Sync

Sync.  It’s a term everyone uses now (in Oaxaca a sincronisada is a quesadilla with ham), but it’s relatively new.  It first appeared in written form in 1985, but its mother term was an invention of the Industrialization era, taken from the Greek word synkhronos, meaning at the same time, and used in 1879 to describe the synchronization of all those new timepieces that were the fad of the era.  One of the books I teach in Oaxaca is Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne (1873). Phileas Fogg, a clock-like man in his punctuality and precision (he fires his valet for bringing his shaving water at 84° instead of 86°), takes on a wager worth about 1 ½ million that he can make it around the world in 80 days, using the newly built Suez Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad in the US, and the linking of the Indian railways. It’s a tribute to machines and a foreshadowing of global tourism. Fogg races against the clock and makes it back just in time, checking his pocket watch all the way, but he thinks he has lost the wager because he is out of sync—he has not taken into account the time changes.

My daughter is enchanted by the style that today echoes the Industrial era and especially its “scientific fiction”: the flying ships, the machine-driven houses. It’s called steam punk, and it relies often on alternative histories set in the Victorian era, in other words, stories that happen in sync, “at the same time.”

My friend Larry from Lively is a psychologist. After I mentioned about mirror neurons (how our emotions are so synced with our kids), he sent me this video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0  where a baby and her mother communicate without words. You see the baby check with the mom over and over to validate her emotions, her take on things. And then for one whole minute, the mom clears her face of all emotion and doesn’t react at all, and after a few attempts to engage, the baby becomes distressed and starts crying. No one is listening. There is no one to sync with.

When I walk into the radiation lab, Rob, the technician, asks me about my weekend and exclaims that he’s from Sudbury, and asks did I like it there. He is trained (I assume) and willing to make small talk to help me sync my emotions to his, to calm myself before going into a machine with my chest exposed to fire.  I watch as he syncs me to the machine, adjusting its beam to the four tiny black tattoos on my chest, pulling on the sheet under me to align my body. He explains how the machine adjusts the beam according to what the radiologist says I need, closing its aperture and shooting four or five times, honing in on one spot.

And in the evening, I drive to the city to join 70 other people in rehearsing Christmas music (we will be holding the concert Nov 27/28. Please come!) And we sync our voices, the timing, the volume, the energy (chop/chop; punch/punch; glo-ho-ri-ous) so that we are one voice, celebrating. And I listen to my neighbors, and I watch the director (who is a chop/chop kind of guy) and I listen to myself, and I adjust and adjust. I learn. And it’s a good feeling. I wonder if it’s what God felt when he made the world good.

All of life has this one purpose. To sync not our wildly different ways of doing things but our wild wills for doing them. Because the first and greatest commandment is this: Love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your body. And the second is like the first: Love your neighbor as yourself. And when the new creation is complete, that precise City, that flying Mansion, that one Body with members finally synced to work at a million things with one mind, we will all see that it’s been hard, but it’s been good. No regrets. No "undo."

Wind

On my back porch, an outside light goes on and off, on and off, as the motion sensor picks up the flapping of the patio tent in the strong wind before Robert goes outside to zip it back up. This wind, they say, traveled from Mexico, from Colima, where it began as the worst storm recorded in history there and is now dumping inches of water here in Canada. Think of it, a storm moving across a continent with enough water to leave behind in three countries. It reminds me of me, traveling across those same three countries, hoping to have enough good cheer to leave behind in all three. I look outside and see the pine tops swaying, see the leaves on the bushes show their undersides, see the grass shiver. I hear rumbles. But I can’t see the wind. There’s so much important stuff we can’t see. That reminds me of God, of course, and Jesus insisting there was more out there. Robert and I are working on some training sessions for missionary candidates, and so much of what we talk about is the invisible stuff, even invisible people, like the Samaritan woman.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus was sitting by the side of a road with a clay jar half-full of water in his hands. He was bright-eyed and making one of his usual outrageous claims. “Friends, I’ve been eating food you don’t know about.” His friends, you see, had just arrived with groceries and were getting ready to build a fire and make supper, but Jesus wasn’t interested. Even though they’d left him sitting on the lip of a well, drooping from weariness and thirst just a while before, he was now suddenly full of energy. The friends knew they’d missed something, but what was it this time? It surely couldn’t have to do with this empty-handed Samaritan woman hanging around all starry-eyed!

“Wake up! Look around!” Jesus exclaimed. “There’s a harvest all around you, and you can’t see it.” In another context he would add, “…and the workers are so few. Ask the boss for more!” Oh, Jesus could be so frustrating at times, couldn’t he? They’d been tired, too, but they’d dragged themselves to the store to do the shopping for him, and now this was the reward they got! Who knows what would happen to their supper plans now. I bet that is what they were thinking, because it’s what I  would be thinking. Meanwhile Jesus had teamed up with a discarded, adulterous woman to plant a fountain of living water right in the heart of a Samaritan village. Some people say Jesus’ visit to this village was the start of a Christian community there, a Samaritan congregation that followed Jesus as the Messiah. I don’t know this, but it could be true. It sure wouldn’t surprise me, Jesus showing his friends, single-handed, how to bring the good news to a person, an entire town, in fact, that had been discarded by his own.

How did he do this? The conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well seems so pitifully short. How could such a short interchange convert an entire village? I can’t answer this question either, but one thing he told the woman stands out to me: “The time is coming when it won’t matter where you worship, whether here or Jerusalem…” With these few words, Jesus opened the door for Samaritans to follow him without first becoming Jews. He laid his own Jewish culture aside so they could hear him. And when He did this, they recognized him as Messiah and followed him.

The good news that the Samaritans heard and that we take to nation after nation, culture after culture, is that God comes to live among us. That God sets his culture aside to rescue us. That God becomes a Man walking on our roads, drinking from our jars, and worshiping on our mountains. This is the meaning of incarnation, and when this particular Samaritan town got a taste of true incarnation from Jesus, they “came streaming from the village to meet him.” We get so entangled with our stuff.  It’s so much harder to move into a new place when we’re loaded down with stuff from the old. Jesus showed up empty-handed and thirsty.  Ready to ride the wind. If it had been me, I’d have come prepared. I’d have had a big bottle of clean water. And I wouldn’t have seen anything out of the ordinary.

Substitute people

When my teammate Eunice first started her practice as a doctor, she had a series of interesting short-term jobs. She filled in for a doctor who practiced out of a pharmacy (I see they are starting to do that in North America now. Copy cats). This doctor did surgeries on the side, and Eunice was concerned she’d be required to help perform abortions. Then she filled in at a clinic that certified sex workers as being clean of AIDS and STDs (now called STIs). Then a friend of hers persuaded her to join him in setting up a clinic in a small town outside Oaxaca City. He would do bloodwork, and she would give consults. Everything was going well until she realized that people were coming in for bloodwork when she hadn’t ordered it. Her partner’s lab was thriving. After a little PI work, she realized her partner was selling the bloodwork as a cure in itself. After all, getting pricked with a needle and having blood removed has to be good for something. Give a little blood; get a little healthier. If you think that’s strange, just think about how long blood-letting was a staple of medical care for centuries.  Medicine is still as much an art as a science. How much we trust the artists without really knowing what they are doing.

I think about this under that radiation machine. How long did the doctor take to explain what happens when the machine buzzes and lights flash and everyone leaves the room? Oh, he gave me a booklet to read, and I can look it up, but the information is sparse, and I can’t figure out why the thing buzzes five times from one position and two from the next or why something I can see bathed in green light inside the machine seems to open and close between zaps. I can’t understand how this slow “blood-letting” that’s over so quickly doesn’t kill all my cells or cause even more cancer. How much we trust the artists without really knowing what they are doing.

On the way to Lively last weekend, I looked out the window at the quartz-veined rock walls next to the highway, like river banks, and on top of every bank I was surprised to see little piles of stones. There were hundreds of these piles, maybe thousands, all along the road. They were just piles of stones, made to look a bit like a man and left on all the high points beside the highway. They are called inuksuk (meaning people substitute) and were once navigational markers for the people who lived in the Artic, where the terrain has few natural landmarks. They are found from Alaska to Greenland and have become not only a symbol for the Inuit people themselves, but a national symbol for Canada. They were used for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

In 2007 the Inuvialuit artist Bill Nasogaluak built an inuksuk for the city of Monterey, Mexico, to commemorate Canada’s involvement in the city. One of its stones comes from the Artic and the other from Toronto, the artist’s hometown, and together, they form the inuksuk’s heart. If only that worked! We are starved for symbols.

Why do people stop their cars on a highway riding north toward the Artic and build these little man figures by the thousands? What about this simple symbol draws them, stopping them cold on the road? What are they marking with their little rock piles, the substitute people they leave behind? In one way this simple art seems so accessible, so communal. In other ways it seems mysterious, uniting us with strangers who lived in another world of cold barrenness we don’t understand, and with strangers who still live there, and with strangers who are simply Canadians stopping beside a road to pile up stones. How much we trust the artists without really knowing what they are doing, or what we are doing.

Lively

We smuggled a trip in between treatments. We drove to a place called Lively, surrounded by a smoldering fire of color flaring in the leaves and in the rocks, which were streaked with glistening quartz. We got to see the enormous steel Nickel and the Super Stack, where the underground mines puff their smoke into the clouds through a 1200 foot concrete cigar.

We had given Kath and Larr a few hours warning. They had said, "Come! Just don't mind the house," which we never do, but they had cleaned up anyway, so the joke all weekend was, "Quick, make it look nice. The Thiessens are coming!" She even managed to bake an extra pie.

How many people do you have in your life that make room like that? That move over on the bench and let you slide in at the table? And it was a good table, laden with friendships and good will. Saturday night our friends (they are from Niagara but moved to serve in a church in Sudbury) were helping out at a church fund-raiser, a lavish turkey dinner for 300 people with all the fixings. Robert spent four hours outside under a tent helping Larry and three other guys cook the vegetables. When the rain slanting under the tent got to them, they stood under the church awning to give the rain its space. When I asked Robert what he had liked most about the weekend, this is what he mentioned first--getting to know these men, friends of friends, that would stand out in the cold and cook. My first instinct is to want to see only those I already know. Silly me.

Sunday it was back to church. The team that had helped build a home in Nicaragua told their stories, and there were tears because the Nicaraguan family building alongside them faced difficulties, and the Canadians didn't know how they were coping. After the worship, there was more food downstairs. A woman stopped me in the stairwell to ask if I were Larry's sister. We're both bald, you know. I said yes. He said no. She laughed because of course we were both right. She said she was glad to meet me and that I glowed. The radiation is not supposed to do that, but what do the doctors know? I wasn't feeling especially cheerful in this new place surrounded by strangers. Until she said that.

And until Kath's friend Pam welcomed me. And her friend Alyson asked me, "Why do you wear that cap?" and I told her, and she said with her very short hair, "Sit down" in that startling Scottish accent she has, and we exchanged stories (she has more experience in this journey than I do), and we talked too long so that the family left me behind, and I had to go home with the minister, who understood.

And until Caleb, their son, who reminds me of Philip, sat down and watched The Imitation Game with me and all my literary observations (you can tell the genre and outcome of the movie by the opening scores of music) because unlike the rest of the family, he couldn't go help with the turkey dinner because he had just broken his wrist and had to take care, so we stayed home with the two dogs who never wanted to be left out of anything and watched the movie with us, facing the wrong way.

And until Robert made friends with the man behind him in the turkey dinner line, an Indian man with long grey hair in a pony-tail who keeps bees and can interpret their buzzes when they call from the hives (a bee whisperer). Did you know there are Russian bees that love winter? Kath invited the man and his wife home to dinner, and they came, and we learned about bees and many other things.

And it snowed that very afternoon, just for the sake of the Russian bees. It snowed after we took a walk beside the river, where beavers come up on the bank and make trails to the white birches and chomp on them with their teeth. I wanted to see one. I wanted to see a lodge. But Larry explained that beavers weren't the only thing to come up the bank and startle you as you walk. Cashew, the yellow lab, had startled a bear. So I was content with Cashew splashing into the cold river and coming back out alone without the bear. Kath had told us that when you count to three, Cashew jumps into any water available, and so of course Robert had to experiment, and of course Cashew jumped and brought half the cold river back with him and shook. This is the Lively dog that lived in the Lively family that went to the Lively church that breathed the air of the Lively town that made room for the Thiessens that needed somewhere to be between radiation treatments.

Tangled

Lying down inside a machine every day that makes buzzing noises and flashing lights makes you (well…me) think of scientific things…like death rays…or protons and electrons. It’s protons that are being shot into me with their “search and destroy” mission, but electrons are just as interesting. Both of these particles get what scientists call “entangled,” and both of them do what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Don’t you love the language? It’s as if these things know each other really well and can predict what the other will do.

Mikael and Elai started showing their budding “entanglement” at the shower—in the shoe game. They each held a shoe in each hand, one of their own and one of the other person’s (they were both black sneakers, so we had to identify them by the laces), and when Carolyn asked a question like “Who is more romantic?” (Mikael), or “Who is more creative?” (Elai), they had to raise the appropriate shoe. Funny thing was, they answered identically almost every time, right down to the hesitations and the times they raised both shoes. Pretty good for beginners, I’d say. Hope it grows to perfection.

entangling machine!

Like electrons...which can appear in the universe already paired—already married, so to speak. These paired electrons always have opposite spins. If one spins up, the other always spins down, no matter what, because they are mirror images of one another. They are entangled. If you split these entangled (married) particles apart and send them far away from each other, they stay connected somehow. They communicate telepathically, faster than the speed of light, and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein called this spooky and tried very hard to disprove it. The experiment that annoyed him goes like this. If you split married electrons and send them down different paths, and you randomly change the spin of one of the electrons, guess what happens to the spin of the other electron? Yes, it will still be the opposite of its pair. You can measure it at the same instance you change the first one, and it will always mirror its fellow, even when there was no time for the change to be communicated. How does it know?

And protons do something similar. If you split a proton in two, sending half of its light to one lab and the other half to another lab, and then you try to detect where the photon traveled, Lab A or Lab B, you’ll always only ever detect one photon. It might be in Lab A or Lab B, but never both. It’s described as a wave traveling to both labs, but when you measure it as a particle in one or the other, you find that photon particle somewhere and the wave collapses in the other lab. It disappears. You only ever find one photon even though the wave went to both labs.  How does that wave know?

Spooky action at a distance and entanglement happens everywhere, as if a God who is One is giving us lessons. In humans, psychologists see it in mirror neurons. That’s what makes you yawn (go ahead) because someone else is yawning. It makes you react when things aren’t happening to you directly. When something happens to someone you love, someone with whom you have been paired or entangled, your neurons fire exactly as theirs fire. You feel their disappointment, their joy, their anger. You react. Oh, I don’t mean you get telepathic messages when someone you love is in trouble (although God prompts you to pray sometimes, and Einstein would call that “spooky”). What I mean is that there are ties between us that surprise us. They make us do strange things like drive to Michigan in the middle of the night or choose the right color dishes on a gift registry. We can predict each other’s actions and be affected by them even over distance.  When a red car door shuts and you hear the engine slowly move away, or you see short brown hair through a bus window and still walk away, all your protons and electrons ache because they are paired with what is moving away.

We’re more tied than we think. We’re practicing for the time when we are “One, even as the Father and I are One,” the ultimate entanglement, the source of all “spooky action at a distance.” Marriage, and everything that we do because love “pairs” us, is a preview, a rehearsal. It’s the purpose of all life. Gradually, we should be getting this with every neighbor, though we can’t imagine how that could be possible. Even so, ultimately, we will be playing the shoe game as one body and knowing as we are known. We will “be of one mind.” Finally. We have such a long way to go. But at the end, the wedding will be breath-taking and the pairing finally perfect. Better, even, than electrons.

We should be taking notes and practicing.

Spooky action at a distance

Lying down inside a machine every day that makes buzzing noises and flashing lights makes you (well…me) think of scientific things…like death rays…or protons and electrons. It’s protons that are being shot into me with their “search and destroy” mission, but electrons are just as interesting. Both of these particles get what scientists call “entangled,” and both of them do what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Don’t you love the language? It’s as if these things know each other really well and can predict what the other will do.

Mikael and Elai started showing their budding “entanglement” at the shower—in the shoe game. They each held a shoe in each hand, one of their own and one of the other person’s (they were both black sneakers, so we had to identify them by the laces), and when Carolyn asked a question like “Who is more romantic?” (Mikael), or “Who is more creative?” (Elai), they had to raise the appropriate shoe. Funny thing was, they answered identically almost every time, right down to the hesitations and the times they raised both shoes. Pretty good for beginners, I’d say. Hope it grows to perfection.

Like electrons...which can appear in the universe already paired—already married, so to speak. These paired electrons always have opposite spins. If one spins up, the other always spins down, no matter what, because they are mirror images of one another. They are entangled. If you split these entangled (married) particles apart and send them far away from each other, they stay connected somehow. They communicate telepathically, faster than the speed of light, and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein called this spooky and tried very hard to disprove it. The experiment that annoyed him goes like this. If you split married electrons and send them down different paths, and you randomly change the spin of one of the electrons, guess what happens to the spin of the other electron? Yes, it will still be the opposite of its pair. You can measure it at the same instance you change the first one, and it will always mirror its fellow, even when there was no time for the change to be communicated. How does it know?

And protons do something similar. If you split a proton in two, sending half of its light to one lab and the other half to another lab, and then you try to detect where the photon traveled, Lab A or Lab B, you’ll always only ever detect one photon. It might be in Lab A or Lab B, but never both. It’s described as a wave traveling to both labs, but when you measure it as a particle in one or the other, you find that photon particle somewhere and the wave collapses in the other lab. It disappears. You only ever find one photon even though the wave went to both labs.  How does that wave know?

Spooky action at a distance and entanglement happens everywhere, as if a God who is One is giving us lessons. In humans, psychologists see it in mirror neurons. That’s what makes you yawn (go ahead) because someone else is yawning. It makes you react when things aren’t happening to you directly. When something happens to someone you love, someone with whom you have been paired or entangled, your neurons fire exactly as theirs fire. You feel their disappointment, their joy, their anger. You react. Even when they are far away. You don’t necessarily get telepathic messages when someone you love is in trouble, (though God prompts you to pray sometimes, and things happen, and Einstein would call that “spooky”). What I mean is that there are ties between us that surprise us. They make us do strange things like drive to Michigan in the middle of the night or choose just the right gift. We can predict each other’s actions and be affected by them even over distance.  We’re more tied than we think. We’re practicing for the time when we are “One, even as the Father and I are One,” the ultimate entanglement, the source of all “spooky action at a distance.” Marriage, and everything that we do because love “pairs” us, is a preview. Someday we’ll be playing the shoe game as one body and getting every answer right because we will know as we are known. And we will all laugh together. We will “be of one mind.” Finally. The wedding will be breath-taking and the pairing finally perfect. Better, even, than electrons.

We should be taking notes and practicing.  

Good Guys

Yesterday was my second day to be radiated. It used to be we shot things into people to kill them: sticks, arrows, pellets, bullets. Now we shoot rays to kill parts of them. The rays shot into me damage the DNA in cells so that they don’t divide properly. Since the cancer cells are the ones most excited about dividing, they (theory goes) get killed off the fastest.  But everything in the path of the death ray gets affected: skin, bone, bone marrow, nerve, and tissue. There’s a 5% chance the radiation will affect my heart (at least it’s out of the way on the other side. But I have a lung under there getting radiated, and ribs). Apparently I turn brown and dry like fall leaves. I’m right in fashion. It’s a rayburn, like a sunburn. Because burning is what it is. I guess in this cold, fall weather with the sun covered up with white sky I should be glad that you can still get a (permanent) tan somewhere. My next appointment is today at 3:45 if anyone wants a turn. I have this spray you use to build up a film over your skin to protect it. It slowly wraps you in cellophane. You could borrow it.

Without the side effects you wouldn’t know anything was happening because everything goes so quickly and silently. You lie down, exposed, under a big machine which rotates around you, and everyone leaves you alone in the room, and you look up at the pretty picture they’ve built into the ceiling to tranquilize you, and you hear a dozen buzzes and see a flashing red light on the wall behind you warning a dozen times, “BEAM ON,” and then the youthful people dressed in purple come back into the room, cover you up and let you out, and you’re done. Maybe it’s been 15 minutes. But the rays aren’t done. They go on killing for hours, days, weeks, months. The cells just keep dying. You’re counting on the dead cells being the bad guys. They ask the first time, “Is there any chance you’re pregnant?” Because their rays never can tell the difference between the good guys and the bad.

There’s a parable about that. A farmer wakes up to find that there are weeds in his field. Unlike the weeds of today, which make it into fields on their own, these are intentional weeds, like death rays, that someone has actually shot into this guy’s field. I’m sure my farmer friends must feel that way about weeds sometimes—that someone put them there maliciously. We sure feel that way about cancer. I’m convinced that my cancer didn’t just arrive in my body but was planted there by Evil in some natural get-up, an Enemy in some familiar, neighborly guise like air, water, grain, soil or food. But the farmer doesn’t let his workers yank out the weeds. He lets them grow up with the grain, stealing nutrients and choking out the sunlight, because he doesn’t want to accidentally pull out a good guy. That farmer found it just as hard to separate out the bad guys as my radiologist does now. So they both make plans to keep the good seed going and bide their time, scheming. It’s a risk they take.

I’m glad neither throws out the baby with the bath water. At one time, that happened, only it was Flood water instead of bath. I’m glad we live in a different age. God always knew we’re all a mix of cancer and healthy tissue, and we’re all a mixture of good choices and bad. And all our creations are a mix of fine taste and lousy art. And sometimes we have to cut off the whole arm to avoid sin. But now is the age when we keep loving our kids and spouses and neighbors when they make bad choices (according to us), and we forgive ourselves when we fail because we’re forgiven already, and we keep looking for the good grain that is there, sprouting with the bad, sometimes almost impossible to distinguish, and we don’t give up, and we don’t go on the defensive, pulling everything up left and right. “Rejoice,” he says, and says again, “rejoice.” We  take heart and are glad because, whatever it looks like out there in the field today or under the death ray, the Good Guy is winning.

Late night painting

It was late Friday night.We were at Janey’s house, playing hand and foot (it’s a card game like canasta; and the guys immediately pulled ahead but we trounced them in the end). Elai and Mikael were driving from Chicago with their Wheaton friend Ben. They’d left in the late afternoon, after their last class, and since they’d get in late, we were in no hurry to finish our game. We were giving Dawnelle a hard time for something she’d said, and we were laughing, and then the phone rang. I didn’t pay much attention until I heard Robert saying, “Oh. Are you all right? Where are you? Where’s the car?” Everything got real quiet.

They’d been in an accident and were standing on the side of the road with the tow truck. They  had swerved to avoid hitting another car that suddenly wasn’t where it was supposed to be, spun out, hit one guard rail, bounced off the other guard rail, smashed the car on all four sides, and ended up on in the middle of the highway facing the wrong direction. It was midnight. They were ok, just a bit banged up. No charges. Thank God. But they were also in some small town called Duran with no way of getting anywhere, and they had a wedding shower at 1:30 the next day. What do you do?

We had to go get them. Four hours each way. We went home to get a few hours of sleep first, but after crawling into bed, lights out, we both lay there not sleeping, so we got up, bundled into the car, and started driving. Everything was dry until we hit the “death corridor” somewhere between London and Sarnia at 4 in the morning. Suddenly we faced driving sleet, then snow, then more sleet, just the combination you like on a dark, cold night. The ground and the road was white with snow, and more white came knocking at the windshield, horizontally, defying gravity, like tiny suited warriors out of Ender’s Game, playing with your mind. Robert commented dryly, “It’s disorienting, isn’t it; makes you feel like you’re not moving.”

We slept an hour under blankets outside some rest stop and kept going. At the border, we told our story to the guard. It was an especially slow night. We were the only customers. He was sympathetic. “Deer,” he asked? Duran is in the middle of hunting territory, and the shop where the car was towed had a sign out front: Specializes in Deer-hit damages. I got the impression all that guard wanted to do was finish his red-eye shift, get in his truck, and go hunting. He was almost human. We stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee, and at one table six men in full camo were debating some fine point of hunting while two young boys, also in full gear shuffled past us, disheveled and sleepy but ready for bear. Or deer. They start them young, apparently.

On we went to find our kids at the Quality Inn in Duran and the smashed up Saturn on a tow trailer. Several bills later, we were on our way. Back across the border. Back through death corridor, still snowing, back to a little community center in a tiny town called Silverdale. We were fifteen minutes late, but the welcome was extra warm, the snacks were plentiful, the decorations were creative, the gifts were generous, and the relief to be home with the kids all in one piece was palpable. We had a great weekend with them, nailed some details for the wedding, ate well, and then drove them to Buffalo to take a bus back to college.  Not one hassle at the border. That’s a relief, since radiation has started, and I was sure there’d be alarms, and one was enough for one weekend. This morning is quiet. It’s raining. The kids should be just getting home from downtown Chicago. I miss them already. They paint your life with unexpected colors, and you can’t imagine a more beautiful painting or wish for one.

Scarecrows

The doorbell rang the other day, and opening up I found a policeman on my doorstep. If it had been Mexico, I would have felt fear and looked around for the neighbors, but it’s Canada, and I was mildly curious as to why there was a cop on my doorstep. He was a railroad cop. Did you know there were such beings as railroad cops? Railroad ties run through my back yard, and I have a crossing next door, and apparently someone shot out the lights for the crossing, and did I hear anything? I wasn’t much help since we’d been in Mexico the week before, and besides, there are poppers going off everywhere, so how would I distinguish the gun from the poppers.

It’s fall. When I take walks now, the peach and plum and pear trees are bare, their leaves turning colors, but the corn stalks are full and the grape vines are black with fruit. And the poppers go off, invisible scarecrows made of sound, just loud pops to scare off the birds. They sound like random gun shots. You get used to them just as you get used to the random fire cracker explosions in southern Mexico that scare off the spirits. In the fruit trees I also see shimmering silver tape in the branches, more scarecrows. I remember how in Mexico the farmers used the tape from cassettes in their corn fields to do the same thing. Unfortunately, often this tape came from the cassettes of sermons given out for free in the migrant labor camps. You’d hope they listened to them first before offering them to the birds for a lesson.

You don’t see human figures as scarecrows standing in fields much anymore. Maybe the birds have caught on to those. But you see them still in Halloween decorations along with the witches in bent witch hats and the sheet-covered ghosts acting like scarecrows with their shivering “booo’s.” What are they warning us off from? Death? As if we needed warning.

Aren’t scarecrows meant to warn us off of good things? Like a field of juicy black grapes that pop in your mouth when you bite down? Aren’t they meant to trick us into avoiding something that would be good for us? And don’t you need to be a bit bird-brained to fall for it? Fall for this fall-shaped figure made the color of falling leaves? L (standing for Lyman, which he didn’t like) Frank Baum’s Scarecrow was convinced that it was he that lacked the brain, not the birds, for standing in a field all day, empty-headed, though as the band America says, “Oz never gave nothing to the Tin Man that he didn’t, didn’t already have,”  and this went for Scarecrow, too. And it served him well to have a head stuffed with straw after all, because when the flying creatures came for him (though they were monkeys, not birds), and strewed his stuffing all over the field, it had merely to be gathered up and stuffed in his clothes again for him to gain his life back, rather like the rattling of gathering bones in the valley of bones in Ezekiel. The Scarecrow was a human scarecrow after all.

I might be a bit of a human scarecrow myself with some of my stuffing removed, and hoping for a bit of wisdom to navigate this land of Oz, and warning people off the field I stand in, “Don’t come here; I’m radioactive (or will be in a few days—can’t wait to see what happens when I cross the border next week to renew my passport, “Yes, ma’am, you say you’ve undergone radiation to set off all our alarms, but now can you prove it?” Of course, the only people who won’t believe the scarecrow will be the border guards, baldness and breastlessness notwithstanding. That could be a disguise! Does the hospital give a border pass, I wonder? And why would they believe that? There’s no warning them off. I can’t wait!)

Meanwhile, in these Halloween days I will fool you, too, when I, a resident of Oz, put on my cap and my prosthesis and walk around in Canada with my secret, looking normal. That’s my disguise. The appearance of normalcy works every time.

Living in parallel

One of the advantages of being in the car for six hours as you travel to the Pocono mountains to see your friends is that you see a lot of colored leaves. That, and you catch up on your favorite podcasts. I cycle through TED radio hour, Dan Carlin or BBC’s history, Freakonomics, and the last Southridge and Woodland Heights sermons. That sometimes sparks conversation with the driver (to put it mildly; sometimes we have to agree to move back to the colors of the leaves). Our latest conundrum is why God told the Israelites to commit genocide. Oh. I know. This enormous problem has been contextualized in many, many ways. We find our way around it. One sermon I heard unsettled me by suggesting this solution: maybe God never said this in the first place. Ok... Never said this? I can handle contextualization through all four seasons, and as a teacher, I am quite comfortable with genres that aren’t meant to be taken literally (I’m still hoping with everyone else that in the end, there really will be dragons, but, sigh, I doubt the devil deserves the honor). But…never said this?  What does one do with such an untethering?

But I loved the reminder that we “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The Greek word “parable,” apparently, means to throw something down alongside something else so you can see them side by side and learn something about the one from the other. This is my life. This is novels and short stories and essays and poetry and art and dance and blogs. You lay two things down next to one another to learn more about both. You put two worlds side by side, like Mexico and Canada, or Oz and Kansas, or farmers and Palestinian audiences sitting, listening, on a mountainside, to find out what you can discover about one from the other. The Kingdom of God is like…

How rarely does our learning go in a straight line. I thought I knew what I was meant to be learning and then suddenly found myself here in a parallel life, where, after a view of corn and soy fields, I now see evergreens that look like my Group of Seven calendar, a bit straggly now in the cold wind and the rain. Here we are, living all these parallel lives, all these parable lives, and we look over at our sister’s life, and we learn from her some of the nuances of life we’ve missed because there is no way to learn it all straight. And the people who are the most different from us—little Ian chasing the ailing tabby around the sofa, yelling “Meow, meow,” the mother wearing a head scarf in the grocery line ahead of me, the bent-over scraggly woman dying of lung cancer and cursing for it, a husband who likes his omelets with everything included, even lettuce and radishes—these are the parallel lives that teach us the most.

Because God knows that we always miss the obvious. Like our kids, right? My son, in his last year at home when we exasperated one another demanded, “Why do I have to come to supper with you guys when I’m busy? What good is it if I don’t want to be here?” And the question takes your breath away because it’s so obvious. To you. You can’t think of a single word to offer as explanation. And you wait for the parables of life to offer the explanation for you, to show what you can’t say, to build a parallel road beside your table and bring him back to it. Which it has. There have been school cafeterias and suppers in other homes, and they have brought back the meaning of the common family meal to him now.  I have to admit I own a question like my son’s—a question about why I have to sit at this particular family table called Cancer and drink from this one particular common cup.

My guess is that all of our life, all of our lives, are parables, parallels to God’s life, and that he gives these lives to us to open our eyes to the meaning that is hidden for a time. And we will need all of our art to understand it, and all of our art to tell it.

Joining the choir

I’ve joined a Christmas choir! With 80 other people! It’s uplifting for the soul and challenging for the mind. I have to learn 18 new songs with lots of difficult things like syncopation, dotted eighth rests, and unresolved chords.  I have to start learning how to read music again. It’s been a while, and the director is very animated and very exacting. “YOU CAN’T LEARN THIS STUFF JUST BY COMING TO PRACTICE!!! He says, “YOU HAVE TO PRACTICE AT HOME!!!!! YOU HAVE HOMEWORK!!!!!” he says. “OK, I GET IT,” I don’t say.

But I’m glad to be in a classroom of sorts, and I don’t really care which side of it I am on, the learning side or the teaching side; I enjoy them both about the same. The challenge is invigorating. Of course, I realize that learning goes on in all kinds of places, like border-crossing lines, for example, where I learned last night that airport immigration officials are different from border-crossing guards. The border-crossing guard looked at the electronic note tacked onto his computer by the shaking-head immigration guard I met in Toronto last week. “So when did you last cross the border?” He asked, just testing us. It was late and we couldn’t remember, because we thought he meant crossing the border by land. “We can’t remember,” we said. Pretty bad since it was just last week. “Have you gotten that residence card?” He asks? “Uhhhhh,” we answer. “Working on it, right?” he fills in for us.” “I suppose so,” we answer. Lamest answer since the last one. But the guard had already passed us back our lame documents and waved us on. No shaking of heads or ridiculing of 25 year old documents. Welcome to Canada.

Or you can learn in chemo lounges where I was today. The lady registering with the receptionist in front of me had had it. She told us all that she had terminal cancer and that today she would be told how long she had to live, and that it was……#***$@@#$......to be spending these moments of her life waiting in line. She was sick, and at the reception desk she put her head down as she waited for her wrist band and paperwork. We all got a taste of what anger and frustration and weariness can do to you when you’ve had enough and you’re expected to put out still more. In the chemo chair, with that IV fluid going into your arm straight out of the freezer where they’ve stored it so that no matter how warm you are when you sit down, you are shivering in a few minutes, and your arm is cold even after it’s been warmed up in a blanket before you got started, you look around. Next to me, a daughter waited beside her father in a tight black dress and high heels. Going to work was my guess. Her sister spelled her after a while so she could leave. “Wish I had my kids that close,” I said. I relearn every day how much I miss them.

Yesterday I had been in Pennsylvania overnight to see Phil and Eunice and Ian (our teammates) and Hampton and Ginny (former teammates; long story). We were by a lake in the Pocono mountains, where the quilted fall colors fed you like dessert. The conversation was as rich and varied as the leaves. One of the topics was this: You know that when you come to God, you don’t really have any clear idea of how much he’s forgiven you. He’s forgiven everything, even what you haven’t confessed, because you never know how much you’ve actually done to hurt people. We’re clueless, really, about how much sin we carry and how much he’s lifted from us without our knowing. And part of heaven’s wonder will be the growing awareness of how much He’s done. Of how forgiving He really is. Of how wide His love is. It will be a growing repentance, but without the shame or the guilt. It will be wonder. Wow. What He’s done! And I think it will be like learning. Like the pleasurable hard work of learning a complex and beautiful song. Together. As a choir. With an exacting and animated and utterly loving director. An eternal song of praise ever growing because we’re always learning how much he has done, and is doing, and will do. Forever. That’s the classroom I look forward to. Don’t you?

tattoos

Imagine yourself lying down on your back in a quiet place. You’re relaxed. Overhead you see leaves with dew drops on them. Young beautiful women walk around in bobbing pony tails, pink outfits, and warm, cheerful voices. You are getting tattoos, four of them, delicate things that no one will see but your spouse. And the rays will be shining down soon, and you’ll be spraying yourself with lotion to avoid the sunburn. But you won’t. Not completely, because you’re here every day for the next month and a half. In this quiet place. With the young beautiful women helping you lie down in comfort, relaxed, with your arm over your head and a part of you exposed to the rays that burn, hopefully burn what doesn’t fit in this scenario, stuff that grows too fast, stuff that moves too fast, stuff that just takes over when everything else is calm and quiet and peaceful inside you.

After the poison, after the slash, now comes the burn. The radiologist—this guy is smooth, experienced, suave with his warnings that “You won’t like me once we get started,” Dr Smooth explains that it is possible that since there was once cancer in the lymph nodes, and no one knows how much, something could have leaked out into the surrounding tissue, and even if it didn’t show up in the pathology report, it could still be there, microscopic, menacing, waiting until I’m not on the attack any more, waiting to pounce. I can tell others have asked him whether this is really necessary now, after the surgery has done its job and the pathology report comes back clear, and he says, “As I have told many others before you, it’s your surgeon that sent you to see me. What does that tell you?” There is no carrot here. Only the stick.  He adds that since it’s a HER2+ cancer, he’s going to add a booster for free, five more treatments, just for fun, just targeting the original area, just in case. “But it’s your choice. You don’t have to.” And I’m supposed to know what to choose. And he holds his leathery hand out to shake an agreement out of me that I don’t want to make, and Robert shakes, too, as the caregiver, so we’re committed now to this sunshine room, my life for the next month and a half.

And he recites the side effects as realistically and matter-of-factly as he can, what my chances are for getting these horrible things, a useless arm, a damaged heart, a broken rib, a scarred lung. And I think, great! How am I to make this decision? And what decision is there? And what will life look like afterward? Some things are more certain, the darkened, leathery skin, the burning, the tiredness, the fact that I won’t want to talk to Dr. Smooth (or the young beautiful women) with kindness in my voice, but just a wasted, let’s-get-through-this-and-move-on voice they don’t deserve. I think in this part of my treatment I will feel more distance between my culture and theirs. They have a rule in theirs that they have to put on cheer, but I don’t. I choose. But I’m the one burning, too. So mine’s a greater choice, and who knows if I’ll have the energy to choose it. I may just go silent, the usual choice when things hurt under the skin.

Despite the greenery with dew drops overhead and the tattoos and the soothing voices.

Ray of sunshine

Back in Ontario now, the sky is completely white from horizon to horizon. It’s 59 degrees outside. The trees are splashed with red, and the sumac is on fire. The maples look like gala apple trees. I left in summer and two weeks later came back in fall. But some things don’t change. The border guard at the airport took one look at my landed immigrant document from 1990 and started shaking his head and never stopped, even while he stamped my passport and handed it back, saying disapprovingly, “No one shows those here anymore. I haven’t seen one of these in years.” I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that his buddies at the border crossing actually told me to carry it, because that just made him shake his head even more.

I’m glad that on the trip home (we had an overnight layover in Houston), I got to bask in one final ray of sunshine before heading into the grey skies of Ontario: my sister organized a family get-together in Houston. She and her boyfriend picked us up at the airport with my two nieces, and Philip drove three and half hours down from LeTourneau to meet us, and my nephew brought his wife and her family, and we all met to eat sushi at a restaurant called Kublai Khan. When we were taking pictures, we realized we had American, Canadian, Mexican, Dutch, Zimbabwean, Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese all in the mix. My nephew married a Zimbabwean, and she calls us “Auntie” and “Uncle,” and even though I haven’t spent enough time around her, she knows how to make it feel like family. Thirteen of us gathered around the table eating orange dragon and crazy dragon and volcano roll and superman roll, and my nephew was teaching us how to hold chopsticks, and Philip was explaining how he is a security guard at LeTourneau and quite happy giving tickets to faculty, and Angie was telling me about selling houses, and Selina, a stewardess, was planning a layover in Toronto to visit us. After all the picture-taking and all the hugs good-bye (I told the Zimbabweans about the Mexican saying, “El que mucho se despide, pocas ganas tiene…”), they agreed that it was hard to say good-bye. We prayed together. My nephew’s wife’s sister (still family) has cancer, and we agreed on some things--like how we trust God, but it’s still hard to wake up in the dark and remember what’s coming and what’s at stake.

I love how marriage pulls two families together that have nothing in common (so it appears) but the love two people have for one another, and suddenly, you’re related by their love. At Ivy and Andon’s wedding, her Zimbabwean family dressed to the hilt. The colors were like fall. One aunt wore a gold turban that rose a foot over her face, and we couldn’t help but watch in wonder as she walked elegantly past us like a crowned queen. Another aunt, the matriarch, told us in her African way, “You all are marrying one of my wives.” When my father, who married them, said the words, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the left side of the church erupted in ululation, and my mother, seated in the front row with all that whooping behind her, almost fainted in shock, not remembering what rejoicing Africans do. It was wonderful. There was a lot of food and a lot of dancing, and a lot of black and white and brown laughing together and getting to know one another, working out on the ground the reality made in heaven that day that we were family. I love how God gives us things sealed in heaven to make real here on earth—like those startling, new, beautiful relationships that come through birth and baptism and adoption and a Canadian/American/Dutch/Mexican/Zimbabwean wedding.  Ray of sunshine to see everyone again. Thank you, Angie.

Theatre of the Absurd

Yesterday we dealt with the things of life, my students and I, and we laughed together and prayed together, and it was good medicine. During chapel, we gathered in the library of the school, surrounded by books—all those stories that teach about life by only hinting, as Emily Dickinson said, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant…the truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind—and Aaron and I told our stories about living with cancer. He was not even out of grade school when his mother found something that wasn’t right on his skin, and she had to persist and persist with doctors until one saw, right off the bat, that it was melanoma. A year of treatment. “I just couldn’t get how it could be me,” he said. “I know other people get cancer, but it was me.” 12 years old. That puzzlement, that confusion. “Why me?” The way of the universe with us makes no sense. The laws of physics that inject cancer in us make no sense, not immediately, not obviously.  We joked about how his biopsy was with a knife and mine was with an 8 inch needle (of course for me it would  be a needle, and it was 8 inches—Robert was there and can verify I’m not exaggerating—and it was not just once), so I got the better deal, and he can’t remember his biopsy—must have blocked the whole thing out—good for him! And we joked. We could. Because we sat there next to each other in front of the others and realized out loud together that God has gotten us through those things. This 8^th grader, talking about the goodness of God after a biopsy, and melanoma, and cancer in his lymph nodes, and surgery, the same as mine (surgery in the armpit! He blushed and laughed) and a BIG scar, he said, and terrible headaches from the interferon, and I am so honored to be sitting next to this kid who has grown up and moved to Oz and is brave and faithful and beautiful.  Even though the laws of physics in our universe make no sense.

And in the evening the six juniors and seniors came over to my house and we ate quesadillas made with hand-ground corn tortillas (how I’ve missed those), and the girls cut up the avocado and tomato and set the table, and Ryan told a true, tragic story about someone he’s not related to that was impaled. And we wondered together, Ryan, too, how we could laugh when there is tragedy, but there’s something funny, too, and how do you do tragedy and comedy together? But of course that’s Shakespeare’s specialty, and we were gathered at my house to watch a parody, a tragi-comedy of Hamlet, a play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which is of a genre called Theatre of the Absurd, where the dumber of the characters is always just on the verge of discovering the laws of physics but doesn’t. An apple falls on his head. He creates an elaborate paper airplane. He drops a ball and a feather from a balcony. And he discovers nothing. And the whole time, both characters are wandering in and out of a greater story, the story of the insane Hamlet and his murderous uncle, and they discover nothing. No one understands. And the two lost characters talk about death, the state of nothing, where you don’t come back. And they die in the end, as most everyone in Hamlet dies, and they never do discover anything. “We were sent for,” is all they ever know. And it’s tragic. And comic. How is that?  A good, hearty example of existentialism that I wanted my students (I wish!) to ponder because they have access to another point of view. Telling truth slant.

Because life doesn’t make sense. Cancer doesn’t make sense. 12 year old kids with scars in their armpits don’t make sense. Being here for 14 days and going back to Oz doesn’t make sense. It’s absurd. And we can laugh when the needles and knives are put away, and we breathe normal again. Even pagans can laugh because God wired them that way. And even though I don’t understand. I can laugh sometimes.

One of my students wrote a question on a piece of paper: “Did you have any sleepless nights?” Yes. From steroids. From who knows what. But not from worry. Aaron said, “God got me through.” And though Aaron and I still don’t understand, and the world is still wonderful and terrible and absurd at the same time, we know the One we trust. And we sleep most nights.

Colonialism

I was researching how Christianity came to the New World, and some of the stories are pretty gruesome. Some of the conquistador priests didn’t mind using force, and some of the first conquistadors were bloodthirsty. The Franciscan Friars tended to gather hundreds of Indians in one place, throw water over all of them and consider them baptized into the faith. As a result, many Indian groups in North America think that the Catholic faith is about following certain rituals instead of about becoming disciples of a resurrected Man-God. When they add the Catholic rituals to their beliefs in the spirits, they create a hybrid (called syncretism) that looks like Catholicism on the outside but hasn’t committed them to God on the inside. We saw a lot of this when we were living in Guerrero. The men in our village would make their annual trek up the mountain to the altar of St Mark, but this Mark was the rain god, not the writer of the gospel. We knew because you had to be drunk to communicate with him, and honoring him included things like making animal sacrifices, speaking with the dead, and telling the future from mirrors and stones. The people called themselves Catholic, but they weren’t aware that Jesus solves our issue with sin and death. Because of the way Spanish colonialism introduced Christianity on this continent, there are many people who are not aware of the good news about Jesus, even though their religious practices have a thin veneer of Christian ritual overlaying their pre-Colombian beliefs.

But there are good stories. Some of the Spanish priests traveled in small bands from village to village with an interpreter and preached the gospel. When someone responded, they baptized him  and gave him a few more days of instruction before moving on, expecting him to baptize and disciple the rest. I would love to hear how things went after the priests left because this is not much different from what Peter or Paul did in the book of Acts. Of course Paul kept discipling his converts through letters and visits, but perhaps the friars did this, too. I would love to know more about this. Did discipleship happen in colonial times? Although Christianity looked very different back then, so different we would not now recognize it, still we have to realize that many of those missionary priests were motivated by the same love for Jesus that moves us today to go to Indian villages with the gospel. One Indian group was asked why thy accepted the friars and their response was, “Because these go about poorly dressed and barefoot just like us; they eat what we eat; they settle among us; and their intercourse with us is gentle.” We have to honor them for that. They made huge mistakes. Yes. But so do we, and we love Jesus no more fervently than they.

You’d think the colonial days are over. Sadly, they are not. When Robert came back from his trip, he brought back this story, which has a sad ending. Not all our stories are happy. A Hispanic church planter we know was sent out from his church to work with an Indian group. He moved to the village and lived humbly among them. He worked hard. Things went slowly. Although at first he had been committed to learning the language, he found it difficult, so he continued to evangelize in Spanish. His home church, a megachurch in a big city, had a change in leadership, and the new pastor could not understand why work among the indigenous should grow so slowly, so he persuaded the church to drop this missionary’s support. The missionary became a tent-maker, barely eking a living from various trades. After ten years, the missionary decided he was called to move on. There was a small congregation that would remain faithful. This brings gladness. But here was also the problem: it had no leaders. The missionary had pastored the church from the beginning, and no one in the group could match his gifts or his knowledge. So the missionary invited someone from another church a few hours away to take over. This new pastor brought these practices with him: the Lord’s Supper was only served once a year with wine that had to be brought in from the founding church in Chile; baptism could only be performed by someone approved by the founding church; and the members of the congregation would be forbidden from meeting for fellowship with believers from any other churches. Even though there are so few Indian believers in the area, they would not be able to come together for encouragement. The church would be sealed off and controlled from afar. This is a sad story that repeats itself over and over among Indian churches in Mexico. So just as it was 500 years ago, the story of bringing Jesus to people of other languages in this hemisphere is a mixture of gladness and sadness. Even as more and more people come to Jesus,  colonialism is still alive and well here.