Month: October 2014

Forgiveness in the thick of it

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          In our house, we host a weekly event after Tuesday night community dinners called Creative World Justice. The purpose is pretty much what it sounds like—to worship, learn, and brainstorm together about the creative steps we can take towards promoting justice in the world, as individuals and as a group. We’ve just begun a series exploring violence and nonviolence, and last night I had the privilege of leading a discussion on nonviolence in the Bible, particularly in the life of Jesus.I’ve read these verses so many times myself over the years, and I’ve often taken part in theological discussions and detached, intellectual conversations in which we have discussed violence on an impersonal, even hypothetical level. We hold the world’s problems at arm’s length, arguing back and forth about historical wars, current large-scale conflicts that are far enough away to exist for us only in newspaper headlines, or potential scenarios of aggression or crime in which self-defense would be necessary.

But last night, Jesus’ words and example of forgiveness and enemy love had never felt more powerful. The room was full of people for whom violence is a personal issue. Many of them grew up in violent homes, were abused as children, belonged to gangs when they were younger, had boyfriends or husbands who beat them up, or perhaps served jail time for beating up someone themselves. One woman came into the discussion reeling from the news that a close friend had been the victim of an extremely savage crime this week—one which may yet take her life; it remains to be seen whether she will make a recovery in the hospital or not. Is it offensive or even ridiculous to talk about forgiveness against the backdrop of such vitriolic hatred and evil?

Jesus’ teachings about forgiveness and nonviolence are difficult for us all, but especially for so many people in that room, whose lives have been shaped in significant ways by violence. I really respected the courage of my new friends to take his words seriously and to grapple with them right in the thick of it all. I admired their humility and honesty in sharing the difficult emotions and the fragile places in their lives that have made it difficult for them to respond to violence in any other way than with retribution. Some of them are also very new on their journey with Jesus, and I was inspired by their passion to soak up this new way of being in the world.

In the face of so much raw honesty and pain, I was humbled myself by the reminder that this nonviolent path is not a solution that I have to hand out to people. It’s not anything I have mastered myself, and it certainly is no short-cut or cure-all for the pain. It’s a difficult and lengthy process of inner transformation, and it is a learning curve that we are all on together, stumbling and backtracking and finding our way forward again. But it is a potent anecdote to the fight-or-flight world and the survival mentality that we’ve all been raised with. In fact, it is exactly in the thrall of horrific violence that forgiveness and creative, compassionate resistance are needed: to overcome evil with good.

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.