Relational muscles

As Robert and I drive around the Niagara region we see how the buildings reflect the changes in the culture since we lived here twenty years ago. I mentioned the rural churches I see closed down and put up for sale, but rural schools are being sold, too. The tiny school up the road from us now has just closed. It still has the painting on the outside walls of adults and children holding hands together. All different colors. Robert went to kindergarten there, and my friend Dawnelle used to go there only a few years ago. As the number of school kids enrolling each year continues to drop, the school boards close more local schools and build large, amalgamated ones, so if you’re interested in renovating a quaint old school as a home, now is the time. The median age here in the Niagara region is higher than elsewhere in Canada. There aren’t as many young people running around, so it’s just that much more homogeneous, maybe a bit more staid, more private.

At the same time, new homes keep going up. We see housing developments where there used to be fruit farms. And the size of custom homes is impressive. Every week, when we drove to Robert’s nephew’s farm to pick up our box of fresh vegetables in the summer, we looked across the street to see how the new house was coming along. Maybe it’s 10,000 square feet. I don’t know. It has two separate garages and two separate upper decks overlooking the lake, as well as two separate patios out the back sliding doors. It’s huge. Looks like a hotel. And it’s for two people. I’m not saying what the square footage for a couple should be; I’m just saying that even by this culture’s standards, the place stands out. That’s a lot of privacy.

Diego Rivera

And I think of Mixtec homes where we used to live. There is no word for privacy in their language. Their homes once used to be one room, sometimes two, with wooden walls and roof, for sleeping and for cooking. The smoke rose right through the wooden shakes. Then they built houses out of adobe, a little larger, and now the smoke found its way through tile roofs. Most recently, with money trickling back from relatives working in the US, the houses are concrete, but the same pattern applies, two rooms: one for sleeping and the other for everything else. Now gas stoves begin to replace the wood fires on the ground, and moms send their children to the mill down the street to grind their limestone-soaked corn kernels instead of crushing them at home on their kitchen grindstones, but I don’t yet see them building separate bedrooms and separate living spaces. Privacy is a commodity they cannot yet afford. Of course North American houses once looked more like that, too, many, many years ago.

It’s a paradox. As families in North America prosper, we choose to have less kids and roomier houses. We are busier and spend less time at home. It’s more and more difficult to have people drop by or stay for dinner, and there is no expectation that we should. We value our privacy and see it as a basic need. People’s lives overlap less and less as their society prospers, and convenience is more and more an option. This is a more comfortable way to live. Of course it is, and we all choose this way when we can. It eliminates all kinds of stress, and tension, and conflict. But it does not teach us as much as when we live overlapping lives. It does not demand as much, does not require as much sacrifice, does not show up our faults to be corrected, hopefully in love.

The Mixtec communities we visit are poor. To survive, families stick together and rely on each other a great deal. People traveling have very few options for lodging, so the culture values hospitality. When we show up on their doorstep unannounced, they take us in and give us room to sleep where everyone sleeps. They might give up their only bed, if they have one. Their space is our space. I remember when we were first married and living in a borrowed home, a two-room adobe place, the family sent their daughter to live with us so we wouldn’t be alone. When my Colombian friends were here, Girlesa told me about how she has spent months with a team of six missionary trainees living in her home with her. It’s been tough, but she knew it was the right thing to do. Six months? I couldn’t do this. I am more North American than Mixtec and realize how much I value privacy, control over my own space and time. It’s a gift that prosperity brings. But I also realize that Mixtecs have relational muscles I can’t even understand because their poverty has required a generosity never required of me. I honor that. The Kingdom of God is close to them. Their muscles bulge.