Modern Art

The book I am reading now (well, one of them--I’ve always got four or five on the go) is by a married woman, a poet, who joined the Catholic Benedictine order as an oblate (an offering; a vow-taker). She lived for stretches in the abbey, working at her writing going to prayers, but she always returned to her husband and her job and her Protestant church after her retreats. The liturgy schedule ran:

3:30 Vigils

6:30 Lauds

9:15 Tierce

11:45 Sext

1:45 None

5:30 Vespers

7:30 Compline

The 3:30am prayer no longer throws me off because I wake then so often. (Today I woke at two. Steroids can do that. Watch out!) I wonder what it would be like to be so steeped in daily, public Bible reading, prayer, and meals. Kathleen Norris’ writing gives a taste in The Cloister Walk.

Kathleen calls the monks poets because both have a sense that there is treasure in all things, and so "they commit absurd acts: the poem! The prayer!” She describes an exhibition entitled “Degenerate Art” that set side by side art approved and art denounced by Hitler.  The approved art was clearly propaganda. The other didn't follow the state's agenda because Art doesn’t like to be told what to say. Kathleen quotes Pat Robertson as saying once that modern art was a plot to strip America of its resources and that the material of Henry Moore’s sculptures should have been used to make statues of George Washington. Gloomy Plato, who never knew a good Creator God, would have agreed. He never wanted art to interfere with the ideal Republic’s program, and when you let “degenerate art” escape onto the stage, there’s no telling how humans will react. For the sake of predictability and control, you have to keep a lid on things that hint of counterculture or mystery.

Robert is building modern art right now. A friend of his brother bought a sculpture from the university near here, built with lumber that’s fallen apart, so Robert, his brother, and an apprentice are recreating the piece from scratch. It’s massive, as big as an elephant. It’s a team of seven ( of course) men hunched over every which way, holding a 17 foot beam over their shoulders as they walk, and it’s titled Endless March. Very cool. The artist, an Israeli living in New York now, is going to come back to see it when it’s finished. Must feel strange to have someone else go through the steps you took to make a piece like this.

I think God would say he liked this piece Robert is building, just as he would say he liked Henry Moore’s smooth, round mounds, if God were standing next go me, commenting. I suspect he’d like either of these better than another classic statue of Washington. God’s the one, after all, who creates art, and inspires art, and inspires us to create art. The freedom this requires costs him because we abuse freedom like we abuse all things, but I’m glad he loves us that much. I wish I could write the poem or the prayer or the update that said thank you well enough. Maybe the monks are on to something. Psalm 81, which I read today, exclaims, "Sing! For this is required by...the God of Jacob!" 

(Re-reading that final sentence I realized I was missed the "g" in the first word of this quote. Awkward. Always proofread! Artists do make mistakes, apparently. And sometimes their artwork falls apart.)

Enjoy Henry Moore's art, which will be around for a very long time as you can see, despite Pat Robertson:

Transcontinental (imagine it)

Mother and baby (notice the hollows; I get this one!)

Vertebra (this one just feels right)

this is in a park: looks like it should be titled "Play ball"

Countdown: 2

Second to last treatment!

Pairs. Symmetry. Contrast. Complements. Twins. Bookends. Humans are quick to find patterns: it only takes twice for something to happen before it sets up an expectation in the mind. We are wired to fill in the gaps to make a whole out of the pieces, even just two pieces. This mental urge is called gestalt. I have a stronger urge to close the missing gaps than my husband, which makes me far quicker to jump to conclusions while he’s still asking questions. The best researchers are those who can hold off the urge to reach a conclusion until more data comes in. I think I am too much the artist, finding connections between everything, even creating them if need be, as you can tell with my posts. When I teach literature, I ask my kids to connect characters, scenes, plot devices, symbols, life--anything and everything. When they protest, I give them this challenge: “Pick any two things you can see, any two things you can think of. I will connect them. Go.”

“Bookshelves and flowers!”  

“Easy. Both come from plants and feel smooth.”

“Dry erase marker and my grandmother.”

“Both remind you about things you need to get done.”

“Clouds and motorcycles.”

“Both race by in the wind.”

This skill is good for English class but not so good for scientific inquiry.

When we experience gestalt, the puzzle piece falling into place, the perfect fit, it feels good, like a sigh of relief. We love finding patterns. We love symmetry in the human face. Apparently we will quick-judge people’s physical beauty by the symmetry of their faces, and then go on to make assumptions about their character as well, based on what they look like. This, of course, is a terrible use of gestalt.  Here is a good use: I have a Mixtec friend named Symmetry. She met a German friend of ours when he came to visit us in Guerrero, Mexico, and eventually they married, and she moved to Canada, close to where I live now. He committed suicide after a fight with mental illness, and she now raises their four sons alone. She is tri-lingual, tri-cultural, strong, wise, and beautiful, inside and out. I’m sure her life does not feel beautiful or symmetrical through this season, but she belongs to Christ and will see his pattern for her journey, a pattern of infinite beauty and joy, when the time is right.

I think when we are with Jesus at the end of time, one of the most satisfying bits will be the symmetry, the patterns, the story untangled so that the pieces connect and everything makes sense, even the dark bits like chemo and separation by an inexplicable death. Somehow both the artist and the scientist (and everyone else) will flourish in heaven like never before. And I will be making even more connections, better ones. And Robert will still be asking questions. And you? What will you be doing in heaven? Because that sitting-around-on-clouds stuff just doesn’t cut it. God’s way too busy getting things done and creating new stories and symmetry and beauty for that. Our worship will be to create right alongside him, trying to please him, trying to keep up. Best to shine up those talents now.

Motorcycle dogs

At our house we have a polite dog, a courteous dog. She doesn’t jump up on anyone, doesn’t push her way past you in the doorway, doesn’t bark, doesn’t even come up to you unless you call her. Ducati. Obviously someone likes fast (was going to say cars, but I looked it up, and it’s motorcycles, my favorite vehicles). And Ducati is fast. We watched her race after two Canada geese across a dead cornfield with tiny soybean leaves sneaking up between the stalks, the geese barely getting enough airlift to escape her as they skimmed the ground. She’s all confidence, Ducati is. We were passing a tree, and an enormous raccoon was lolling around under it, and Ducati took out after it, and I was sure we’d have some explaining to do to our hosts, carrying shredded dog back in our arms, but the raccoon disappeared before the show-down. Further on, there’s a broken, wooden signpost lying on the grass. Ducati loves that sign. Every time she spies it, she races to it, shuffling it with her paws, and snuffling it with her nose, and moving it around, and sticking her nose under it so that only her ears stick out, and I’m sure she’s got something this time, but there she comes when we move on, laughing and empty-snouted. She covers three times the ground we do when we walk, but she always comes back when we turn around and beats us back to the yard, all dirty-pawed and happy-tailed.

I notice energy these days. I notice that as we made a turn on our way to church on Sunday, the oncoming lane was filled with thousands (no exaggeration) of bicylists with serious bicyclist clothes; I’ve never seen so many bicycles in one place before—on the road and on the shoulders, in the fields, and coming out of the backs of cars, and moving, moving, moving. After church, waiting for the potlock meal to be set up on big round tables on a gym floor being cleared, three girls ran round and round, weaving through the disappearing chairs, the oldest leading with a big smile on her face, looking over her shoulder to see if the others were still following, and I heard a wistful voice behind me, “We should all be doing that.” And so we should. And I’d just seen the same thing the day before, in someone’s yard, a boy, older than the rest, leading a string of running children zig zag across the lawn and checking, grinning, to see if the others still followed. I remembered how the bicyclists looked so serious, almost grim, determined to get their miles in, no longer able to follow a leader like laughing children or a laughing motorcycle dog. And I though how much we change as we go through life.

In the living room where I am house-sitting, there are two pictures on right-angled walls (did you read angeled? What a cool image—right angeled walls; I’d like some of those walls and those angels) that sum it up. The one is a painting of white wicker rockers and white wicker couch on the broad, shady porch of some white southern home with shades of pink roses and geraniums and azalias blending in, with an endless lawn stretching out peacefully in front, and the caption reads: “You fill my life with good things.” On the other wall is an unframed, black and white photograph of a far-off, lone lighthouse on a wave-crashed island, dominated by the energy of the sea. There’s me having tea with some of my friends on the porch right now, but across the way are other friends, restless and zinging with get-up-and-go. I'm grateful for every one.

And so goes life: Energy. Silence. Movement. Quiet. And though we often move in and out of these like day following night and season following season, often we don’t. We move more and more into bustle or quiet. And the balance and contrast and beauty comes not just from our individual lives but from our lives together. And to the extent we live apart, the Quiet miss the energy of the Young and Young-at-Heart, and the Restless and Energetic miss the goodness of Silence. And we all lose something. In these days when I live in slow mo, when I find my head suddenly bumping the keys on my keyboard because I’ve drifted off midword, or find myself waking up from another nap I don’t remember starting, I notice energy and how it’s not in me but in children and motorcycle dogs and seas. And I’m thankful that they are “right-angeled” across from me, and I wonder what we have to give to one another in this patchwork of human seasons.

Subversive

I like posting when I first wake, whatever the time, because my best ideas seem to come when I’ve had rest, either sleep, or a long walk. But at this point the 3 am posting may come and go, either because I’m too tired now to write then, or because the initial urgency has worn off—I’m not sure. Either way, I write as I can. One thing I want to do is add pieces of something else I’m working on. I guess most of us want to finish a work and hand it over polished and complete, like Athena sprung full-grown and armored, straight out of a split in her father Zeus’ mighty skull (giving him, yes, a splitting headache), but I’m realizing that it’s the blog format that got me writing in the first place, where every day I have to present just one complete idea at a time, a full essay, each post. And although the blog has a theme, which you may or may not have caught by now (I’m not going to analyze anything for you), I don’t have to know quite where it’s going yet. It’s an adventure, this finding out together. The Spanish song says, “You make the path by walking.”

This might help me on my other project, which is supposed to be a simple compilation of a course I give about helping people start a church in a culture where the church has never stepped foot before. I actually have a transcript of the course, sent by my friend

Monica, which should make this task easy. Yet I have not looked at it. Instead, I started writing from memory, which seemed a more interesting task. Yes, it’s still about helping people respond to Jesus in a place where this has never happened purposefully before. But it also seems to be about how human cultures respond when God’s culture shows up.

When Jesus walked around on earth, he insisted that God’s culture had already shown up right among them. He claimed it couldn’t be seen, wasn’t obvious, was like a wind in the trees, but that it made a difference from the inside out and would eventually turn the world upside down.  Jesus was the world’s greatest Subversive. He lasted three years before the government (both governments over him, in fact) shut him down. Well, tried to. We carry the DNA of that divine culture that God promised through Abraham, sketched as from a blueprint through Moses, set to music through David, purged through prophets and exile, and lived out himself, perfectly, through Jesus. Now we are the world’s Subversives, with the Spirit of Revolution coursing through our veins. We are the light of the world, the salt of the earth, the ambassadors of God. We have a job to do.

After Jesus conquered Death, he stood on a mountain and gave us his job. He said, “I’ve won. Not even death can stop me now. So go, and as you go, bring people into the family of God, the culture of God, the kingdom of God, my new kingdom. Bring them in from all the cultures of the earth. Breathe my new community-life into them through baptism, and teach them the family culture. And don’t worry, I’ll be there with you, getting the job done through you, until the very end of time. I WILL NEVER GIVE UP.” (Subversives don’t, you know. Give up. Especially not when they’re GOD.) Then he rose up in the air and disappeared, leaving us all open-mouthed and hungry. Clouds, move away! Let him come back!

So here we are, trying to catch up to this man, this guy, this…god. Trying to love him. Trying to obey him. Trying to know him, to catch the nuances of his words in those texts we have, that he never wrote, but his friends did. Texts that are copies of copies, translations of translations, printings of printings, yet still they move us to the core of our being. Those words. That live and open a window on his soul, and so turn our world upside down.

And we carry our passion for this man everywhere we go. Into grocery store lines, and to the dinner table with our kids, and onto the highway behind crazy drivers, and into the chemo lounge where the tiny lady in front of us is trying to tell us she is having a heart attack. And we fail. We fail. We hide his soul from people with our bumbling. And we forget. And we aim, and we miss, in the loving and forgiving, and being humble, and being unselfish, and being One that would transform our world. People are dying for causes all over the world, and here we are, sitting on the greatest one of them all, and we fail. Sigh.

But… But.

A subversive just doesn’t give up. Especially when the Subversive is God. He’s got this scenario covered. He does! And we pull each other up from the ground, and we coach each other, and it takes all our breath and skill and perseverance to keep going, but He’s put his DNA in us, all of us, put his Spirit of Revolution right in our lungs and pores and brain cells, and…

That’s the story, isn’t it?

Red Hunting Dogs

I...once...got a letter from a former student of mine who needed something from me. It was an impassioned plea for a second chance. And unlike the teachers of geography or algebra, I have free rein to judge this friend’s progress in my class by the letter itself, both content and style. I can call it a final project and then evaluate its quality, because of all the subjects, English has more in common with P.E. than any other, both being about Practice makes Perfect. Just as one final 5 minute run can tell a kid’s fitness, so a 500 word letter can tell a kid’s skill at writing. Sure, mom reviewed it, but doesn’t she always? And doesn’t the kid learn from her coaching, especially when there is much at stake?

As writers, we tend to notice the technical mistakes first, the run on sentences, the spelling errors, and we itch to let loose our pens all over the paper like red hunting dogs sniffing out squirrels. The technical errors do need correcting, and that will come, but as writing coaches, we need to notice what the student did right, and help the student pull the paper together and clarify ideas before letting loose the dogs. My kid’s paper (I’ll call him Bill) is full of technical errors, but let’s look at the organization. His introduction tells of an unfulfilled expectation. He expected one thing and got another. He is now embarrassed, frustrated, and afraid of the consequences. So he’s got me right there, this student of mine. He’s hooked me by sentence two and laid out his purpose with an appeal to pathos, the emotional appeal. I heard at our transitional seminar that if you want approval, use logic, but that if you want action, use emotion. Our decisions are sparked by emotion and then fueled by logic. If the emotion is strong enough, it can overwhelm the logic altogether. On the other hand, we can overcome our feelings with reason, given enough time to think. There’s hope. So already I want to help Bill.

Next Bill lays out his logos, his logic, his reasoning. He tells me what will happen if he does not get a second chance, and for him, the consequences are dire. I feel that. He offers to do his part in pulling in the slack. He lays out a defined plan of action. As part of his reasoning, he counters the opponent’s argument by acknowledging past failures and accepting responsibility to change in the future. Finally he lays out his trump card, his appeal to ethos or to authority: he has met with an academic expert who recommends the action he is requesting. Brilliant.

Bill concludes with a reminder of his feelings and a call for action (returning in the conclusion to remarks in the introduction is called framing, an excellent device). I know exactly what he wants me to do in this very impassioned, very persuasive, very effective essay disguised as a letter, and so it’s done. He could have used some paragraphing, reviewed his paper manually for spelling mistakes (the spell checker missed “cam” for “came”), untangled the run-ons, and remembered his training in matching pronouns (“he and me would…”). But the red hunting dogs will have to lie slumbering under a Canadian maple for now while the essay goes about its business, squirreling away a change for my young friend Bill that will serve him next season.

I miss Bill. I miss teaching. My dogs have needed an invigorating run.

Invisible people

During one of the lunch breaks at our seminar on transitional leadership, we walked to a Pita Pit next door. I had a gyro (pronounced euro, apparently) and a mango smoothie, as close as I can get to the real thing. Before we ate, one of the men prayed, just casually, eyes open. I told him I hadn’t seen many people try that. Most of us do the bow-your-head-and-close-your-eyes thing even in public spaces. I find it very hard to break this 50 year old habit. The other guy, Anglican background, said he didn’t mind prayers that moved away from this style, but that they didn’t communicate the respect we hold for God, somehow. For me it’s a question of where do you look when you’re talking to someone invisible.

But we actually do this all the time—talk to invisible people—and we do it very naturally, eyes open, often gesturing with our hands and nodding our heads as if the person can see us. We do this even when we’re in the middle of a group of people, and in fact phone courtesy now requires that you move away so as not to interrupt the group’s interaction with your one-sided conversation. So my next question was how did the men think cell phones would affect prayer? (Robert had been thinking we were meeting to talk about apprenticeships, but I didn’t know this  and unwittingly hijacked the conversation, sorry.) Would we all start talking to God like we talk to any other invisible person, eyes open but disengaged, hands gesturing, head moving? What would it be like to put God on my phone as a speed dial and just talk to him as I’d talk to one of my friends? What about texting him? Would that be prayer? Would it keep me as connected as the whippersnappers keep connected now with their social media? Do they intuitively already know the purpose of prayer?

I don’t think God cares what devices or postures we use, but as humans with bodies, these matter to us. In two minutes, you can change your self-esteem with a simple power pose, or your happiness with a pencil between your teeth. The Bible is full of different styles and postures for different occasions: for us, postures and devices matter. Although my favorite image of prayer is Robert Duvall's character in The Apostle where he paces the room, arguing with God so loudly he upsets the neighbors, I prefer journaling (which my own Robert finds impossible), because it seems both loud and silent at once, the perfect combination.

You'd think I'd find a transition to texting on a phone easy, but no, my kids make fun of me for how slow I am, poking out my message with one halting thumb, never abbreviating (I had to ask what ttyl was) and always correcting my mistakes. It’s a new world. And alien, too, always inventing new tongues and new agendas for us, keeping us young. I got a text from Dawnelle that said “elle pixels faire” and from Diana that said “soery tupo.” From someone else I got: sunshine for cast will be helpful, and I wondered if she knew something I didn’t. I sent a Spanish (I thought) message to Simi assuring her I was,  “taking out a tuna casserole.” Gotta watch your phone, or it will start inviting people over for dinner without you. I started calling my hospital St. Catharsis because I found it easier to agree with the phone than argue with it every time. My favorite cell phone message was when I was in ER for the third time and got this message from Rosalyn: “You have been in error this whole time?” There just doesn’t seem to be a good answer for that.

Technology changes our lives, even our lives with God. Churches put powerful sermons that motivate us on screens and on podcasts  and show us video clips that call us to action. I just watched the Skit Guys do their Chisel on youtube because it was a sermon illustration at church. The Mixtecs I know buy huge sound systems, set them in doorways of church buildings, and blast their music out into public space. Makes you wonder how Jesus and the early church got as far as they did without all this stuff. But this is our culture, perhaps not forever, and certainly not everywhere, and we adapt. So is there a way that technology can help people who aren’t used to doing this thing, carrying on an apparently one-sided conversation with an invisible God? Can it pull God more naturally into the room where he belongs, right into public spaces beside us, without setting us apart with what might appear to others as church culture? Is it relevant that for some cultures ( some Mixtecs, for example) there is no such thing as “praying in your head”? I don’t know. I’m just wondering. Jesus faced the issue of never being able to address God with any name at all. Even the pronunciation had been lost. But with one stroke, Jesus solved this conundrum by bringing God into the room as Dad.  Not that cell-phone praying compares, but are there ways for us to bring God closer to others by how we pray?

 What I really want is for praying to become more like breathing: constant, urgent, automatic, necessary. If holding a cell phone in hand helps, then so be it. Maybe by the time I die, I’ll get the hang of it. My other idea is to keep a card in my pocket with meaty, liturgical, make-you-think prayers typed on both sides, and to take that out and read it when I’m at Tim Hortons (with Robert, of course--coffee got wiped off my food list, too). No wait, I could download that on my cell phone. 

Tricks

 Today I’m having an allergic reaction. I think it’s to the mango my friend brought for dessert Saturday night, which was when all the itching started. It was delicious, and this hardly seems fair, because I’ve eaten enough mangos in my life to fill a barn. No kidding. When I was growing up in a small town in Honduras called Olanchito, my friends Rina, and Eva, and Norma, and Angie and I would spend our entire afternoons, once school was out—public school for them, and homeschool for us—hunting and gathering fruit. Mostly mangos, though ovos, and nances, and yuyugas, and guayabas were acceptable as well. It appeared to be our job as neighborhood children to wander like herds of pets from back yard to back yard, climbing trees, shaking them, or poking them with long sticks to coax the fruit down. We gobbled up anything we found, never storing it but eating it all, right there, in whatever stage of greenness or ripeness it fell into our hands, with no thought for tomorrow. 

Even in junior high, when I should have outgrown this habit, I

remember visiting at my friend Pati’s house and seeing, from the second-story window of her kitchen, those luscious, green Haden mangos, tempting us from the enormous trees in her back yard. I think we used the stick-poking method, because even the bottom limbs were way out of reach, and eventually we (was this all my idea? I don’t remember) managed to get one down and whisk it back upstairs to the kitchen. Haden mangos are the ones the size of rabbits that turn bright red and yellow outside and deep orange inside, and are worth every bit of string between your teeth to finish. And when they are green, they are purple on the outside but pure white on the inside, and the seed is a smooth, pure white, soft bean too bitter to eat (believe me, I tried), but that you can pop out with your thumb, and the green skin tastes just like the meat, so you don’t even have to peel it, but you cut the whole thing up on a plate and douse it with salt, ground cumin, and vinegar.  Ah. The thing sets my teeth on edge just to think of it, but I remember devouring the prize in ecstasy. To this day my kids tease me because I can’t pass a fruit stand without wanting to stop. My hunting, gathering instincts run deep.

So now to be banished from the world of mangos by a lousy chemo regime seems unfair. I’ve joined the ranks of people who shun food by necessity, who have lists of forbidden meats, or grains, or products, or fruits, as the case may be. I’m hoping my restriction is temporary, that the ban will be lifted when my hair grows back, but who knows. Mangos are in the family of poison oak, and many people, including my mother, sister, and son, suffer allergies from them (especially when they are green and oozing a milky white sap), so my body might consider one barnfull enough.

Isn’t it strange how you can put something good into your mouth and find out a few hours later it was poison? And it had never been poison before? Your body has changed its mind, not you, and the food hasn’t shifted any ingredients, but suddenly you’ve made a mistake you didn’t know was possible: you’ve ingested an allergen. It’s those unintended consequences. There’s just so much we don’t know out there. None of us need convincing that we’re not perfect when it comes to our behavior, but sometimes it’s so much harder to convince us our minds are not perfect, either, that they can miss the difference between goodness and poison, make damaging  judgments and assumptions.

It is the nature of the brain to justify itself and think its knowledge is whole and sound. Malcolm Gladwell describes in Blink how we make snap decisions based on emotion, and then our slower, rational brains catch up and slap logical explanations onto our emotion-guided behavior. We’ve all watched human brains come up with justifications for just about any behavior there is, good or evil. Not that I don’t hold out for free will. I do. It’s just that I also hold out that we are no more guaranteed perfect thinking than we are guaranteed perfect behavior. We are farther off on both counts than any of us realize or wish for a helpful spouse to point out. Saying we are wrong in our actions is one thing, but admitting we are wrong in our judgments is worse.

So who knows what my body is doing under the influence of this wretched chemo regime. It makes me pant going up stairs. It makes my eyes twitch shut when I’m awake. It forces naps and deadens senses. It gives me allergies to the world’s best fruit—or does it? And if bodies can fail, and brains, then what? Maybe this will remind me to make lighter judgments and take comfort that there are things beyond logic: like love of husband, child, friend, God.  Maybe there is assurance when the body plays such tricks.

Verbs

Monday Angie comes to Canada. Yay! What I didn’t mention is that all my family is coming: mom, dad, sister, and two nieces, with only my oldest nephew, all grown up now and working, left behind. I had been wondering where I would put all seven of us, but Janey came to the rescue, offering to take her family on holiday to Paris just so we could have the house (just kidding! about why she's going, not what she offered)… 

Irony. As I was typing that paragraph, the phone rang. It was my mom telling me my dad is in the hospital after having emergency surgery. As well I could make out (I haven’t talked to him directly; just piecing it together from mom’s description and Wikipedia), he has Amaurosis fugax. Although this sounds like quick lover’s syndrome, it’s actually a kind of stroke that blocks blood to the eye.  So I’m waiting to see how he’s doing, and realizing my parents aren’t coming after all. Meanwhile, I called Angie, and she says it looks like she will be selling twenty, (twenty!) houses this week, with all the detail that entails (and I thought bureaucracy in Oaxaca looked like tangled cheese!), so she might not come…

Adjusting…adjusting…

It seems unfair how much our expectations affect our reaction to things.

But rather than dwell on that, I am going to turn a corner and relay what happened next, when my mom took a cell phone into the hospital so I could talk to my dad, who is still in ICU, and whose voice is still hoarse from the anesthetic, and who looks like a porcupine with all the monitor lines and tubes sticking out of him like so many quills, and who has lost vision in one eye but assures me he can still work on the computer, designing a course that trains church leaders outside the classroom, following an apprenticeship model, and he’s 82, my dad, and he almost immediately switches the conversation to me. How am I doing? He loves my blog. Etc. And he asks me what kind of readers I have, and what kind of comments, and I tell him, and one comment reminds him of what he considers the gravest danger in the church today, and off we go into a discussion of the dangers that the church faces today. And he’s in ICU, and my mom is making faces at him to take care and not get excited. This is why I love my dad. One of the reasons.

And, according to my dad, this is the gravest danger to the church today: abstraction. Not distraction, but abstraction. What dad means is that we can get so caught up in lists and discussions about doctrines and theologies and word studies that we miss the point of doing them. He says this is the gravest danger of relying on seminaries to train leaders because they tend to emphasize information, which can be measured on tests, over practice, which requires the more difficult Paul-and-Timothy-working-in-a-real-church model. In our culture, knowledge is so often assumed to transform behavior, but when you don’t check through active discipleship, do you know it’s changing lives? When they hand you a degree in divinity (!) do they know you've grown in divinity? There't the rub. There is a reason that some languages (Mixtec, for example) have only word for our two: listen and obey. At one point in our history, these two ideas were united in one English word as well, but the modern tool of analysis (not a bad tool unless badly used) made it much easier for us to analyze when we should be out the door, doing.

Abstraction means that people are hearing the Word, studying the Word, getting degrees in the Word, judging  people’s faith by their interpretation of the Word but not necessarily obeying the Word.  The Spanish translation of John 1:1 captures the idea so much better than the English: “In the beginning was the Verb.” [Guatemalan Ricardo Arjona sings it like this:  “To not be redundant, I have to say that Jesus is action and movement, not five letters forming a name, that Jesus likes for us to act, not talk, that Jesus is Verb, not Noun.” (link to the lyrics: Jesus is Verb)] My dad said, “Just look at the beginning of John where he describes Jesus. It’s all verbs. All actions—not an abstract noun among them.” (My dad writes training materials all the time. He'll write the day he gets out of the hospital. With every title a verb.)

My dad said he’d sent out a survey that compared seminary course content with field worker “course” content. What he found, and the results he sent out to 50 seminaries, was that the seminary course content was filled with abstract terms, while the field worker “course” content was mostly actions—verbs. His final conclusion asked: In which context should we be training our future workers? Isn’t it time we opened a second track?

All of this on a phone, from ICU, with Mom making faces in the background. My dad, planter of churches, coacher of coaches, and writer of verbs. If you ever wondered why I am who I am, a big part of it you just saw--in verbs.

Tranquil Father's Day, Dad.

Hadn't thought of that 'til now.
Irony.

Wilderness

I have the kind of life where I don’t see people for years, and if they are very good friends, we drop back into our friendship right where we left off, and all the time in between disappears. It’s rich visiting.  My friend Kath, who moved away from this area five years ago, drove hours to come see me, and we tucked ourselves away in a booth in Conversations Café and caught up. Kids. Husbands. Jobs. God.

And we got to talking about what happens when you move away. I’ve moved away to Mexico, and she’s moved away to “up north,” but we’d both come up against the same experience of what she’d call wilderness, when you leave behind the support structure that makes Christian life and Christian ministry life easier, and you try to live without all that.  I’d been struck by this idea especially hard a few months back at a missionary retreat, and it was all coming back now. At the retreat, one of the women that shared works for a mission agency, a hopping, vibrant center of some 20 employees who are constantly seeing God’s handiwork all around the world. She’d gotten a promotion into a brand new ministry job in the agency. She described it as a door opening, unlooked for, and all she had to do was walk in. It was wonderful.  I think this is the kind of experience God wants for all of us, and it’s what his body is meant to provide.

But I had realized with a pang that it was not my experience. And it was not the experience of several others of the missionary wives in the group. We were going through a wilderness. Doors didn’t just open. Opportunities did not drop in our laps. In fact, we were wondering how to use our gifts when the structure for using our gifts just wasn’t there. Our husbands seemed challenged enough, but we were not, and nothing seemed to be changing. Prayer wasn’t opening doors.

Sometimes prayers don’t open the doors we want.  We have to wait. Maybe forever. These are hard times. In reading Matthew now, I’m impressed with how often Jesus mentions people just doing ordinary jobs faithfully: “A faithful, sensible servant is one to whom the master can give the responsibility of managing his other household servants and feeding them” (Matt 24). I think we forget that around the world, most Christians don’t have the ministry opportunities that exist in North America. They can’t raise money to go on short term mission trips or volunteer at a homeless shelter. In much of the world there are neither the resources nor the infrastructure for this kind of freedom and choice, although because of our experience in North America, we come to expect it as a given.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for serving others. These abound. It means that our brothers and sisters in other places often have to take more initiative, be more creative, and be far more sacrificial to get things done. There’s no organization handing out brochures, signing up newcomers, taking donations. And sometimes in our rush to help, we jump in with our ready-made organizational efficiency and stifle what believers in the neighborhood could do.  They start thinking nothing gets done unless it comes in from the outside where all the resources are.

It’s hard to leave your culture. And part of North American culture is having so much choice, and so much opportunity, and so much variety, and so many resources to get things done, and so much rich organizational efficiency. These things you leave behind when you live in Mixtec mountains, and you trade them for an awareness of what makes martyrs. And you trade them for the patience to stand in the hot sun, with grit in your mouth, for five hours, bumping around in the back of a truck bed with twenty other people, just to get home for the evening. And you trade them for one enormous, handcrafted tortilla sandwich of young black beans and red-hot salsa, and the unstudied generosity that handed you this feast.

Buckets

When Robert unpacked his bags after coming back from Mexico, he handed me a flash drive with pictures of our team. I miss them. We are five families, four involving marriages across borders, and one involving six people just planted in a new culture, so all of us experienced in Oz moments.  Someone called it a ragtag team and compared it to the team that gathered around David in the wilderness, because this team, too, has gathered in a kind of structural wilderness around a common mentor and some common values. We all want to live incarnationally as we connect people in southern Mexico to Jesus. We want people’s response to Jesus to be as steeped in the flavor of their own culture and their own redeemed being as possible. We want the church at the end of the ages to be a vast crowd too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, united as one body at last, worshipping not with one voice, but many, following not many voices but only One, with all our heart.

The advantage of being on a team is that you celebrate other people’s stories as if they were your own. Big organizations take good advantage of this fact about community, using resources to highlight, video, and publish people’s stories that might not otherwise be heard. Of course, on the other hand, some big organizations hide lots of awkward stuff behind the good stories, making us all just a bit more skeptical when we hear good stories bandied about. But this story happened to someone on my team in Oaxaca, and though I can’t show you a video, I can celebrate it with you.

Phil’s story:

Exhausted from a long day of mixing cement and carrying buckets of it to make the footings for his house, I sat with my friend Tadeo outside a store in our village.  As the sun set, we remarked on our hard work and our sore muscles.  As we sipped our cokes, Tadeo went back to something that had happened to him a few months ago.  At another job site, a fellow worker had clubbed him over the head with a 4x4 post, almost killing him.  He had called me to pick him up in that village, two hours away.  Later, he had told me more about the attack.  He explained that when the crew bosses started giving him more responsibility, it stirred up jealousy, and one man had attacked him in a drunken rage.  This much I knew already.

But today, Tadeo told me that since we had become friends, his perspective on life had changed.  Seeing how I loved and supported my wife Eunice as a doctor, he began to want that for his own family.   Now that he knew me, he knew life could be different for him.  He acknowledged that life was going to be harder because there were traditions in the village working against him (the pressure to drink was enormous), but he was thankful he now had a friend to guide him through.  We were two tough guys, just exhausted and almost in tears, sharing a moment neither of us expected.

Our time in the village has been one of struggle and success.  The clinic has helped hundreds of people from several villages, but people haven’t responded to God as we hoped.  Eunice and I knew it wouldn’t be a quick job, could even take years, but through the months we have struggled with doubt: were we going too slow?  But that night, sitting with Tadeo, God showed up.  During my ten years working in Mexico, I have seen churches born in small indigenous villages, but they usually lack young adult males.  These men should be the life blood of a healthy, growing and reproducing indigenous church, but these are the hardest to reach.  If a young church is filled only with women and children, people think this new religion is primarily for them.  Over the years, I have heard many men say that church is fine for their wives, but they don't need anything from a God who comes across as feminine.  Now Tadeo was telling me he trusted me to show him a new path toward a God that is for everyone in the family.  

I know that in his day, Phil has carried a lot of buckets of cement for neighbor’s house-building projects and played a lot of basketball. Eunice has treated a lot of patients. Paco has given a lot of people lifts and drunk a lot of cokes with people, one of whom he married. Now he has three more people in his family. Doug has checked out lots of peach trees, and Sarai has taught a lot of math lessons. Jason and Tifany have racked up miles and miles as they walk around meeting people with whom to practice their Spanish sentences. This story of Phil’s takes work. Takes time. Takes practice. And I celebrate Phil’s story, and all the team’s stories as they watch to catch God at work around them.

Seams

Transitions are the seams of our lives. They can let things leak out that had been hidden, like an urge to write at 3 o’clock in the morning about lilacs and cynics. They can let things in, like resentment, friends, or God. Or they can unravel and let you fall apart completely. It’s not just individuals that go through transitions. Groups do, too. Sometimes a group’s transitions are too slow to notice, or too big, or they just don’t match up with our personal experience. But they are just as significant.

I had to think about this in my latest cross-cultural experience, one I would not have foreseen, a three-day seminar with sixteen men. When I walked in the room, there were just men everywhere, and I hadn’t walked into a situation like that for a long time, and I reacted, just coming in the door. “Wow, it’s all men.” They were kind. “Were you looking for the Great Women of the Faith course down the hall?” they asked. I laughed. I almost turned around to ask the registrar if, even though I was signed up for this class, would they let me in the other one? But I stayed, and eventually one other wife joined us, so it wasn’t so bad. Really, it wasn’t so bad. This had to be a room full of the most caring, the most non-judgmental, the most empathetic men on the planet. (I’m keeping track, as you know.) Over the three days of the course, most of them took a moment to come up to me or to sit down deliberately in a chair next to me to ask quietly how I’m doing. Some doctors I know could take lessons from such men. In the course, they treated me no different from anyone else.

And what made the experience cross-cultural wasn’t just that it was all men, but that it was about Canadian churches. Specifically, it was about Canadian churches going through transitions between pastors, in other words, having their own Oz moments. After a lifetime south of two borders, watching baby churches get started, and developing local leadership, I hadn’t put much thought into what happens farther down the line when churches transition from pastor to pastor, but my guess is that most of us have watched this process happen in a church somewhere. Our home church here is actually going through this right now. It can get rough when emotions run high, and people aren’t agreeing. If a married couple faced a transition like this, we’d be recommending a counselor, but sometimes we forget that groups of people can need help, too. This course was about how to coach congregations through transitions.

My favorite moment was when the instructor stood in the center of the room and told us to react instinctively when he made his next statement, which he did in a loud voice, “I AM CONFLICT!” Susan and I made for the ends of the room, standing behind podiums and tables, while two of the men, including Robert, of course, practically had their arms around the guy. They insisted that moments of conflict are opportunities. Well, I guess so, but I’d rather be safe behind a podium. The instructor then drew five stations around the room, representing the ways you can respond to conflict, and again asked us to react instinctively. Here are the five:

·         Avoid the conflict

·         Accommodate the other side

·         Compromise, so both sides give up something

·         Assert your position

·         Cooperate

Then he said something that surprised some of us: Jesus did all of these at one time or another. Really? Jesus avoided conflict? Jesus gave in? What a relief! Because that was where I was headed. So, remember when the crowd tried to crown Jesus king, and he slipped away invisibly, evading the issue because the timing was off? Remember when the Temple authorities demanded a tax, and he paid it to keep from offending? Of course there are the times you have to face the storm, but sometimes my avoidance instincts are right after all—who knew? We might assume conflict is always wrong. But that’s not true. Even Paul and Barnabas had conflict during a transition in a joint project, and their solution was to split the task in two, and go their separate ways. And remember Gethsemane? When we are in conflict with each other, that is not the problem; the problem is how we deal with it.

Transitions are hard, especially transitions experienced by whole groups of people, and Christian groups, believe it or not, are no exception. It doesn’t help to think, “Oh, my group couldn’t possibly fall into conflict when things go wrong or there’s change in the wind. MY group wouldn’t be that immature.” Uh huh, right. Groups need coaches probably even more than individuals do when transitions come, especially transitions to new leadership. I’d never thought about this before. I appreciated learning about church culture, about the importance of checking the seams that hold us together, and about the effort it takes to manage conflict so that transitions don’t become times for leaking toxic stuff but times when hidden gifts get tapped, and maturing happens, and God gets in. This was my lightbulb moment today.

Book Smart

On one of these Sundays in church, our mission rep told us about a young woman who is called to be a missionary. I love this. He also casually added the fact that she is getting a Masters degree. That is fine. I have no problem with that. But in our culture, this casual addition to the young missionary’s pedigree might just give the impression that higher degree equals better missionary. I know the speaker didn’t mean this. I’m just saying. Let me explain.

In my extended family, some of us are book smart and some of us have other kinds of smarts. There are the idea people who devour books and love intellectual conversations. Then there are the ones who buckle down and get their degrees but have to work at it. Then there are those like my sister Angie, who are smart at what they do and know their stuff backwards and forwards, but they aren’t drawn to theology texts. To be honest, in my experience, sometimes the Church is hard on people in this last category, the ones that don’t necessarily have book smarts. In fact, the Church seems to be hard on two kinds of people: quiet ones and non-literary ones. Like they just don’t cut it somehow. I already wrote about how I didn’t feel I measured up as an introvert. I mean, if God wants us to go out and win everyone to Christ, why in the world does he insist on making quiet people? Why doesn’t he make us all really gifted, really extroverted evangelists? I have wrestled with this question a lot. I’ve come to terms with it, more or less, so what I’m writing about today is the other group of people that gets sidelined by the church. Those who don’t LOVE books.

So let me tell you a story. Two, in fact. When Robert and I first went to Mexico, we lived among Mixtec Indians in their mountain village.  They are oral people. This means they rely on information coming to them out of other people’s mouths, not information that comes on paper. This is because they don’t read in their own language (there are translators working on that, but it’s SLOW going), and though they are taught to read Spanish in school, they don’t own many books and tend to distrust what they see on paper. Some of the believers can read the Spanish Bible. But that can be tough when they use the standard 500 year old version with thee’s and thou’s, because in Spanish, it’s you’s and we’s, and the you’s (vosotros) sound very much like the we’s (nosotros), so sometimes the sermons, which include much translating of Spanish into Mixtec, can get a bit…interesting.

When the first church was born in this area, it was in response to one man’s testimony about the power of Jesus. That was it. There wasn’t a Bible in sight. And half the village came to Jesus and made a commitment to follow Him, all in one day. And they decided to stop doing the things that they knew were really wrong: they stopped getting drunk and beating their wives; they stopped taking money in exchange for marrying off (they call it selling) their daughters, and they stopped taking interest for loans (the going rate is 50-100% interest--a month!). We are talking about Pentecost, Holy Spirit transformation in this village. And one of them, a musician, started writing songs about Jesus: “People here say I will die. And if I do, I am going straight to heaven with Jesus.” And the founder of the church did die--was shot in broad daylight in the middle of town for it. And so was one of his relatives, another leader. And all this faith and obedience without reading the Bible! These people loved Jesus, and that is what mattered. I saw this.

Story number two. Robert was in Panama, meeting with leaders from the Wounan church there. They were talking about how their culture was oral, too, like the Mixtecs. (the Wounan call Robert el Mixteco). But their churches depend for their spiritual growth mainly on reading. And most visiting speakers spend all their time insisting that people read the Bible. On one such occasion, an old man stood up to speak. His words were forthright and cut to the quick: “I think I need to die now. I cannot read. I cannot even see well. I will never read. So I can never be nourished by the Word of God on my own. I think I should die now.”

Do we need to learn to read the Scriptures? OF COURSE! But we are a body. And those with the gifts of reading and analyzing can help those who don’t have these gifts. And those without those gifts can show their faith and love for Jesus to those who sometimes lose perspective and get proud of sheer book-learning, keeping them connected to the real world. Some people in our churches here in North America could feel like that Wounan man. They love Jesus, but they might not do private devos well. They might find it hard to read, to make long prayers, or to analyze sermons. But this means nothing. The only thing that Jesus is looking at is their heart, and Jesus is the only one who can see what is happening there. It’s never about what we know, but about how we respond in love. And God is the only Judge of that.

I’ve seen people (including members of my family) get judged for what knowledge they lacked, or what degrees they’d failed to earn, or what natural book smarts they’d never been given. When I was growing up, my dad, who mentored semi-literate Honduran pastors, drilled this sentence into my head: “Just because they can’t read well does not mean they cannot grasp and apply the deepest truths of God.” I’m glad he kept insisting because it’s easy to forget.

The Place

Yesterday, coming home from Lake Eerie, we passed some fields that lay right behind a tractor dealership, low-lying fields with nothing but grass, and Robert said, “That’s my place.” It’s been twenty-five years since he’s lived on his father’s farm, since Dad sold the place to Ian, who rides dirt bikes all over the 55 acres of its rolling hills. Robert tells me that when his mom and dad first bought the place so that the kids could learn to farm, it was full of two million tires, a half a million of them piled high between the house and the road. The property was a landfill of tires. The three boys spent their first summer on the farm, piling the half million tires in the front yard onto wagons that they could dump over the hill behind the house. And the tires were a mess, because someone had set fire to them after the property sold, someone jealous of the sale, apparently. Once the millions of tires were out of sight over the hill, the boys made tunnels and bridges and forts out of them. The tires are still there, buried under fifty years of farm life.

The family lived off the farm, raising pigs, chickens, cows, planting an acre of potatoes for storing in the cold cellar, and an acre of sweet corn for bagging up and freezing, or selling at the end of the driveway with a can for payment, and wheat and hay and corn and pasture and a giant truck garden that the boys weeded. And Mom made her own butter, and her own cottage cheese, and cottage cheese veranika for supper with cream sauce, and cherry veranika with cream sauce for dessert, and homemade wine, and canned green beans, tomatoes, peaches and pears.

Once Robert found a garden snake and killed it. He rolled it up in a coil, and left it under the maple tree for his mother to find. He forgot all about it, until the screams started up. His mom had to hide the screwdrivers because he would take them to the kitchen chairs, loosening all the joints so that the chairs were in danger of falling apart. He was a carpenter in the making. And a scalawag. Once he borrowed his dad’s shotgun and shot up the lawn furniture. Realizing that those white lawn chairs were going to get him in trouble, he took them out to the back of the property, where the grass was high. It was summer. Come winter though, when the grass was gone, and everything was bare, the chairs stood out in plain sight in the back field, all full of holes, and Robert waited for the ax to fall, but nothing happened. He figured Dad considered it a mystery how those chairs got shot up and dumped out back, but Dad said differently forty years later. He said he knew more than he let on.

Robert’s room was a scary place. He had a big hole punched in the dry wall where he’d missed punching his brother, who later came after him with a pipe. The fights were serious, and I’m glad they all survived. One wall was covered with a sky blue drape on which hung every sort of weapon Robert could find: pistols, knives, a mace, even a bear trap. Under his bed were dynamite caps stolen from an employer. Robert’s young nephew Ryan refused to sleep in that room, and I don’t blame him. At one point Robert wore an empty bullet on a cord around his neck. The first time he emptied the bullet, he drilled a hole in the casing by hand to empty the powder. The second time, he used a power dremel tool, which heated up the casing, and the powder…he’s slightly deaf in his right ear today, and remembers how the casing shredded right up to his thumb and forefinger, where he was holding it. So there’s a bullet hole somewhere in the floor of that room, too.

Robert and I were married by my dad in the back yard of that place, commissioned to leave, even before the vows were said. We were married under three birch trees on a hot August afternoon almost twenty-five years ago, the same three birch trees that Mom had painted, framing the two girls ice skating on the frozen water in the hollow below the hill, the same hollow we were now driving past. Those three birches are in my wedding pictures, with two starry-eyed young people grinning at each other. And Dad’s proud line up of tractors would have stood just behind them if I hadn’t been silly and asked him to move them for the ceremony. What was I thinking? Now I miss them.

And as we drove past this place, we both had the same question: do you regret leaving this place? Do you regret our life in Mexico, where we raised our kids and made our home? Do you miss what we would have had here, the lost prosperity? And together we decided, no, we didn’t. I can’t imagine another way of life than the one we chose together twenty-five years ago. I’d choose it all over again, bear traps and all.