Slippery Slope

Yesterday Hostess Mom sat on the stairs and told me about the sermon at her church called Don’t Be a Butthead. You can watch it on youtube. I looked it up. I liked it because it countered in a way that was funny and clear some ideas that have been zinging my way over the last few months that make me uneasy. These ideas are: 1. If only we could go back to a time when everyone around us shared our beliefs. 2. We don't have much to learn from people with other beliefs 3. You can jeopardize your relationship with Jesus if you don't hold certain other beliefs, too. 4. The more certain you are,the more right you are. 

Here are some of the counter ideas of the sermon mixed in with my own thoughts. What do you think?

First. We don’t live in our grandparents’ time when everyone around us shared our beliefs. No. We now live in a pluralistic society where we constantly bump into people who don’t share our beliefs. They constantly challenge us to rethink things. Despite all the moaning about not living in a Christian nation any more, this is a good thing because God is bringing people who don’t know Him right to our doorstep. He does this. He is not worried. He made us thinkers and fishers of men.

Second. If we approach people with different beliefs like we know all the answers, and we aren't ready to listen or find common ground, and we are darn certain of all our beliefs, with nothing new to learn, we come across as arrogant buttheads. We evangelicals can be arrogant buttheads!

Third: Not all beliefs are created equal.  One (One!) we are passionately committed to, no holds barred, and all the rest we are willing to hold more tenuously. They aren’t a package deal. I mean (in Paul’s words), “I have decided that while I was with you I would forget everything except Jesus Christ crucified.” Period. This one thing, this one confession, puts us in a love relationship with God and each other forever. There is no slippery slope! And everything else is under discussion. That doesn’t mean I don’t have other beliefs.  Oh, I do. Please. Ask me! It means that when I talk to people, I am not going to peg my passion and my soul (or theirs) on anything but Jesus crucified.

Fourth: How right I think I am is not a measure of my faith. How certain I am of my package of beliefs does not reflect my strength as a Christian. Trusting in my own certainty is idolatrous. How committed  I am, even in the face of terrible, Gethsemani, blood-sweating doubt, now that reflects my faith. If we think our beliefs are so obvious that anyone should believe them, then we are just buttheads. Of course it takes faith. Of course there is doubt. But will I stick to Him even through the valleys? That’s the question.

There. I saved you 45 minutes of youtube. What do you think?

Tradition!

Sunday our church met at a park for its annual summer picnic, surrounded by hiking trails, waterfalls and giant shade trees. You could hardly call it a picnic. It was a feast of salads and hamburgers and sausages and cupcakes and pies…the food just kept coming! This is a tradition that’s been around probably since the church began, and an excellent one! During the worship, held in a barn, the visiting preacher offered a shofar for people to blow (a ram’s horn), a tradition in Jewish worship that his own church has adopted. I liked the way the horn’s rustic blare called to the band’s modern instruments. It reminded me of other rich church traditions: the Moravian brass bands playing together at dawn in God’s Acre (the cemetery) on Easter, for example. I remembered the Mixtecs, too, in bright Indian garb processing down to the river for baptism among singing and shouted hallelujahs and no instruments at all. All of us can think of church traditions that enrich our worship and our fellowship. God loves our creativity.

And yet, as I move among cultures, I remember that we hold these great treasures lightly. For the sake of others, we let them go. When Jesus became a man, he left all the glorious traditions of heaven, all its rich culture, and he took on the nature of a slave. We, too, leave behind beloved traditions when we cross cultural thresholds. I am not talking about leaving Jesus behind. I know that the ground of our unity as believers is that God has revealed himself once and for all through his Son Jesus, and that outside Him, there is no salvation. What we do leave behind is our own cultural responses to Jesus, the way we clothe our obedience to him with our own traditions. This way we make room for people in new places to find their own ways to worship God creatively, using their own art forms, their own celebrations, their own garb. We let them create their own traditions. The more we leave our culture behind, the more freedom we give to people coming to God in another culture to express themselves from the heart. We remember that the most precious things in life are fleeting.

When John saw the vast crowd worshiping in heaven, they were from every nation and tribe and people and language. How did he know? I think it was obvious. White robes or not, I think this crowd reflected the vast variety of human culture all being put to use to worship God. I think there were shofars and brass bands and electric guitars and banjos and lyres and sitars. I think they each brought such different traditions to the mix that no one but God could weave them together into one body. And yes there must have been a summer picnic, too. A feast. With waterfalls and hiking trails and giant shade trees. Right next to the Mexican fiesta: tamales, piñatas and all. I just know it!

The question is: how do we know what is human tradition and what is universal? What do we take and what do we leave behind when we move among cultures? This question is behind a good many church fights and splits. It’s what separates denominations and gives mission agencies the greatest headaches. This is what I want to tackle in my writing project, and so I hereby give notice. I don't know how much I'll be posting now while I write whatever it is that I'm writing. The daily blog posts have gotten me through chemo, and I'm grateful. Now I feel the same urgency to write this...whatever it is. Let's see how things go (nothing new in that!).

Mentoring

As you might imagine, one of the toughest things about being in Canada for these months is making sure our time is productive while we wait to return to Mexico. Obviously for me, getting through the stages of treatment takes some doing, but there is time left over. Ironically, it feels like one of the busiest, most fulfilling times of life, because I am for the first time in my life taking time to steadily write. It’s my new job. For Robert, with his penchant for action, it’s tougher, I think. He’s used to spending his time working hard or talking hard, usually both together. Already he’s helping his brother train an apprentice in woodworking, he’s now driving with someone from our church to the World Mennonite Conference, where he will meet the editors of The Anabaptist Witness that have been publishing articles he’s been writing, and as soon as he comes back, he will be hosting a Christian brother from the DRC. And he finagles coffees and teas and suppers and desserts with people, mentoring when that works. He’s a natural born coach, mentor, teacher, and I have lost count of the hundreds of people he has taught to plane a board or question an assumption about church.

He’s had excellent mentors himself. Rick taught him how to make guitars in a shop in Catacamas, Honduras, while apprenticing him in church-planting. During the day, the team of Hondurans and Canadians would work in the shop, but they would quit early so that after lunch they could be out hacienda amigos, or “making friends.” They would walk around Catacamas, chatting with neighbors, strangers, and friends, and they would invite people to know Jesus. They studied together, prayed together, and grew a church right in the shop. As a team. There were four guys who were the elders, and though Rick mentored them, no one called him pastor because that’s not what he was after. He wanted those four guys to go out to other neighborhoods and towns and villages and do the same things he was showing them how to do now. And they did. These guys started dozens of churches all throughout central Honduras. And that was Robert’s education in missions and church planting and pastoral training—an apprenticeship in a guitar shop.

The best thing about this training is that it was eminently practical. Immediately reproducible. All the guys were out mentoring other people, assigning the same simple training booklets they used themselves. There was no waiting time, no being sent away from their networks for special training by experts who’d never seen your village. No. this was something anyone could do right out the gate. And they did, Robert included. Rick was a good mentor.

My guess is that the hardest thing for Robert this year is being gone from our team in Mexico and the many others he mentors there. He skypes, emails, calls, and goes back to visit them whenever he can, but it’s tough being this far away. Thankfully, every member is immersed in Indian culture and everyone is hacienda amigos and mentoring others, too, including each other. Because that’s the job. We learn and bless by passing on to others what we have received. Recently our mission board reported that they are switching their training model to that of field apprenticeships, and we think this is a good thing. Don’t you think that we let discipling get too complicated sometimes, if we do it at all? 

Medicalese

Dr. Cynical was in fine form. He said my blood pressure was a bit high, so what was I afraid of? What did I think he would do to me? He’d just said I should up my dose of the beta blocker, which can cause light-headedness, depression, and weight-gain, thank you very much, so I said that was what I was afraid of, him upping my dose (Gotta be fair. He wasn’t trying to be cynical, just funny…in a doctor sort of way). He said it was up to me, then, what I wanted to do. I could quadruple my dose if I felt I needed to. Quadruple? Why? I think my level of light-headedness, depression and weight-gain is just fine, thank you very much.

You enter another world when you walk into the doctor’s office. He’s talking fast, well within his area of expertise, and you are scrambling to keep up, to take in the implications of what he’s saying, trying to remember your questions, your concerns, trying to figure out from your list of twelve (twelve!) medications and vitamins and supplements which one he’s referring to. It’s all so obvious to him and not to you. “Metopropol, that’s the one. And when you wrote out your list, you should have included the frequency you take them. That’s important (I know!) Is that 25 mg once a day or twice? Is it a white pill? Next one: Dexamethasone 4mg. How many times is that each day? How many pills? How long?”

He’s moved on, and I’m still trying to find D-e-x-a-m-e-t-h… I didn’t think to put them in alphabetical order! Where’s my brain? For him this language is English, while for me it’s Medicalese. (Speaking of languages, a friend of ours told us that his pastor put the first page of his passport up on the screen for the church to see. On the line marked “Nationality,” it clearly said, printed up by the Canadian government itself: Heavenese! What border-crossing stories he must have! “Ok, sir, what are you bringing from your home country today?)

And just when I think I have a handle on things, on how everything is so interconnected, I bring up the Muga Scan. I mean, someone needs to be interested in the Muga Scan. That was a huge machine, and he’s a cardiologist. He says, no, it’s not that important to him because the Muga Scan tracks damage to the heart, and by what he can tell, the architecture is just fine. (Whew!) What’s wrong is the electrical wiring, the rhythm, which he says, “is a pain in the butt but not life-threatening…unless you’re 80.” He’s just fine with the little EKG they do in the lab next door. He’ll let the Cancer People keep up the Scans, tracking the damage they are doing to the heart, but he’s working on the rhythm. The doses. The timing of an ablation (not oblation!) that could accidentally nick a node and leave you with a pacemaker for the rest of your life or could accidentally perforate your heart and leave you dead. Great.

 Outside in the waiting room, a petite lady is waiting to take her turn with Dr. Cynical. I am in and out in 15 minutes. He had called her first, but she had protested, saying my appointment was earlier, and so he sent her back and called me in, apologizing for mixing up our files. When I leave the office, I ask if I’ve been fast enough, and she smiles. Or I think she does. She’s wearing a mask, but her eyes twinkle. “Yes; that was perfect. You have a great evening.” Finally. Someone who speaks my language.

Stupidly, we got in the car

Olancho, Honduras

Our 25^th is coming up. It takes me back to the wedding and early days when Robert almost died. My dad had married us (with a special permit; he’s American) and committed us to Oz from day one. So after the wedding we took a trip to Honduras to recruit team-members, and there we were offered a ride through Guatemala and southern Mexico to meet new cultures. You didn’t pass up trips like this because the alternative was a series of long, uncomfortable bus rides.  We should have stayed behind when, the day before the trip, Robert was diagnosed with typhoid. But we didn't. No, instead, we handed him a heavy antibiotic, prayed, and stupidly got in the car.

It was a nightmare. Sick and sloshing around curves in the heat for hour after hour, Robert only got worse. In Guatemala City we took him to Emergency. The doctor, working off the first diagnosis, doubled the dose, and we drove on through more bad, mountainous roads.  

Robert got sicker and sicker, and by the time we got to Chiapas, Mexico, he couldn’t sit up and couldn’t get warm.  Now I look back and figure his blood pressure was plummeting. People avoided him in case he was contagious. Frightened, I took him off the drugs since they obviously weren’t working, and within a day, finally, his eyes turned yellow. It was not typhoid but hepatitis. Which damages your liver, so the last thing you need is heavy antibiotics pumping through it.  Off the meds, Robert improved a bit, and we limped around to a few Indian villages, but by this time he’d sunk into lethargy and even depression, and nothing clicked.  Doggedly, we pushed on. Now I can’t imagine why or how.

Chiapas, Mexico

After a long bus ride to Oaxaca City, we holed up in a hostel. We had contacts in the city but no phone numbers, so, since these were old-fashioned days, we sent a letter to a post office box and waited. Surprisingly, our friends came for us the next day and finally, after more rest, Robert started coming back to life, though just barely. I think back on how idealistic and blind we were to make this trip, but it did set us on our track toward the Mixtecs.

Especially for Robert , the whole trip is a blur. But the people we met in Oaxaca were wise, and after driving around as much as Robert could handle between long sleeps, we picked up that we needed to find ways to meet the people we wanted to reach before just landing on them unannounced in their villages. Landing as foreigners unannounced was the quickest way to get expelled.  These villages, unlike any in Honduras, had laws governing who could move in. We would be better off, we realized, going to northern Mexico to meet Indian workers in migrant camps. They were more open there and, after establishing good friendships, were likely to extend invitations to visit them in their home villages. And this is just how we met the Mixtecs two years later. God used our ridiculous trip to set us on our way. But that came later, when the hepatitis was gone, and the spirit was back—another story. This one is about how tough and dumb we can be. I'm grateful to see this 25th coming up, despite stupidly getting into cars.

Chiapas, Mexico

Celibate

I wrote recently about austerity, about choosing to live among those who have less choice. My  Miskito and Mixtec (say that 50 times fast) friends were among the most hospitable people I’ve ever met, and the landscapes where they live, barren swamp and lush forest, are hauntingly beautiful. I would never trade the years of my life spent among either. 

But they make me think of the people I’ve been reading about in Kathleen Norris’ book who choose a different sort of austerity, who move to Oz without really moving away. The ones who choose celibacy. I think it would be unfair to include only monks and nuns in this category, since I know many people, especially women, who have remained celibate for other reasons. I know Mexican women who have come to Christ and found there are no Christian men to marry, and they have chosen to wait—a lifetime if need be. I know missionary women who have chosen to serve in places that makes marriage less likely, and to stay there, and stay single, the rest of their lives, if it comes to that. And there are other reasons.

Kathleen in her book talks about how the celibate servants she met struggled with their sexuality, but by sublimating it, and dedicating it to God, they found ways for their passion to express itself in service. They found ways to love people in a focused, intentional way, without exclusivity or conditions. They became practiced at offering hospitality. When I was in junior high in Honduras, our principal was a nun, Sister Cristina. She lived in a local convent of the Sisters of Mercy, and she was excellent at her job. And I found she considered all of us, students and parents, Catholic and non, her community to serve. She was counselor, mentor, and friend to many, both during school hours and after, and she wore her availability on her sleeve. I know many single, celibate women like this (men, too, but fewer), not just nuns. I honor them. 

In conversation with a fellow bald friend last night, we talked about the furor right now over the US Supreme court’s decision to support gay marriage and the learning curve we face using the proper terms for today’s alternative (or is that term wrong now?) and perhaps unfamiliar lifestyles (I wondered if I couldn’t cheat and call them “The Letters.” The English teacher in me cringes at labels with more than three syllables.) I’m also wondering if we shouldn’t tack on to The Letters one more, a “C” for all those people, who over thousands of years, have, for many reasons, lived as celibates for a few years or for many. I think that in our indulgent “me” civilization, we may overlook this path of celibacy. We may assume that if life is hard, and the urges are strong, we have a right to take an easier route. I’m forbidden to judge. I can only ask God to lead us all to purer and more sacrificial loving and hope I can obey.

The “C” in The Letters would then include Jesus, wouldn’t it, and Paul, (neither of whom said much on the topic) as well as monks and nuns. It would include all my single missionary friends, too. And I think many would be happy to share the company of all those Letters, and would love them, though their chosen life is different from the other Letters, because theirs isn’t about how to live with a partner but of how to live without, for a different purpose, embracing chastity, austerity, even renunciation. I wonder if the “C”s we know who choose this lifestyle or have it thrust on them, even temporarily, have more to teach us than we realize.

Defenses

Yesterday, before my last chemo, I saw Dr. Blue and Brown. His opening was, “I heard you were a bad girl in Florida,” (because I hadn’t seen a doctor about my fever. I could just imagine father-daughter rooms next to each other in the hospital. No thanks. I survived without doctors.) We then took stock of where things stand at this quarter way through my treatment. He had sent me to a breast surgeon, whom I just met before going to Florida. There are pictures of her in her office from the beginning of her practice, and Robert and I did double takes to recognize her. I was glad she has lots of experience.  As she gave me my surgery lecture, I wondered if it got boring for her. I had to stop and ask her to repeat some things because her voice was soft and without modulation. I doubt doctors take speech lessons in med school any more than they get handwriting classes. Her competence and compassion are what matter.

Defenses

Mastectomy is set for Sept 1. Dr. Soft-Spoken said since there is at least one lymph node enlarged still, everything is coming out on the right side. She told me the chemo had shrunk the tumor, yes, but as far as she could tell, hadn’t shrunk the node. This was disconcerting since I know the nodes are my last defense before the cancer metastasizes. She explained what it could be like to live without those nodes, the heaviness and swelling I could feel in that arm each day, the need to move it overhead after surgery. A survivor friend told me she sits beside a lamp and just holds on to the post above her head for as long as she can stand it to relieve the heaviness.

Dr. Blue and Brown pshawed Dr. Soft-Spoken’s assessment. He said it was unlikely the lymph nodes were unaffected, and he poked around to double check. He said if I wanted, he could order another CAT scan to check for metastasis, but he didn’t recommend it because it was rare for cancer to spread during chemo, especially chemo like mine that was working, and if the test showed “hot spots,” all he would do is cancel surgery because there is no cure for metastasized cancer, so what would be the point? The cancer was out the gate. But he thinks so far so good (no guarantees).

So I realize after these four months of chemo that yes, the cancer has probably been stalled, but it’s still capable of spreading, and surgery is my next line of defense. I will live without lymph nodes on the right side after Sept 1 and move on to radiation once things have healed, the third line of defense.

What’s crazy to me is the silence of the battle. I know it’s a life and death struggle, and all I feel are the effects of the chemo, nothing of what’s happening inside. I take these good doctor’s words that my defenses are holding, but I really won’t know for years. I sit in that chemo chair with that final potion going in my arm, and I look at the five other people in my pod connected to IV’s and most of us have care-givers like I do, and most of us are silent. The couple to my left asks our petite nurse Lisa questions about what the drugs do and how the PICC line works, and he has all his hair, so I realize he’s new, but after 4 months, I have no questions for Lisa. At the end of my 6 hours, she takes out my PICC line, making my arm vibrate slightly, but no pain.

For the rest of this year, I’ll have an IV put in every three weeks to finish out my treatments. When they offered me the gong, I said I’d wait until all that stabbing was over. Seemed premature right now to ring it when I have all that still ahead of me. Surgery. Radiation. 13 stabs, which they beguilingly call pokes. (My chemo brain calculated 40. But it's NOT 40. It's only 13! Host Dad caught that one. Yay!) More prayer. Robert said I should practice the gong. One battle down. But I was still thinking about the uncertainty and the invisibility. My guess is that with teamwork like this, it’s always that way, you trusting other people to help you see, help you judge. So little of reality is accessible. Trust, waiting, underscores everything.

Notice the melting ice, the bird trap. You've seen this before: Peter Bruegel the Elder

Austerity

My friend Compassionate Nurse lent me some BBC series, the goodies like North & South and Cranford. She threw in an extra movie, which we watched, about bands of people who choose austere lifestyles, like Spartans or the Amish. I was thinking, who would do such a thing? And then I remembered I’d chosen to live with Miskitos and Mixtecs, who had less freedom to choose where they lived. In both places I slept on boards, slogged through horrible weather, and felt constantly hungry.

I think my worst moment was a night in a village called San Miguel. We’d walked for hours and then ridden in the back of a truck through a river and up a mountain to get there, hoping to find Reinaldo (not his real name), a man we’d met at a migrant worker’s camp in northern Mexico and who we thought had turned to Christ. He had offered to take us over the mountains to another town where we had friends, and we thought we were ready for this long day’s hike. We weren’t, so fortunately our trip took another turn. 

When we found Reinaldo’s house, we committed our first faux pas right away when we asked his wife where Reinaldo was. The terms for “he’s on his way” and “he’s not coming” are only a tone apart, and we missed that little detail and sat down to wait. (Later we found out he had slipped away when he saw us coming, not wanting to be seen in his village with foreign bringers of a false religion.) His wife, I’m sure, wondered what we were up to. We practiced all our Mixtec on her, but even Robert soon ran out of words, and she wasn’t offering any conversation, so we took a walk up the mountain path. We came to an altar of rocks with dead flowers and dried blood on it, and realized we’d found the town’s altar to Saint Mark, the rain god whose day of appeasement matched Saint Mark’s festival day, so shared the name. We knew this was no Catholic saint and wondered if we offended by being here.

Returning to our hostess’ wooden shack, we found her preparing supper, the usual beans, greens, salsa and tortillas, and since we were still hanging around, though for no reason she could see after her plain answer, she had no choice but to feed us. After that I committed the second (or was it third or fourth; we were racking them up) faux pas. I had to use the wilderness restroom, so out I went, and on my way back I found a cut bouquet of bright red flowers on the ground. I picked them up and brought them into the house. “What are these flowers?” I asked, proud I could say this much. She mumbled that she didn’t know. I thought she’d misunderstood my words, so I slowed down and enunciated more clearly. She glanced at me, then at her daughter, then looked away, mumbling even more quietly that she didn’t know. I insisted. They were flowers she’d cut herself. Finally Robert put me out of my misery, “Anne, they’re poppies. Put them down!” The daughter eventually picked them up and slipped out the door.

“Oh!” The light dawned. Glancing down, I could now see (observant person that I am) that there was a slit around the enormous bulb from which the white gum had been harvested: the base for heroin. I’d just asked this woman about a sale of illegal drugs. Now she probably really wanted us out of there, but it was dark, and she was stuck with us for the night. The bedroom was a second wooden shack with nothing but two beds, both made of sticks. She piled her kids in one bed with her and gave us the other. Rain leaked through the roof and wind reached through the slats of wood. We were at 7000 feet. We covered ourselves with our plastic rain jackets and slept in our boots. No, didn’t sleep. We shivered until first light when, after a breakfast of tortillas, beans, and salsa, we finally got that little detail of the tone pair figured out and realized we should be on our way. Down the mountain road we went to wait forlornly in the town square for a return truck. We did not feel welcome.

The river had swollen from the rain, and we took our chances fording it in the truck, but over we went, eager to get home. And from there it was supposed to be a plain hike, but I’d picked up a virile bunch of giardia bugs and could barely walk. I kept thinking what would have happened if I’d attempted the all day hike over the mountain with two men. Whew. When we got to a doctor a few days later, he was impressed with the virility of my giardia bugs—had seen nothing quite like it. Wondered how I’d managed. I wondered, too. But after I knocked them out with drugs, we went back. Austerity is a relative thing.

Countdown: #1 Last Chemo. The Theory of One

Although I still have 40 IV treatments left, today is the last of the chemo. No more pure poison after today. YAY! So today I celebrate One. And it’s about the Unified Theory of Everything.

River Styx

Sometime back I said that I believe Christianity is true because of the Gospel of Homesickness, which is an application of Plato’s Ideals. In other words, I am convinced that the reason I have such an ache for something more out there, is because there really is more out there. Of course Plato thought that the more out there was bad news for human beings, just tragedy and Hades, so they may as well forget about wishing for anything different. He wanted to eliminate art, eliminate music, eliminate comedy, because they made you think there might be more than gloom and doom out there, but there’s not. But because of Jesus, whom Plato never met, I know differently. I know that the story ends well. That is the Gospel of Homesickness.

The second reason I believe Christianity is true is because of Occam’s Razor. This is also called the law of parsimony, or frugality, or even stinginess. In other words, shave off what you don’t need.  Occam’s razor is a heuristic device that helps you choose between several explanations. (a heuristic device is a rule of thumb, a rule of common sense, a mental short cut. For example, when a stranger offers you a ride, as a rule of thumb, don’t take it.)  Occam’s razor is a rule of thumb that says if you have several explanations, take the simplest one. Here’s an example. Calvin’s dad walks into the bedroom and yells, “And what’s with all these feathers? Are you tearing up your pillows? Calvin insists innocently, “It was incredible, Dad. A herd of ducks flew in the window and molted! They left when they heard you coming!” Yep, incredible all right. Calvin’s dad applies Occam’s razor and Hobbes adds, disgustedly, “Nice alibi, Frizzletop! No dessert for a week!”

One of my favorite children’s books is by William Steig, entitled Yellow & Pink. William Steig wrote Shrek and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, which won the Caldecott Medal. In Yellow & Pink  two carved wooden figures wake up in a field and try to figure out how they got there. Pink assumes someone made them. Yellow starts coming up with a series of accidents that might explain their existence. It’s obviously a creationist tale, and the American Academy of Pediatrics as well as the New York Times don’t recommend it. It’s not in print. But it does illustrate Occam’s Razor. 

Someone, later than the Franciscan Friar William from Occam, added a few words to the Razor so that it now said, “if you have several explanations, take the simplest one, but don’t bring in the supernatural.” This is how Occam’s Razor is applied today, making Yellow’s long explanation for our existence the only one acceptable. And I can see how giving supernatural explanations for everything isn’t helpful when you are trying to find a cure for cancer. You have to know how stuff works. How the laws of science hang together.

But our entire culture is suspecting that behind the laws of science, there is more out there. The race is on to find the Grand Unifying Theory, or the Unified Theory of Everything . These theories try to connect the various forces of the universe including  nuclear particles like electrons, magnetism, and gravity. Scientists want these forces to come up symmetrical, like the neat symmetry between energy and matter (E=mc^2),. They aren’t there yet, but they might find something any day. I don’t know. Meanwhile I think their title is a bit grandiose. It connects forces. It doesn’t begin to explain love or poetry. I suspect that the real Unified Theory of Everything is not an equation but a Person. Someone ultimately holding physical forces together as well as love and poetry. My personal Unified Theory of Everything, my Theory of One is far more interesting, and bringing Him into the picture is definitely more in keeping with Friar William’s Razor.

Conversion

When the sun is going down, Robert and I walk out the door and down the road for exercise. I feel I am made of blocks that are having difficulty staying stacked on top of each other in a straight line. We pass vineyards. I hadn’t noticed how many vineyards there are until the summer covered their bare branches with leaves. They are propped up with string—no wonder they grow so straight and regular. We pass a tiny cemetery with family names, including the name of our own short road with its warning “Rough Road” at its entrance. We pass a church converted into a family home with big windows along its sides so that you can see all the way through, like looking at the sky through square glasses. Friends live there, and we’ll visit on Sunday. We pass apple trees and corn fields and bean fields. The wheat fields are the most colorful with white Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrots) and purple hairy vetch (someone does not like this flower) showing through the gold. The winter wheat is ripe for harvest, and these are the tares to be cleaned away, bouquets that can’t be eaten.

The vineyards have brought a conversion to the area. It’s not just fruit farms and grain farms now; it’s a wine trail, and where there were just a handful of wineries when I first married here, now there are dozens, their driveways lying right next to each other along these roads, and I watch how they choose their labels, some from family names, some from locations, some from a whim or a to make a statement. One is called Megalomaniac with classy clothes in human shape but no faces.

We take our walk along the escarpment, the cliff over which the Niagara River falls. At the Falls, water thunders abruptly over rock shelves with such power that its seething surge at the bottom holds the ferries at bay with their blue-raincoated passengers drenched in river spray. At night this water power is harvested for conversion to electricity. Here, though, the escarpment drops smoothly, gradually, so that tiny vineyards nestle in crooks of the drop, drinking their flavors from micro-climates caught in mini-plateaus like fumes in wineglasses. Here the water drips from the sky and filters through soil to be sipped calmly by grapes, water converted to wine the quiet way. Some wineries let the grapes freeze in winter to squeeze out ice wine, the sweetest of all. The tourists follow both trails of water, leaving a trail of their own, of water converted to houses and jobs.

When you are driving above the escarpment and come to the edge, most roads curl round and back to take you down more safely, although in winter, black ice can still lie in wait and ambush you. One winter night my friend Alyson found herself hanging upside down, strapped over her car-roof in a ditch on such a road down the escarpment. But on one road named Victoria after a queen, you crest the top and go straight down (watch your speed; the cops are merciless) and as you first catch sight of the bottom, you see the lake stretch out majestically before you, with the silhouette of a great city lying dim in the distance across flat water, with its iconic tower soaring above, and I’m surprised every time, and my heart lifts like it lifts when I drive round a curve and see mountains!

As we walk along the escarpment beside quiet vineyards, I tell Robert of the book I’ve just finished. This one I savored while vineyards greened: The Cloister Walk. It describes how people following the Benedictine Rule commit for life to an ongoing conversion of the heart, a slow, gradual renunciation of power until God has it all. This conversion, this wine-turning, takes a lifetime. It’s not a moment, a raising of hands and going forward. Somehow I think the Benedictines have the better definition. 

Goldfish crackers and broccoli

As often happens these days, I tired quickly and went to wait in the car for Robert to finish his shopping at our local thrift store. There were lots of people out in our small town--three young girls walking by all in black summer wear (is that an oxymoron?), a dressed up Asian couple, a black guy cruising on a stretched out motorcycle, an older lady under a denim jungle hat. It made me wonder, as I am sure you have wondered, surrounded by people from diverse groups, how do you introduce God into this shifting  kaleidoscope? How do you bring God to people who live in settings pretty different from yours? Maybe they know God better than you do. How would you know?

I once watched a psychology experiment with two kids, a one-year old and a two-year old. The psychologist put two plates of food in front of the one-year old, one piled with goldfish crackers, the other with broccoli. The psychologist took a goldfish cracker in her hand and made a big fuss about not liking the cracker. She was shaking her head and wagging her finger and saying, “Yuk! Ugh! Gross! No cracker for me!” Then she took the broccoli and started rubbing her tummy and smiling and nodding and saying, “Yum! Yum!” Next the scientist put her hand out to the one-year old and asked, “Can I have some food, please?” The one-year old didn’t miss a beat. She grabbed a goldfish and handed it placidly to the scientist. I mean, that’s what she would eat. Who would want that broccoli stuff? 

With the two-year old things went a bit differently. After the scientist made her preferences known and held out her hand for a cracker or a broccoli stick, this youngster cocked her head to one side, pursed her lips, scrunched her eyebrows together, and reached for the broccoli. But all the time you could see the thought bubble over her head, “You’re crazy, Lady, but here’s what you want.” Sometime between year one and year two of life, most humans learn that other people do things differently.  Other people like different things. This doesn’t make sense, but by age two, we gather it’s true.

Sometime later we also learn that groups do things differently, too. “We Joneses do it like this.” Or, “We Canadians do it like this.” Or, “We Baptists don’t do that.” What we do in our own group makes sense, and what other groups do doesn’t. This is how we are wired, and it takes a great amount of listening to understand that other groups really do want the broccoli.

I heard a great story on TED from an outgoing Italian NGO worker trying to help a Zambian community build its economy. The soil along the river where they lived was excellent for growing tomatoes, but the community never grew tomatoes there. In fact, they didn’t grow anything there. The land was wasted. So the Italian busily planted row and row of lovely Italian tomatoes and showed them off to the Zambians. The tomatoes grew. The tomatoes were a success. Until 200 hippos came up out of the river and devoured everything. “My God! What about the hippos?” exclaimed the Italian. “You never asked,” replied the Zambians. That other group wanted the broccoli, and he kept handing over the goldfish crackers. You know what this Italian titled his talk? Shut up and listen.

We make this mistake in the church, too. Yes, we sidestep the problem by setting out several plates: different worship services; a blend of hymns and contemporary worship songs; a Children’s Moment. The arguments start when there are several groups at the table and only one plate full of goldfish crackers. Then what do you do?

The problem is worse when we start churches in groups different from our own. If we aren’t asking the right questions, if we aren’t listening, they look suspiciously like our own churches back home but not much like the new group, and the hippos come. Christian history is full of hippos.

The very first church ever born had a problem trying to bring a new group to Christ that didn’t do things the same way as the original group. The book of Acts records the struggle. It shows how the Greek widows weren’t getting the same care as the Jewish widows. It explains how the Gentile churches felt pressured to become Jewish. It repeats Peter’s vision where God taught him to accept food from Gentiles, kosher or not. Finally it documents how the leaders of the very first church called a council in Jerusalem to decide once and for all whether Gentiles were bound by the Jewish way of doing things. Their answer was a resounding NO. Broccoli was acceptable.

Easy to say. Hard to do. I think of Peter, the one to whom God repeated that important vision three times, and yet after his own group pressured him, he stopped eating broccoli with his Gentile friends. I think all of us would agree now that God meets people wherever they are, in whatever group they belong to, and He gives them a new life and makes them witnesses to that very group. This is the meaning of the Incarnation: God comes to us. But accepting other groups without wanting them to do things our way does not come natural. It’s hard work and takes intentionality, even for Saint Peter. Our default mode is our own culture, so when we don’t think about it, we automatically go for the crackers (or the kosher food, as the case may be). And the hippos come. Where have you seen hippos lately?

Magic pills

Coming back home to the farm, I see that outside my window “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” (just about), and Host Dad Larry is already talking about harvesting something—not sure what. He’s just waiting for one more day to dry the rain-soaked fields. Things grow so quickly! I overhead him say maturity is at 95%, and maybe the extra day will get another percent or four.  How does one know these things? Could one invent a way to measure one’s kids this way? “Yes, Bob, Philip is at 95% maturity right now. We’ll just wait a day or two to get that last 4-5%.” Huh! Wouldn’t that be great? Like magic.

Here is more magic: I unpack my identical bottles of unidentical medicines (could I have a blue bottle, and a red? We are all a little tired of orange, thanks. Oh, and do you have pills that aren’t white?). I’m glad that this week I am down to one, a beta blocker, which I’ve been taking for, what, a month now? In a week I have an appointment with the cynical cardiologist who prescribed it, and I decided I should go online and research what a beta blocker is before I see him. Not sure I want to ask him.

In the old days this little white pill would have seemed like magic:

“You say your heart beats way too fast at the wrong times? Not when you are startled by crazy cart drivers but when the weather is hot and muggy, and you’ve been out for a long walk with a motorcycle dog? Hmmm. Not sure I get the connection there, and I’m not sure what a Ducati is,  but let me see. Here: take this. This miniscule amount of compressed white powder should just about take care of it. If not, let me know, and I’ll be glad to burn that little spot right off your heart for you.  That’s if you survive that other little spot in your chest. That will be four hundred gold coins, please.” (Yep, that is what Dr. Cynical has cost me, so far, four hundred gold loonies, cold cash).

The Beta blockers that I take (there are three kinds) block the connection between stress hormones released into your blood and receptor cells in heart and kidneys. Keeping those hormones from linking to receptor cells mutes the effect of epinephrine (adrenaline) with its “fight or flight” reaction. I like this. I get to live in slow mo for the rest of my life, I guess, and not startle when certain people (who shall remain nameless) jump out from behind doors, or when certain other people drive in a certain way (that also shall remain nameless), or when the weather turns hot and muggy while I’m on long walks with a motorcycle dog.

Beta blockers were discovered by a Sir James Black three years after I was born and are considered a marvel of the 20^th Century because they slow down the heart and prevent heart attacks. Performers found they also reduce stage fright and within ten years the dancers, actors, speakers, and musicians of the day were popping them like candy. Stutterers and surgeons liked them, too. And the International Olympic Committee had to ban them after finding that their archers, shooters, golfers and snookerers (who pot balls from spots, I kid you not) relied on them like modern athletes rely on steroids. And I get to take them legally. I just can’t compete in the Olympics, drat.

“So, Doctor, you who can give medicine to slow my heart, to stop my heart, to cut its pressure in half, you who can eliminate the killing fluid from my father’s ankles and drive the clot from behind his eye, can you give me a pill to solve the stuff inside my head, the stuff that shall remain nameless? How far does your magic go?

Culture of God

I like borders. Even though they make me nervous, they make the differences easier to see. According to my daughter, when we cross the border from the US into Canada, the houses and roads perk right up in quality, but they turn somber and cautious. Other than the occasional red door, their colors are subdued. She lets her breath out in relief crossing into Mexico where variety and color reign, even riot. Like people, countries have personalities. Margaret Atwood says that at their core, countries have a single symbol that comes out over and over in their literature, movies, music and art. For the US she says it’s The Frontier with its Lone Ranger saving the world. For Canada it’s The Survivor, carving out a life up there in the North. 
 

She didn’t offer a symbol for Mexico, but maybe it would be The Rebel, someone never quite happy with the rules or the status quo. (Feel free to offer something better.) I’m thinking of the iconic legends of Zapata and Pancho Villa, or the name of Mexico’s strongest political party, the Institutional  Revolutionary Party (PRI), or the fact that narcocorridos,  drug ballads like the tribute to Chapo Guzman, are becoming ever more popular, even though they subvert every family value on the planet. “El Chapo” (Shorty) is the drug lord that just escaped from a Mexican maximum security jail (whether through a tunnel or right out the front gate, no one is telling) for the second time. He’s so wealthy that Forbes listed him as a self-made billionaire along with Gates and Buffet, and he’s offed thousands of people. There is a section of society in Mexico that admires Chapo’s ability to thumb his nose at authority. Not all Mexican rebels are as harmless as El Chavo. 

The week spent with my parents and sister, a type of  “border crossing,” reminded me that not only did our own original Patterson clan have its personality (that fortunately included card games I could win), but Angie and I have our own family personalities, or cultures, as well. And all of us are embedded in such different environments: living in a retirement community in Florida; selling houses in a bright Texas economy, and teaching school in southern Mexico. We are all constantly weaving new cultures out of old.

Recently, I have been asking myself how to describe the culture of God’s country. If it’s true that God as Trinity has always been a Family, a Community, a Union, a Pueblo, a Nation, a Country, then His country has its own culture, too, its own way of doing things, and its own unifying symbol. I think God revealed this symbol through Jesus when he taught us to pray, “Our Father...” Only he turned the whole device on its head, because He is The Father, and earthy fathers are symbols of Him, and never the other way around. We are the Bride to the Bridegroom, and earthly marriages are symbols of that, and never the other way around. Jesus showed us that the primary way we relate to God now is as his children. He is our Father, and he wants us back! And not just us; He wants the whole family estate. He wants the land, and he wants the people, and he wants all the ways we relate to each other in groups, too—the ways we govern, educate, work, heal, play, love, worship—everything.  In other words, he wants His Culture to utterly infuse ours. That’s living in God’s kingdom.

We are all embedded in such different cultures when He calls us: Mixtecs, Smithvillians, Oaxacans, Texans, young, old, post-moderns, pre-moderns, dead-on-moderns, don’t-try-to-label-me-whatever-moderns, and He meets us where we are. That’s the meaning of the Incarnation. But then he disciples us. And as more and more of us from any culture follow his lead, together we weave from that culture something truly beautiful, a tapestry made by all our choices together, all our work together, all our creative acts of worship together. May that tapestry be rich and not one culture lost! We kid ourselves if we think this is easy.