Guatemala, Part I

I leave for Guatemala on Tuesday. I love to say that. I have learned that the best part of an exotic trip is rarely the trip itself. Some people are the adventurous type. I am a homebody who still manages to travel regularly. So each trip is a challenge, pushing me beyond my comfort zone, demanding that I release control of my life, forcing me into contact with those I don’t know, reshaping my understanding of myself and the world. I get stressed choosing places to eat or what to eat. I get tired and crabby after a day of endless decisions. I worry that I am in the wrong place or doing the wrong thing all the time. So why do I keep traveling? Why do I keep putting myself through all of this?

The most noble reason is to learn more of the world… and that is certainly a piece of this trip to Guatemala. I have never been to Central America. I have been to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, but this will be something different. I have been watching some videos and doing a little reading on the history of the country. I am not sure what it means to be a tourist in a country so recently ravaged by civil war. It has only been 10 years since the peace accords were signed between the government and the guerillas. The village we will be visiting will not be telling us history. They will be telling us the stories of their lives. I am grateful for the chance to grasp even a little more fully the reality of this world and so to better understand who I am and who God is.

I must admit, though, that there are also less noble reasons for going. It has been so much fun telling people where I am going on vacation. Are you doing anything this summer? I am. I’m actually going on vacation with a few friends next week. Where are you going? Guatemala. I say it casually. As if it is no big deal. And wait for the reactions. I must admit, I love the surprise in people’s faces. I love that it changes their perception of me a little.

And I love having the stories to tell, the pictures to show, the odd souvenirs around my home. I love being considered a world traveler. If I am going to be a single, 39 year old, professional woman, I might as well enjoy it. I might as well be the exotic aunt who travels around the world bringing back strange gifts and has an aura of mystery and wanderlust around her. I might as well make the most of my freedom and financial independence.

I realize that my travels are a privilege. I don’t take them entirely for granted. I would trade them in a second for a family and all the accompanying financial responsibilities. But I also realize that many people, single or married, will never have the opportunities I have to travel. Or they will travel for necessity rather than pleasure. I was watching The Motorcycle Diaries this weekend, the story of the young Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s journey across South America. In one scene he and his friend are sitting around a campfire with a couple they met hiking along the road. This couple begins telling them of how their land was taken and their need to travel in order to find work to support their family. They then turn to Che and ask if he is also looking for work. When he answers no, they inquire why he is traveling. Che gets a sheepish look on his face and answers that he is simply traveling for pleasure. It is the beginning of his awakening to the needs of the people, an awakening that would eventually lead him to champion the cause of migrant workers throughout the world.

I don’t foresee such a revolutionary awakening in my own life, but I hope that I allow for the possibility. I hope that in encountering others, if I allow myself to truly see them, in some small way I might be changed.

A Cinderella Story

High school for me was a bit of a Cinderella story. Middle school was a nightmare. A tomboy. Silent. A brain. Braces on my teeth. A back brace to keep my spine straight. Carried a cello to and from school on the bus every day. My junior year in high school I got my braces off… all of them. I was elected Junior Class Representative. I became a cheerleader. The star running back from the football team asked me out. Cinderella, all the way.

Why would God choose that time to interrupt my life? Why would God choose that time to call me to faith? And yet that is exactly what happened. Now Mark and I remember this story differently. He insists he invited me to youth group. I insist that I asked him if I could come along. Though my life seemed to be going well, I was still not happy. My family was struggling. My friends had just started getting involved with drinking, drugs, and sex. I was looking for something better. And this group of students from Marin Covenant Church seemed to have it. The youth group had recently had something of a revival. Over 100 students from my high school attended each week. And they seemed happy. Truly happy. Mark was a leader in the youth group and the quarterback of the football team. So, one day I invited myself along.

That night at Youth Group they showed a multimedia presentation… God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And I accepted Christ. It was that simple. The minute I heard the presentation I knew it was true. And that this was something I was going to give my life to. The leader asked us to bow our heads and raise our hands if we wanted to accept Christ. A leader would come find us after the presentation. You would think God would make something like this easy. But God’s timing was different than mine. No one approached me after the service. No one seemed to notice that I had tried to become a Christian.

Perhaps it was not the smartest move to arrive at youth group for the first time with a car load of football players. We walked into the gym. The guys walked one way. The girls avoided me like the plague. I was moving in on their territory. Youth group was miserable. Here I was trying to become a Christian and no one would talk to me. Except for Mark. Faithfully, every week, he invited me to youth group. “Pick you up at 7:00 pm?” he’d say. I knew it was a mistake to show up with these guys each week, but honestly, can you blame me for saying yes?

I must have raised my hand a dozen times over the next few months. And nothing. Seriously. Who has to fight this hard to get into the kingdom? And then, one day, someone from the youth group sat next to me at a meeting and invited me to a waterski retreat. About halfway through the retreat a youth volunteer noticed that I seemed to be interested in this faith stuff and asked if I had questions about Christianity. I burst out crying! How do I become a Christian? What was I doing wrong? What do I do now? What is a quiet time? For the next few years Patty took me under her wings and mentored me. She bought me a bible. She taught me how to do daily devotions. She recommended me for leadership in the youth group. She opened up her home to me. I am forever in her debt for laying the foundation of my faith.

Today, Mark and I are both pastors in the Evangelical Covenant Church. Mark’s brother, two other friends from San Rafael High, and several of the volunteer leaders are also ordained in the Covenant. High school was a Cinderella story for me, but it wasn’t the transformation any of us expected.

Costly Hope

This morning in church I sat through the Alleluia’s, the “Christ is Risen’s”, the songs of triumph, and all I could feel is guilt. I wasn’t ready for Easter. I’m a Good Friday Christian.

A Good Friday Christian… I suppose that is a nice way to say that I am someone who has always struggled with faith, struggled with hope, struggled with joy. I can relate to those disciples on Good Friday, without hope, their world shattered, wondering what in the world they had done committing their lives to this man who was now dead, hanging on a cross for all to see. They felt as if Christ had abandoned them. Luckily, three days later they found out they were wrong. Christ had not abandoned them. Christ had fought the ultimate battle on their behalf, defeating death and transcending this mortal life.

I don’t want to deny the hope of Easter, but I think at times we move to it too quickly. During the Good Friday Tenebrae Service at my church, we move from the last supper to Christ’s death on the cross. With each step, a light is turned off and a candle is snuffed out. At the end of the service, the final candle is paraded out of the sanctuary. I would have ended the service there in the darkness. Instead, moments later, the pastor paraded the candle back in and the lights were turned on. Why are we so afraid to dwell in the darkness? Why must we always move so quickly to hope?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship writes about cheap grace, grace that requires nothing of the believer, grace without repentance, grace as an intellectual assent. He writes that this cheap grace is the deadly enemy of the church. I wonder if we have cheapened hope in much the same way that we have cheapened grace? Hope has become an excuse to ignore the pain of the world, the pain in our churches, and the pain in our own lives. Hope has become a politically correct way to say that good Christians get all their prayers answered. Hope has become a way to say that good Christians never suffer. God always rescues, always provides, always blesses.

Costly hope believes God is present despite the pain in the world. Costly hope can dwell in the depths of the darkness and still proclaim that God is there. Costly hope can stand in the midst of the most horrific suffering and in that moment proclaim “Christ is Risen. He is risen indeed!” The message of the gospel is not that God makes this world a bright smiling place. The message of the gospel is that God is here with us, present in our midst, always and everywhere. We don’t have to be afraid of the darkness for God is with us. God is with us indeed. Alleluia!

Wrestling Angels

I’ve been asked to share in a class about my experience as a single person. I guess I am now considered an expert in the subject. They are also passing out a letter to the class written by another expert, a 47 year old man who recently got married for the first time. He is much more gracious about the subject than I am. I wonder if his reflections would have been different a year or two ago, before he met his wife? I doubt it. He seems like a much more even keeled person than I am, a person of steady faith and endless patience.

I, on the other hand, resemble Jacob after a night of wrestling with an angel on the banks of the Jabbok… covered in mud, clothes torn, wounded, limping, and exhausted.

I have wrestled with singleness for as long as I can remember. From that first overwhelming crush in second grade (I am pretty sure his name was Ricky. I just remember he had great hair, brown and thick, bright eyes, and dimples when he smiled.) through a series of first and only dates in high school and college, a few boyfriends in my 20’s, and now, the random blind dates of my 30’s. When asked what I wanted to do with my life, I always responded that I just want to get married and have kids. When I became a Christian in high school I found out that this was the best answer a girl could give. It was only slightly more pious to say that you wanted to marry a pastor. I quickly adjusted my answer.

What a surprise to find out that God had not called me to marry a pastor. God had called me to be a pastor! I resisted it for as long as I could. I was always sure some guy would come along a rescue me from all of this. Instead, I find myself nearing the end of my 30’s with a career I never dreamed of or asked for. I am ungrateful, I know. But it is like getting someone else’s Christmas gift. You write your letters to Santa, you drop hints to your parents, you clip advertisements from newspapers… and on Christmas morning your brother or sister opens the gift you’ve been dreaming of. Your gift is nice. It might even be amazing. It just isn’t what you asked for.

My wrestling with God has increased in recent years. Biological clock and all… I have come face to face with my own version of the health and wealth gospel as I consider a God who might never answer my prayer, who might never give me the desires of my heart. I have had to adjust to a life much different than the one I expected. I am having to make choices I never imagined. I am struggling to let go of a dream without letting go of hope. I am struggling to hold on. But I am holding on. Holding on until God blesses me. Holding on until I am given a new name. Holding on until I can walk away saying “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”

Reconstructing Time and Space

Last November I did my first reading in Queer Theory. Before any of you get nervous or excited, this entry will not be dealing with my views on homosexuality. While a very worthwhile discussion, it is not one I am wading into at the moment. Rather, this entry is about our concepts of time and place.

In a book entitled A Queer Time and Place, Judith Halberstam has an article on “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies.” In the article she argues that our culture has constructed our concepts of time and place around a set of “paradigmatic markers of life experience” within the “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance.” Her writing in particular focuses on two aspects of the queer subculture: AIDS and paradigmatic life markers.

As Halberstam writes, the AIDS epidemic has created a subculture with a different understanding of life and death. Within the community there is a very real sense that each day is a gift, each day must be lived to the fullest, and that each day might be our last. This sense of the present reality of death pervades and reorients the lives of those who live close to it. It should not take an AIDS epidemic to orient our lives as if each day might be our last. We are to be a community where there is always oil for the lantern on hand, where we are always ready to enter into the wedding banquet (Matt. 25:1ff). Not only that, we are to live as if heaven is already present within us, among us, shaping our vision, defining how we see the world around us.

I had never before considered time and space as cultural constructs, yet as I read this article I recognized how in my own way I have been living in queer time and space. Halberstam gave words to my own experience of feeling out of step with so many around me, in particular my co-workers who are predominately married men, men who married young, with wives at home raising their children. I realized the tension in my own life of trying to live into the life markers of the culture around me while also trying to live the reality of my subtly alternative lifestyle.

Home and work space is differently defined for a single person living alone than they are a married person with a family. My home is my private space, my quiet space, a place of personal expression, a place of rest, and at times a place of isolation. My work is where people are, where I am a useful member of society, where I am defined in relationship to other people. For many married people with children, their definitions of space are the exact opposite. I don’t need to come into the office several hours early to get some time alone. I can go an entire weekend without seeing or talking to another human being.

I can no longer mark time and maturity in my life by when I get married or have a baby. I can’t measure my growth as I move into the phase of caring for a child who is solely dependent on me. I have had to adjust my understanding of life cycle, family, and maturity to deal with the reality of my own situation. I have had to find ways to grow up that don’t leave me isolated. I have had to find ways to publicly mark my adulthood whether through owning a home or buying a suit.
What would it look like to have time and space constructed around God rather than our culture? What would it look like if the church were truly seen as sacred space or if all space was considered sacred because of God’s presence? What if a week was marked by worship rather than work? A day by our time spent in prayer rather than at a job or in school? How might God ask us to reorient our understandings of time and space? Is that part of the liturgical tradition? Following a liturgical calendar that shapes the year around the great festivals of the church rather than around the academic year or national holidays?

It seems that queer theory and other post-structuralist readings that critique the cultural role in defining and shaping life provide tools to allow the Church to begin reconstructing a life that is truly counter-cultural. In considering how sub-cultures are formed we can begin to critique our own captivity to the hegemonic culture around us. We can also seek to be more intentional about constructing identities based on different assumptions, based on the values of the kingdom of God. Rather than competing with the world around us, perhaps a new understanding of time will allow us to be clearer about our own priorities and to challenge the cultural assumptions of production and success that consume us.

Embodied and Embedded

I’ve been reading in liturgical studies this week. It raised several different emotions for me.
I grew up with some liturgy… a nominally catholic background. I remember being fascinated with the ritual. Searching through the missal trying to follow the service. Staring at the crucifix until the rest of the world faded away in a blur. I would occasionally ride my bike the ½ mile to church. St. Sylvester’s, a small catholic parish looking out on to the bay. I remember winning some award in catechism and choosing a white porcelain sculpture of Mary, about 6 inches tall, as my prize. It sat next to my bed for many years. I remember the priest gathering us around the altar and explaining the ritual of the Eucharist. I no longer remember what question I answered correctly, but I was given the privilege of ringing the bell as the altar boys normally would as he enacted the ritual for us. I craved ritual when I was a child. Snuck rides to confession with friends. Found rides with neighbors on Easter.

I still crave worship that evokes that sense of mystery, whether contemporary or liturgical. Some of my peers would call me selfish or heretical for that. Worship is supposed to be about God, not about my own wants or needs. Perhaps, though, it is more than my own selfish desires that draw me to a certain type of worship. Many of the articles I read this week talked about the role of ritual in our lives. In particular, they talk about how we come to know things through ritual, about ourselves, our community, and about God. In ritual we do not just learn things with our mind or our heart, we actually learn with our bodies. The act of worship itself forms us.

Byron Anderson says several things about communal worship…
“Socially and psychologically, the sharing of meaning enacted and constructed in the course of ritual identifies a person with (or outside of) a community even as it grounds that person’s sense of self, rooting deeply ‘an orientation which can be drawn upon at a moment’s notice, even unconsciously.”

Perhaps there is something deep within me, something embodied, something unconscious, that was formed during those early years of worship, something I still seek. But more importantly than that, the God I know is the God I met in those early worship services. While I rationally and logically know that God is more than those early experiences, I still often feel closest to God in worship that evokes those earliest experiences.

I must say, though, that reading liturgical studies also evokes some very negative emotions for me. If communal worship forms us in ways we don’t even know… not just by what we say but by how we say it, who says it, where we say it, how we move (or don’t) while we say it… what has it meant to spend most of my time in churches where women are not allowed to preach or lead the sacraments. What do I learn about the church, myself, and God… what do I learn that I carry deep inside me, because I have been refused a place at the table. I remember vividly sitting in a church where I served on staff during a communion service. The associate pastor, who also had just completed his Master of Divinity and was not yet ordained, was presiding. The all male elder board was distributing the elements. I would never be allowed to participate in this sacrament at this church. While my worth as a woman and as a minister (not a pastor) was regularly affirmed, in that moment all I could feel was my separation from God. What I was learning in this ritual, embodied and embedded deep within me, was that I could not approach God on my own. There would always need to be a man between me and God. I felt as if someone had placed a heavy curtain between me and God. The curtain that was torn from top to bottom as Christ died on the cross had been put back in place.
Who else are we marginalizing in our worship? What are we learning and teaching through our words, our actions, our icons, our spaces, our motions?

(work cited: Worship and Christian Identity: Practicing Ourselves by E. Byron Anderson)

Marginality

The margins... the edges, the outskirts, outside, apart from... I felt on the margins most of my life. Funny, because most people would probably see me at the center of the world rather than on the edge. But in my mind I am always on the margins looking in.

In the past year I have come to a new appreciation for the margins. The journey began as I was reading Jung Yung Lee's book, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology. Lee describes his experience as a Korean American as being on the margins, being in-both as well as in-between his Korean and American cultures. Then he takes an interesting turn... he goes on to argue for a definition of marginality that is no longer defined by the center. Rather, marginality is the intersection of all of his experiences. No longer revolving around a single center, marginality is the living space of existence. Roberto Goizueta, in his book Caminemos con Jesus: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment writes of the margins as both/and. In a world where we are so often forced to choose either/or, these two writers force us to move beyond such dichotomies to something more complex and, in many ways, more true to human experience.

Perhaps I need to reconsider my own feelings of being on the margins... perhaps all of life is lived on the margins between various cultures, communites, relationships... Perhaps I am not alone on the margins, but rather the whole world is here with me. What then is in the center? If I can claim my place on the margins, perhaps there is hope of truly centering my life on something other than myself. Perhaps living on the margins will allow me to reconstruct the world with God at the center.

Welcome to marginal thoughts...