Month: July 2013

Taking to the streets

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          As we pulled up in the autorickshaw to the crowd of women waiting on the sidewalk, the clouds looked heavy with rain. I had come to this hastily-arranged rally with an Indian acquaintance of mine who organizes women’s groups in slums around the city, educating them about the resources available to them when they face violence in their homes and communities, and training them to work together to advocate for their rights and to support each other in making their communities an environment where women are respected, and where they are safe. She’s confident, well-spoken, and an abuse survivor herself—all of which makes her extremely good at what she does.

As the rain began to drizzle and then pour down on us, I looked around the crowd: some women in saris, others in salwar kameez suits, and a lot of women in full burqa—faces covered, but voices raised. Their courage was expressed in their presence at the rally in the pouring rain, some of them with babies and small children in tow. Their demands were written on the placards and banners they were going to carry through the flooded streets of downtown, all the way to the front gates of the parliament building. The rally was a protest against a slew of recent cases of violent rape across our city and our state in recent months, and the way that government and police alike were complicit in the terror by not only refusing to enforce laws to hold perpetrators responsible, but refusing to investigate cases and even refusing to file police reports when victims or their families turned up at police stations to seek help in the aftermath of these violent crimes.

In the height of the monsoon deluge, the group of protestors—mostly women and girls, but a handful of men and boys, too—stepped off the curb into the water and began their march. Our clothes were soaked, but everyone marched enthusiastically forward, lifting their arms and shouting together. As we neared our destination, a clutch of news photographers and cameramen appeared to snap photos and shoot footage of the event. Not far beyond them, however, the police also appeared in front of the crowd of protestors. I could see one officer alternately shouting something to the women at the front of the column, and then speaking into his walkie-talkie when those women defiantly shouted their slogans and continued moving forward. We soon saw what he must have been radioing about. Ahead of us, a larger group of police was barricading off the entire road. They were pushing the last section of metal fencing into place when the protesters reached them, grabbed the fence, and shoved it backward into the officers. Everyone poured in through the hole, and more of the barricade was knocked aside as we all made our way through. The police scrambled ahead to make their last-ditch attempt at keeping the women from reaching the parliament building. When we arrived, there was already a line of policemen blocking the gates, but that didn’t discourage the protestors from marching right up to them. Someone passed forward a microphone and a speaker which was held aloft as one woman announced why we were here and described the terrible situation of women in our society who can’t count on the protection of either their government or their police force.

A delegation of eight was allowed inside the building to present their demands (including a proposed amendment) to the chief minister; meanwhile, the rest of us waited outside. Police reinforcements had arrived and begun to surround the group. Then the army also arrived, and soon our group was surrounded on all sides by mustachioed men with bamboo sticks and guns. There were roughly a hundred protestors and a hundred police and army personnel, but this didn’t discourage many of the women from turning toward the men in uniform to talk about specific unresolved rape and murder cases over the microphone or to register their anger over police corruption and inaction.

I was impressed by the courage these women displayed, and by their solidarity with one another. The police and the army had been called up to intimidate them, to stop them… and yet here they were, facing off with power and holding their ground. Only time will tell what is to become of the demands the delegation presented to the government that day, but one thing is sure: that kind of courage and willingness to speak out about the violence against women that is routinely swept under the rug, ignored, or denied as something shameful or insignificant is definitely evidence that the tide is changing, however slowly.

Source: New feed

This night is dark

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Delhi rape protests: demonstrators clashing with police in the capital yesterday
          Yesterday Andy and I participated in a protest march here in our city. Earlier this week in Delhi, where we used to live, a young woman was brutally gang-raped on a moving bus, and this horrendous crime—an extreme case of the rape and violence against women which are commonplace in India—has aroused national outrage and a public cry for justice and change. As we marched with our flickering candles in the cold dusk, I thought about the pain and the terror that woman in Delhi had endured, the grief and shock of her family, and the trauma shared by so many other victims who have not been wealthy or important enough to garner the media’s attention when they have lived through (or been killed) in other life-shattering sexual assaults. I thought about all the women in my neighborhood who suffer violence on a regular basis, and yet were not even able to take part in a protest like this because of how strictly controlled their lives are.

Those flickering, vulnerable flames we carried as we marched made me think of Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (“…til he leads justice to victory”). These words are describing Jesus, but lately I am coming to see that Jesus himself is also that bruised reed and that smoldering wick. He is vulnerable and fragile. He himself was stripped and tortured and killed by the powers of evil in his day. Even today, his kingdom comes through the weakness of human beings, often human beings who fail or who are overpowered by the colossal systems of injustice and evil that they oppose. The strange and wonderful thing about those seeds that fall to the ground and die is that their life is actually multiplied and continues (John 12:24)! Those words from Jesus are a wonderful explanation of the paradox of resurrection.

As John chapter 1 says, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.”  The thing I struggle with is that, at least for the present, neither has the light overcome the darkness. Following Jesus is often like a candlelight vigil in the dark. The darkness of an entire room can be lessened by the presence of a single candle.  But the harder you focus on the light the more pitch-black the surrounding darkness seems, and the candle cannot completely dispel the darkness after all—only the sunrise can do that. Jesus’ life was that candle, that flame of truth to light our path through the dark; that sign of hope that the Dawn is coming and we can begin to walk in the light even now. Our lives are that fragile, flickering candle, burning with love through the night with the desperate hope that Day will come and the shadows of violence and evil and confusion will recede once and for all.

There were signs of hope in that protest. Unlike the protest in Delhi going on at the same time, the righteous indignation did not descend into violence: none of the protesters forced their way through blockades, and the police did not fire water cannons and tear gas at us or beat us with their wooden rods.  At the rally, people spoke not only of the need for police to make cities safer for women and for government to actually prosecute rapists and mete out harsher sentences. They spoke also of the need for men and women to begin to address the degradation of women in society at a root level by raising their sons and daughters as equals in the family. There were placards that spoke of how backwards it is to teach women to be careful in order to avoid rape, instead of teaching men not to rape. These messages are closer to addressing the heart level of the matter.

But there were also discouraging placards calling for retributive violence. The anger everyone feels is completely justified, but we were especially disturbed to see men carrying signs that advocated torture and death for rapists. It’s easier to completely dissociate themselves from the “monsters” who have done this than to acknowledge their common humanity—and to have the chilling realization that those roots of selfishness and lust which grew into this savage act of brutality are lurking in their own hearts, too.

We are still waiting for the dawn. In a society where domestic violence, rape, commercial sexual exploitation, and routine sexual harassment of women are a virtual pandemic, it would be more useful for men to examine their own role in creating this unsafe atmosphere for women than to demonize the few men who have acted out in an extreme way. As long as women are objectified for male consumption, as long as their bodies are turned into sexual commodities, and as long as they are denied equal status in marriage and the family, we can’t honestly claim to be surprised by horrific rapes like the one that has turned India upside-down this week. But we raise our candles and we renew our commitment to throw our lot in with the Bruised Reed who could not be broken, and the Smoldering Wick who lit the world on fire.

Toxicity

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          Andy and I just returned from a two-week trip to Los Angeles to visit friends from Pepperdine, our “family” in Watts, and some biological family. We graduated from Pepperdine two years ago, so the people we knew as freshmen and sophomores when we left are now juniors and seniors about to graduate! It felt good to be able to return to a place that had been so meaningful to us in a formative time of life, and to still run across so many familiar faces. We were even able to meet up with some of our mentors, people who taught us about marriage and Following and have therefore shaped our lives forever. And it was good for our spirits to get to spend time with so many of the close friends that we graduated with, who are still living and working in the L.A. area. Thanks to them, we traveled all over L.A. county without once having to rent a car or even use public transit, and we always had a place to stay. Thank you Christine, Dave, Thomas, Becca, Lauren, D’Esta, Stuart, Grant, Paul, Jen, Bryan, Steph, Michael, Gary, Adam, Daniel, Genieve, Brittany, Shelby, Dusty, Cecily, Jon, Rose, and everyone else whose hospitality fed, sheltered, and transported us during our stay! There are even more people whose conversation fed our souls with good questions and insights and stories. Now add perfect Southern California weather to all of that and you can see just how good we had it.
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an aerial view of Pepperdine’s campus
           At the same time, however, there was one aspect of the trip that was discouraging. For several years now, an injustice that has weighed heavily on my heart is the way that our culture objectifies people, particularly women. I would venture to say that this plague is nowhere more evident than in Los Angeles, where a lot of trends begin and a lot of destructive mass media is produced. Pepperdine’s campus is a microcosm of it, and you can tell by the way that a lot of female students dress (or don’t get dressed) that they have completely bought into our society’s lie: that women are primarily sexual objects who exist to meet others’ needs and whose value and worth depends on their sex appeal. Now some may think I’m being dramatic, until they see a lecture hall emptying out and find themselves wondering whether students forgot to change out of their clubbing outfits from the night before, or whether some of them might have lost their pants while walking to class.          But I can’t rag on them too much, because I know the positive reinforcement they get from the guys around them, and I know the unhealthy lengths that I and other women I know and love have gone to in order to meet those same unreasonable standards of beauty. It’s easier in the short-term to deprecate the women who annoy the rest of us by putting themselves on display, but when I recognize my own weaknesses and fears in them, I can empathize with them and feel the compassion that their situation ought to evoke in us. It makes sense to try emulating air-brushed, soft-porn advertising perfection, if you believe that your identity and the security of your relationships depend on it.

But the truth is that we women don’t have to get on that exhausting hamster wheel of comparison, jealousy, and insecurity, and that we don’t have to devalue as we age. The truth is that our dignity has nothing to do with our sex appeal and everything to do with the Image that we bear and the Love that created us. And the truth is that men don’t have to chase the phantom promises of lust and dehumanize themselves by cultivating selfish and distorted appetites.

In a culture as toxic as the one we live in, that kind of radical message needs some reinforcement– because the opposing lie will be reinforced with every billboard, commercial, and magazine we see. Its important for brothers and sisters  to look out for each other’s spiritual and emotional well-being, and to protect each other from the lust and the insecurity that have become so normal and accepted in our society. I really believe that viewing other people (and ourselves) as objects to be consumed is the root of so many other, more obvious evils: eating disorders, pornography and other sexual addictions, prostitution, human trafficking. All of these big things begin with a small, personal belief that is based on a lie, so the best way to start addressing any of them is to pull out that lie by the root. So men and women, knowing that our struggles fuel one another’s struggles, how can we stand out from the world by treating ourselves and one another differently? How are we reinforcing or challenging the sin in each other’s lives, and how can we draw each other toward wholeness?

The generosity of the poor: friendship at the margins

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          We’ve now spent just over a week in our new community, but it feels like we have been there much longer.  For the first few days, we had a constant stream of children and adults visiting our room, giving us suggestions on how to set things up, watching to see how we would make food, and asking us how much we paid for each thing we brought home from the market (we usually paid too much, and they were sure to let us know!).  One day, to make sure we got a fair price, our landlady took us to the market to bargain for our wooden bed platform.  She drives a pretty hard bargain.  After we bought it, the bed was loaded on top of a cycle rickshaw, we sat on top of it with our landlady’s 10-year-old daughter, and the three of us rode down the main road all the way back to our community, like a slow-moving parade float in the midst of car, bus, and motorcycle traffic whizzing past us!  Slowly, we’re learning how much we should bargain things down in the market, how to knead dough for chapatti with the perfect ratio of water to flour, which spices to crush together for a meat dish.

We’re also getting to know the people who live around us, their families, and their stories.  Many of those stories involve loss, because sisters or daughters have died in childbirth, parents have died in the prime of life from disease, and family members have been injured in accidents or suffer from chronic health problems.  We are amazed by people’s resiliency as they deal with so much tragedy and death, and by the strength of the families here and their ability to care for the orphans, the elderly, and the otherwise vulnerable people among their relatives.  It’s not uncommon to see a single son supporting his mother and sisters, saving up his earnings to pay for their dowries one at a time, or a single mother taking a job as hired help in a rich family’s home to be able to keep sending her children to school.          Andy has spent a lot of time wandering around with the guys in our neighborhood, drinking chai and visiting their workplaces—most of which are recycling-collection stands or workshops where they make beautiful wooden furniture by hand.  I’ve spent a lot of time visiting women, many of whom are literally hidden away from the outside world because cultural tradition, a conservative mother-in-law, and/or fear of sexual harassment (a threat which has some basis in reality but which is also trumped up and used as a means of control) keep them from ever leaving the house.  We’ve both spent time visiting the families who live in crowded plastic and bamboo tents on the alley behind us, several feet lower and closer to the black river which surely expands during monsoon.  As we fill our water drum from the leaky hose in the morning, we watch women and children from that alleyway haul water back and forth by hand in small containers because there’s no morning hose service to their homes, and they’re too close to the sewage canal to dig a well.  And when we head over to our landlady’s back courtyard to use the toilet, we look over a low wall into that same alleyway where we know that there are no toilets at all.

There’s a custom in Indian culture that when guests are invited over for dinner, they eat first while the hosts watch.  The hosts actually don’t eat until after their guests leave.  When we first came to India, we found this an awkward and obnoxious arrangement, but the longer we’re here the more we come to appreciate it.  In our community, a dinner invitation from a poor family is a big gift to begin with.  Offering the guests food first—after you’ve already spent hours preparing it and are feeling hungry yourself—is sacrificial.  You’re making sure that the guests eat until they are full, even if it means that there may not be enough left for you and you may go hungry, and even though you’ve just spent a large percentage of your income on that meal.  In the past week and a half, we’ve already received this sacrificial gift many times over.  We still don’t feel comfortable being given food first, but it has challenged us to give to others more sacrificially than we are used to doing.

The more we learn, the more we realize there is to learn, and we feel honored to be welcomed into our neighbors’ world.  We feel humbled by how much more our neighbors have been able to offer us and to teach us in the past week and a half than we have been able to offer or to teach them.  Coming as outsiders with nothing, as yet, to contribute, we have no claim on their generosity and friendship, much less their patience with our own ignorance and unintended faux paux.  But if grace is undeserved favor, then our Muslim and Hindu neighbors are mediating our Father’s grace to us in abundance, and teaching us a lot about Him in the process.

Pursuing the Kingdom of God: The battle without and the battle within

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          Andy and I are in Colorado Springs for a few days after a twelve-hour drive from northern Arkansas, where we spent three weeks with his family.  We haven’t been doing much, besides sitting around talking with people and trying to keep warm around wood-burning stoves, heating vents, and fireplaces.  But these weeks have left a lot of space for reflection, and He seems to be raising new questions and insights in our minds all the time.  At this point, we have far more questions than answers, but here is a bit of what’s been on our minds.
What a paradox it is that we as humans dread and crave God’s judgment at the same time.  We dread His judgment when we call to mind our own guilt and shame over wrongful actions, evil thoughts, and selfish desires.  We crave His judgment against those who have wronged us or who have wreaked havoc on our society by perpetrating horrible crimes like rape, murder, or other kinds of heartless oppression against innocent, vulnerable people like women, children, and the elderly.  I have been recognizing these two impulses within myself recently: burning indignation against injustice, and yet thankfulness for God’s mercy when I soberly realize the roots of those outward expressions of evil within myself– pride, anger, jealousy.  In Vancouver, it was easy to feel outrage towards a man picking up a desperate woman who was prostituting herself on a street corner, or towards busy shoppers who avoided eye contact with the panhandlers on the sidewalk.  But if I am honest, then I must admit how easily the impulse to pursue what I want ahead of the best interests of others rises within my own spirit, or the way that apathy often finds fertile soil in my mind.  In pursuing the Kingdom of God, we must be willing both to fight for justice in the world, and to courageously face the evil within ourselves and invite God’s purifying flame to test our hearts, separating out the wheat from the chaff.  After all, it is only the pure in heart who will see God.

Patience or just long suffering?

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Digging out a pit and building a septic tank.
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Building a stairway to replace the bamboo ladder that once led to the roof.
          These pictures document the slow and sometimes painful process of waiting for the pieces to come together. Most immediately, we are waiting for construction to finish on our new roof-top room so that we can leave our current home– the humid, ground floor room whose prominent location perpetuates a constant stream of visitors at all hours, and reminds me of a dark cave with its lack of natural light. But in a deeper sense, we’re waiting for the pieces of life here to come together. We’re looking for what the next step is—what kind of roles and work we should take on, and how to begin to put our skills and ideas into action to respond to the needs we see around us. And yet we know that the “next step” flows out of exactly what we’re doing now—getting to know people, studying verb conjugations and vocabulary lists, and all of the unspectacular daily moments, tasks, and conversations that comprise our being present and available exactly where we are, right now.

I usually don’t think of patience as a virtue. I equate it with tolerance for wasting time. It is a void of passivity, a willingness to be unproductive or to carry on with a bad or fruitless situation longer than is necessary. But seeing as the Holy Spirit herself (the Hebrew word for spirit, ruach, is indeed feminine) works with extreme patience in human hearts through millennia of obstinate and destructive human behavior, patience is probably a virtue worth revisiting—because I don’t have any patience at all.

It’s probably true that at times the justifying label of “patience” has been slapped onto exactly the kind of laziness or passivity I described a moment ago. But perhaps a more accurate way to think of patience is to connect it with perseverance: a courageous, stubborn, single-minded determination that is bent on accomplishing some purpose or at least bent on holding one’s ground and keeping the faith, no matter how much time it takes to accomplish, or to come into being. Patience is often a willingness to actively wait for something that we really have no power to bring into being ourselves; something that God must accomplish, or something that God has already finished, but the outward evidence of which is not yet apparent.

We need the kind of tenacious patience that can bear the present difficult circumstances without skipping ahead to the future to either catastrophize about how badly everything might turn out, or to dream up alternative plans and means of escape from the present difficulties. We need fierce patience that refuses to give up because of lack of results or weight of disappointments in the short-term. We need tender patience to continue to journey alongside the people in our lives even when they take destructive actions and make destructive decisions, when they manipulate or get angry with us, when they act in self-interest instead of in friendship, when they fail to change or to meaningfully respond to what we’re hoping to model and teach and draw them into.

Isn’t that what She does with us, Ruach Ha Kodesh, the Spirit of God?  Isn’t that the way that She picks up the pieces again and again and re-imagines the path to wholeness as she labors over us individually, and as the Church, and as humankind? I want to be patient as She is patient; longsuffering and uncomplaining like She is in her relentless love of each one of us. I’ve got a long way to go.