that experience; even our last day in the slum was stuffed full of the roller coaster of emotions I had felt throughout the time I lived there: waves of sadness, anger, tenderness, frustration, laughter, happiness, and grief. I felt exhausted by everyone’s desire to be with us as much as possible in those last hours. I felt overwhelmed by the intensity of their need. I felt humbled, too, by the gifts we received: one last, home cooked meal with our Indian family; hugs and kisses on the cheek from the little children who have become like nieces and nephews to us; a painting from my “little sister.”

“Just think,” our former landlady had told us earlier that week, “when you first arrived here, no one even wanted to offer you a room, because they didn’t know you. Now there’s not a single person in this neighborhood who isn’t sad you’re leaving.”

Those words express the heart and soul of what our time in India meant. By the time we actually walked out of the community, it felt like we were attending our own funeral. Thirty or forty people escorted us up to the main road in a somber procession and blocked traffic as they crowded around to hug us, say their final goodbyes, and flag down an auto rickshaw for us. Many people were sobbing openly. So were we, by the time we drove away. I feel many things about leaving, but in that moment the only thing I felt was immeasurable loss.

Sometimes these experiences elude the grasp of everyday language. They can’t find full expression in words of any kind, but poetry more closely approximates their meaning. I wrote some poetry a few days before our departure:

On the occasion of my leaving
this battlefield and second home,
strewn with unfulfilled hopes, half-discovered mysteries,
love, laughter, triumph, and sorrow,
a poem:

For the children locked up in dark rooms,
and the ones singing film songs, flying kites, playing marbles in the alleyway;

For the parents screaming at their children,
and for the mothers tenderly nursing infants; the proud fathers with toddlers in their arms;

For the women with broken bangles and bruised eyes,
for the grown-up boys who beat them;

For the men earning survival with their sweat and exhaustion,
and for the ones drowning in a malaise of alcohol and ganja,

For the feuds and fights and angry words,
reverberating off the narrow brick walls of the alleyways, and lodging in wounded hearts;

For the communal prayers also, and the generosity of neighbors:
meals for widows, and foreigners, and orphans;

For all the beauty and pain I have seen,
For the cruelty and the love.
Both have taken my breath away, in turns.

No victims here, and no heroes;
No one evil and no one righteous
(myself included)
All facets of the human heart laid bare
In these dusty alleyways and close quarters

Where there are no secrets
(except the ones we keep from ourselves),
And no illusions
(besides the ones in our own minds).

For all of us:
May we find peace
Instead of everything else we go in search of,
To fill the space where love alone belongs.

A death in the neighborhood

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There’s so much more I want to write about the things that go on in the lives of my neighbors and in my own life, but sharing it in short bursts online seems an inappropriate avenue. It would take a book to convey the complexities of all our lives, tangled up as we are in each other’s stories, and to explore all the things I am learning and unlearning in this wild, beautiful, and terrifying place. I intend to write that book someday, after more of the dust has settled and I am able to understand my experiences more clearly than I can today. But for now I’ll have to settle for sharing the soul of what’s on my mind, without sharing the details of the stories that have brought it about.It’s sad and confusing to see a life end with no apparent redemption in the arc of its story.

The bulk of my time and energy since has gone into being with those who are still alive and must carry on, but the suddenness of death in our neighborhood—again—turns my thoughts toward the reality that whether we die unexpectedly or old and boney, there is no surprise in the eventual end of life for each one of us. We are finite creatures, and death is unavoidable. I so often approach life as a project: I plan out the arc of my life, what I will accomplish, where I will go, who I will become. I try to assume control by planning, scheduling, keeping busy. But then I am reminded how quickly grief and loss could change my life completely, stealing away the people I love most, taking away the relationships and routines that make up the day-to-day fabric of my existence. I am sobered by the reality that all of this is beyond my control, and in the end life is not so much what I create for myself as it is what comes to me, and how I choose to respond.

All this meditation on death isn’t intended to be morbid. It’s actually a reflection on life: in light of the impending obliteration of all my worldly ambitions and activity, what is really worth my attention and energy in the meantime? What will remain after that final deconstruction of everything I have sought to accomplish and become? No status, recognition, or accumulation of possessions or material comforts will matter. Only the actions which I join to God’s larger action in the world will last, because God will continue to act in the world after I am gone, just as He was doing before my birth. Joining God in loving, serving, working for justice, and promoting truth is what will continue to matter beyond my lifetime. This is also what grows my own soul, and what prepares me for my continuing journey toward God, beyond the expiration date of this temporary body.

This doesn not mean that our bodies and spirits are entirely separate from one another, or that “spiritual” things are more important than “material” ones—God’s love is the cornerstone of the whole universe, and it’s the basis of everything else that is. In fact, the resurrection that Jesus talks about includes our bodies–scripture talks about God’s plan for healing and restoring the earth and raising us to live again within it, not taking us away to live somewhere else as disembodied spirits. So the warmth of the morning sun on my neck, the chirping of birds in the trees, the steaming cup of coffee in my mug, the laughter that I share with friends, and the gratifying soreness I feel in my muscles after exercise are all good and important things. They are gifts from this loving God who is the author of Life itself, and in whom everything lives, moves, and has its being. Life was God’s idea—sex and good food and sand between our toes.

But the trick to really enjoying all of these material gifts is being able to let them go. Detachment from each of these pleasures as an end in itself is the only way to embrace the Giver himself. It is also the only way that we will be able to experience the full breadth of existence, instead of constantly struggling to avoid suffering, grief, and loss (which are also gifts to us, if we have eyes to see). Spiritual teachers from the time of the Buddha, or probably earlier, have taught that life is suffering, and they have sought to free themselves from that suffering. But Jesus takes things a step further by turning suffering itself into a means of liberation: his suffering and death have transformed those things into sacred tools which can serve our good. Death has no power to destroy us, if the growing weakness and eventual defeat of our bodies gives us the chance to learn at an accelerated pace important that have eluded us throughout our lives. At the moment of death, we are no longer able to maintain our beauty, health, strength, usefulness, or whatever else we used throughout our lives to try to earn love, or to perpetuate the illusion that we were independent and in control. Freed from all these things, we have the chance to learn for the first time that we are loved apart from any of it—loved for ourselves alone.

Paradoxically, the path to authentic life takes us smack-dab through the middle of death. This is the mystery of resurrection: not simply life or death, but crucifixion and rebirth. Life has the final word, God has the final victory… but He has won by way of passing through defeat. This reflection on the transience of my life makes me long to move at last from compulsion to contemplation; from building a life and creating myself to accepting life and surrendering to the process of uncovering the self which God has already created: the one that so often gets lost or obscured behind the images I project to the world, the coping strategies I employ, and the things I strive to do or become.

 

The Neglected Center

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This week I read a very insightful article* about cultivating a “spirituality of contentment” through living a simple lifestyle that draws us into greater connection with God, our neighbors, the Creation, and ourselves. The author of this article, Dee Dee Risher, writes as a seasoned veteran of this approach to life, and as someone who is well-acquainted with its particular gifts and struggles. She is aware that “simple living” has the ironic tendency of becoming a very complicated existence which obsesses over material concerns: how many things do we own? How much money do we spend? How many square feet do we live in? According to Risher, all of these material concerns as a tell-tale sign that the external changes in our lives have outpaced the inner transformation of our heart, so that we are ascetically denying ourselves of things without moving toward some alternative. Simplicity, she says, is not about going without. Its about building something new: moving positively toward a fuller life that would have been impossible without the clutter in our lives being cleared away. If we try to throw off the yoke of mainstream culture without developing an alternative dream, then we will never be content because we will always be longing for the very things we have decided to set aside. For most of us middle- and upper-class North Americans, the narrative that has been programmed into us is upward mobility, accumulation of possessions, comforts, and status. It involves making a place for ourselves in the world and then sitting back to enjoy the fruits of our labors, letting others compete with us and fare poorly or well as they may. This is essentially the American Dream. If we want to walk a different path, then we need a different dream to guide us, because merely building our identity or our life in opposition to something will only turn us into a hollow inverse of what we wish to change. We won’t have created anything new.

//

I resonated with this problem of externals outpacing internals. Perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened to me, living in the slum. Up til now, my spiritual growth has always been driven by external experiences. As I have chosen to act on what I felt was right, what I read in the gospels of Jesus’ life, my experiences of reaching out to others to serve them and to get to know them has always led me into deeper understanding and experience with God. External actions and circumstances have seemed to drive internal transformation, and perhaps that’s as it must be, in the beginning. Until we leave the realm of what we already know, how can we encounter anything new, or challenging, or larger than ourselves?

But I think this necessary and appropriate pattern may have led me, somewhere along the way, to mistake the means for the end. Serving the poor is the ultimate goal, I decided, living as simply as possible in the worst possible place and doing as much as possible to help. Alas, I am discovering that the opposite is true: compassion and service and simplicity should be the means of communing with God, of recognizing God in myself and the people around me (especially the suffering poor), and of joyfully living in Love’s embrace.

How did Jesus live? I asked myself. He hung out with outcasts, poor people, blind people, sick people, enemy soldiers, their yellow-bellied tax collector cronies, and heretical half-breeds like the Samaritans. So that’s what I’ll do, I thought. Find the poor and the outcasts, befriend them, tell them that God loves them, and invite them into the community of the Kingdom in which there is always a place for them at the table.

What I failed to realize until I was smack-dab in the middle of the needy crowds, trying to offer hope to the down-and-out people spit out by the system, was that Jesus didn’t just up and begin his mission with the sheer force of willpower. It takes more than principles or warm fuzzies to sustain any kind of long-term commitment to the messy occupation of loving other people, particularly in a demanding and depressing context like a slum. I neglected to pay attention to the forty days of fasting and prayer in the desert which immediately preceded Jesus’ public life, the lonely hours of prayer and solitude which sustained it, and the 30 years of spiritual preparation that preceded it. Jesus was only able to do what he did because of his strength constantly being renewed by God inside Him. He was only able to maintain hope among misery because of his intense awareness of God’s loving presence; to experience joy in the midst of exhaustion and suffering because he was already well-experienced in cultivating an awareness of God’s presence in all circumstances; to weather frequent rejection and confrontation, and eventually total betrayal, because by the time these things happened to him, he had such an unshakeable sense of his identity as the Beloved of God that he was entirely free from the opinions of others—free enough to serve others without any need of gratitude, to love even those who repaid his compassion with hatred.

This incredible love and courage was only possible for Jesus because he had already experienced this unconditional love in the depths of his own being. It had defined him, and it had become the root of everything he did.

//

As for me, all the labor of love has been exhausting, and my feverish attempts to pour myself out has revealed an emptiness in myself that I was never aware of before. Now its impossible to ignore the aching expanse within myself that has yet to be filled with the unconditional love of God. I am yet to claim my identity as the Beloved, and am desperately trying to build an identity for myself out of all the good things I am doing. See how much I suffer! See how much I am willing to sacrifice! My soul yells. I will earn your love yet. And yet…

God is not waiting for a display of faithful obedience, for exploits of courage and self-denial in order to embrace me. He embraces me with my empty hands and tattered clothes, as the beggar that I am. As the child who could ever do anything to make her Parent love her more or less. As the Prodigal son, returned home after all his fruitless attempts at making a life worth living for himself apart from the love of his Father.

I am the poor, I am the sick, I am the rejected. I wait in grief and hope for the mercy of God to reveal my true identity to me, for God to rock me to sleep in strong arms like a newborn baby, safe and wanted and loved. My neighbors often bear their scars and their struggles openly on their faces and in the rough edges of their lives, but mine are hidden inside.

I am the poor and they are me. God is in us, and we are in Him. Perhaps the whole purpose of life is for us to realize, together, the depth of our poverty, and to help one another to accept the Love that will satisfy it.

*Cultivating A Spirituality of Contentment by Dee Dee Risher

Source: New feed

Easter

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Picture

“The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” by Caravaggio

 

In my little corner of the world, I see a lot of suffering and death. I spend a lot more time contemplating the crucifixion and that silent Saturday when Jesus remained in the tomb than I ever used to in the West. It’s easier to believe in victory and new life when most of the people around you are doing well, and most of the stories you know turn out OK. It’s harder to keep faith in resurrection when most of the people around you aren’t doing OK; when they’re doing horrible things to each other and having horrible things done to them. Sometimes you lose track of the plot line when bad things happen one after another with no resolution and no catharsis, just banal disappointments that drip out like a leaky faucet.These days I often find myself walking through thin places between hope and despair, and the question is unresolved in my mind as to whether or not anything we do is worth it; whether all will be made well in the end. But there is room for all of that in faith—there has to be. Without that kind of desperation, what is the meaning of hope?

These last few days as I have contemplated the story of Jesus—his tragic death, his closest friends betraying and abandoning him, his anguished voice wondering aloud from the cross whether God is still with him in the midst of so much pain—something new has come into focus for me for the first time:

The resurrection was a surprise.

Everyone, everyone had given up on Jesus. His closest friends and followers whom he had literally spent years teaching and preparing for this moment. He had told them so many times that he would suffer and die, but that wouldn’t be the end, and they couldn’t grasp it. When he was tortured and killed by the state and the religious institution they were still fumbling around in the dark for what the kingdom meant and how it was possible that their fearless leader could have failed to accomplish his mission. He was dead and gone, and they thought it was over. The women mourned him and prepared spices to pay their last respects; the men returned to their fishing nets, disillusioned.

I think it was only their total despair which catalyzed such unbelievable joy when these disillusioned followers discovered Jesus alive, and it was this tangible experience of moving through death and loss to new life that made their faith so strong from that point onward. If they had confidently expected his triumphant return all along, then perhaps they wouldn’t have had a real sense of being delivered from any real danger or pain. Real suffering brings questions to the surface, and even to the lips of Jesus: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So Jesus didn’t hold his friends’ doubt against them. Peter, poor Peter who had denied his best friend and teacher three times to save his own skin: Jesus cooks him breakfast on the beach, reinstates him, and entrusts him with the future of his movement (“On this rock I will build my church…”). There is resurrection in Peter’s own heart as Jesus forgives him and Peter learns to trust himself again. Later this former turncoat will be faithful to the point of death on a cross himself.

I often feel overwhelmed by the current state of the world, and I wonder how the kingdom can ever come. I find it hard to imagine history somehow rolling on from the present into heaven on earth. But I read this story and I realize that there is a place in the Easter narrative for the grief and confusion I so often feel. For Peter and the others, there was as little continuity between their experience of absolute loss on Friday and absolute joy on Sunday as there is between my current experience of the impoverished, suffering world as it is and the world as it will be when it is restored.

I am not lost. I am seeing Saturday. But Sunday morning will come, when I least expect it.

And it does come, even now—in those little signs of hope, tiny as mustard seeds, that spring up through the ground of despair. We see resurrection in our relationships when we offer forgiveness after conflict seems to have killed off affection and friendship, or when we creatively imagine new possibilities out of apparent failures. We catch a glimpse of the kingdom when we share a joyful meal with people of different languages, cultures, and religions, choosing to build community instead of walls. There is resurrection in my own heart when old wounds are bandaged and they heal. There is hope when we sow and sow and sow, and then one seed (maybe one in a hundred) bursts into life, we know not how.

I wrote last year about hope being a candle in the dark, never quite filling the room but never ceasing to burn either. Sometimes hope still feels like a lonely candle, but other times I get the sense that what I’m seeing is not just a small flame in the darkness, but rather slivers of a huge light behind everything that’s merely been painted over with black. Perhaps as we work to uncover more and more, we discover that the darkness, convincing as it may be, is what is surface-level and temporary, while the light is what is real and permanent and strong.

May we have the courage to suffer with Christ in the people around us.

May we have the faith to live in hope of new life,

the eyes to see it coming,

and the joy of helping to bring it into being.

May we practice resurrection in our lives.

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.

Is that enough?

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          I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the frailty of truth, love, and beauty in the world. Those are the underdogs, compared to the powerful, evil systems that run most things. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why Jesus describes the Kingdom as a mustard plant, or yeast working its way through bread dough… slow, subtle change that eventually transforms the whole. I’ve been thinking about what it means to have faith. After journeying all this way with Him, I don’t think I could ever come to doubt the existence of God (been there, done that). But I’m coming to see that faith has to do with a lot more than believing in God’s existence or His power. For me, the essential question is whether, in a world of so much suffering, the Kingdom will actually come. Do I believe in resurrection? Not just Jesus’ resurrection, but the restoration of all things, the redemption of all that is evil and broken, the new creation growing out of the old? Do I believe that God has the final victory and will make all things well, even though I see so few signs of hope in the present?

I suppose that our decision to move into a slum was a huge act of faith in the first place. It was a choice to live in hope that God will bring transformation, and a declaration that we are so convinced of that inevitable change that we are willing to stay here until it happens. I know that as they struggle with hunger, sickness, abuse, and systemic injustice, a lot of our neighbors feel hopeless about life ever changing. But today it occurred to me that in Mark chapter 2 when that paralyzed man was lowered down to Jesus through the roof of a packed house in Palestine two thousand years ago, it was because of his friends’ faith that he was healed. Who knows whether he was feeling confident in that moment of whether he would be healed or not, but his friends were certainly taking some drastic action on the assumption that he would be.  Perhaps his own mind was ablaze with fear and skepticism, but that mustard seed of faith from his friends was enough. And I wonder if maybe that can be the kind of faith that we hold on our neighbors’ behalf here. If there are even just two people out of the thousands in our neighborhood who believe that transformation is possible, is that enough? Is that the mustard seed that can grow into a wild, vibrant mustard plant and take over the garden? I’m living on the assumption that it is.