Shopping

My daughter needed to buy a dress for an occasion coming up, so off we went shopping. I’m not a great shopper at the best of times. That’s Robert. I’m more of the in-and-out-let’s-get this-over-with kind of shopper. But you can’t do that when the dress has to actually look good on someone, so we did some proper shopping, and I got to see what it feels like to go through all the stages, and we came home with an ooh! and aah! prize after all. Feels kind of good, really, though I don’t plan to make it a habit and waste the novelty.

Robert likes shopping because he sees it as the simple economic exchange that it is. As he might put it, “I have need of this to help my business grow or my family eat, so I give you money, and you hand over the goods.” Robert can put a bid on Ebay for some tool he wants to take to a Mixtec carpenter, and he knows exactly what it’s worth, and if the bids go too high, he simply shrugs and walks away. He can do this with big things, too, like plane fares and cars. I, on the other hand, feel shopping as a tug of war. Except when it’s about simple things like milk or tomatoes, I keep wondering whether I really need it. Then, when I decide I do, but it’s out of my price range, I feel the pressure to buy, especially here in Oz. Boy, does this culture know how to apply that pressure! And it bugs me. (Robert doesn’t even feel it.) I wish I could turn it off, but then our civilization would implode, wouldn’t it.

So back to the shopping.  Elai and I started our adventure at the This Is Way Too Expensive Store. (Somehow you can just tell by the décor.) Everything on the racks in this store was beyond our (my) price range. When I gasped at the price tag of an accessory that outdid the price tag on the dress, I got the look. I’m not supposed to let on. From there we went to the High Pressure Store. The sales lady kept bringing beautiful things to the change room, and no one was looking at tags because that’s, well, embarrassing, and the perfect dress surfaced, and the sales lady kept up a one-woman chorus of  “Ooh, aah…it’s perfect on you…matches your skin color so well…very flattering waist line…don’t you think so?…

So what do you do when your daughter is smiling, and the dress is beautiful, and the lady is going on and on, putting on the pressure? Maybe you hide behind the “We’ll think about it” line and walk away. Then the sky clouds over. You know you are never going to find the right dress, and your daughter will have to settle for some frumpy thing and resent you forever (you are obviously not thinking straight), and where is Robert when you need him?

Fortunately, we found the magical Hole in the Wall Store with a stunning dress (my daughter makes it stunning) and an acceptable price, and we came home happy. But there’s no guarantee. The pressure to buy can make you do crazy things. I remember the very first time I walked through a mall. It was Christmas, and I was 15, having moved to Oregon from Honduras to finish high school. I remember looking in the windows and for the first time in my life feeling a pull, an almost physical force, drawing me to buy something (a big white teddy bear, as I recall) that I did not need. I had never felt this temptation before. There were no malls in Honduras, and consumerism was yet to strike in our small town. Either that, or I was growing up. And embarrassment can come to sit on your shoulder when you don’t live up to expectations or keep up with the Joneses. (I remember overhearing in a bathroom, “I look like a missionary!” Heaven forbid.) And self-deception can arrive as a house guest when you buy whatever catches your eye. So in Oz I realize you live with this tension all the time. Isn’t it tiring?

Coffee Break

Yesterday my daughter sat on the floor with her wares spread out around her, making jewelry. She was using string, and glass bottles, and gears, and tiny beads. It was relaxing for her, at the end of the day, to sit on the floor and thread beads. Meanwhile I sat on the couch beside her, just to be nearby, but I was getting frustrated because the new Windows 10 on my computer  was dinging its alarm at me, claiming that my mscv100.dll was ( is still) missing. In computerese would msvc100.dll be a medical term for a crippling disease, a kidnapping alert, or a swear word?  I’m not sure. But what I do know is that I did not want to be there on the couch trying to figure it out. I wanted to be doing something else.

What do we do to relax? When I was young and living in Honduras, I got a lesson from my dad on convergent and divergent problems. He was sitting on his bed relaxing, just working on some kind of puzzle, a word puzzle most likely, and I walked in and interrupted him. I asked him about what was happening in some new church in some village or other. He looked up and said he didn’t really want to talk about it right then. Of course I asked why not. He said that there are two kinds of problems in life. One kind has a solution, just one, which, if you think things through logically enough, you can uncover on your own. Then there is another kind that does not really have a solution to be discovered. People problems fall in this category, and the problems that churches cause are this kind of problem. You can’t just think up a solution. You have to go to people and confront them and persuade them and help them change their thinking and their behavior before you reach a solution. You have to act. It’s not enough to sit on the bed with a pen and a piece of paper and your brain.

Dad said that puzzles are convergent problems. Their clues lead you to one satisfying solution. Church problems are divergent. There is no one solution. And nothing happens just by thinking about them. Dad was worn out from trying to resolve a particular divergent problem and his solution to that was to tackle a convergent problem for a few minutes before getting back to work. It isn’t obvious when church planters are taking work breaks, especially not to curious teenage daughters. I’ve learned a bit since then, not asking Robert to jump up and fix something when he’s on break, drinking tea and reading a page of a good book.

What helps us relax? For me it’s not tea because I just guzzle anything that’s set in front of me. I have to finish the glass before I set it down. (I think there is a medical term for this.) What helps me relax are things that focus my brain: a Van Gogh puzzle. A detective novel. Quiddler. Reciting poetry. All convergent problems.

I am amazed at how God made us so complex that in the midst of all we do, some work we find relaxing. He gave us left brains and right brains that switch back and forth. Did you know that if you rely too long on just the right, or just the left, you tire? We switch. In language learning, the sparky right makes snap connections between the sound and meaning, and it works in giant chunks. You make great progress using just the right brain. But you tire. The stodgy left controls the speech and the logic of the grammar and the word lists. But it’s slow. Methodical. You get discouraged at its bit-by-bit pace. You need both sides to keep you happy. Our brains and muscles and nerves switch and adjust and pass off jobs to other parts so much we cannot keep the story straight. I’m glad of the mystery. It’s Someone’s convergent puzzle that He’ solving on His coffee break, just relaxing.

Puzzle Bark

Incarnation

It was evening. I was at a Mixtec church celebration, a three day affair where the men had butchered goats and barbecued them overnight in a great fire pit dug in the ground, and the women had dragged sacks of tortillas they had been making for weeks to an outdoor kitchen set up beside the church, from where they served meal after meal of spicy meat and salsa and tortillas. After a day of worship in the church building, the sky was dark over the steep mountains hunched over us. The mothers lay their straw mats on the ground and covered their children with blankets before joining their men around the crackling fire, singing and laughing and talking together. In the morning, they were still visiting, ladling weak coffee from a huge, steaming pot on the fire, blankets thrown over their shoulders to ward off the cold.

It was a glorious church camp-out kind of festival. But it was very different from the next Mixtec festival I would attend where our host and hostess by morning lay passed out drunk and sprawled where they fell until the effects of the moonshine wore off. This church festival had the goodness of shared song and food and celebration without the bane of Mixtec life: abuse of alcohol. On the final day of the festival, however, the guest speaker, a Mixtec man who had moved away and shed his Indian ways long before, taking on Hispanic culture, told them all in a loud Spanish voice, “It’s been lovely, yes, but call me earlier next time when you plan your festival, and I will show you how to do it right!” And this, to me, is Christian mission in a nutshell. On the one hand, it brings to people who have not known Christ a sweet communion among brothers and sisters and a new freedom from the vices that plague their culture, but on the other hand, it exposes them to the ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism of outsiders.

My husband recently attended a conference workshop entitled Why Missions is a Four-Letter-Word. I thought that was a sneaky way to get participants, but it actually evoked a popular conviction that Christian missions is just another form of cultural imperialism and that for people of other faiths to come to ours through our manipulation implies a fundamental self-betrayal. It reminded me of a couple we briefly met in Mexico that worked for MCC. Someone had told them we were from the same part of Canada as they were, so they stopped by our house to meet us. We lived off the beaten track in a remote town, and rarely saw North Americans, so as fellow travelers and workers among the indigenous of the area, we expected a pleasant chat and a comparing of notes about home and work and what had brought us to this corner of Mexico.

The conversation went something like this;
“So what do you do here?”

“We work in such and such villages as development workers helping people put in clay stoves. And what do you do?”

“We work in such and such villages as missionaries talking to people about God.”

At the sound of the four-letter-word missionary, the room chilled, and the faces of our guests froze in shock. I watched as the woman tried to draw words into her mouth. I could see a muscle twitch in her temple as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. She finally spit the words at us as she got up to leave, “How dare you try to change their ancient spirituality.” (She never caught the irony that she was trying to change their ancient way of cooking.)

But there is was. This couple believed that for us to impose our religion on these people who had been worshiping St Mark the rain god for perhaps millenniums was nothing short of treachery, and that for them to convert under our tutelage was nothing short of betrayal of their cultural heritage. And I have to admit. They were right about a good bit of Christian missions. A lot of it is a betrayal. And it isn’t limited to people in the Third World. In a different workshop tackling the topic of dependency, another form of cultural imperialism that stifles local initiative, a participant stood up to describe his experience. He was German. He said that when the American missionaries first came to start the church where he now attended, they had all the answers and imposed their ways on the new congregations, and no one said anything because the Americans held the purse strings. I’m sure the American missionaries would be horrified to know how their generosity was now perceived by their spiritual descendants.

How can our good intent of taking Christ to other people so often go so far wrong? What do we have to offer that is worth the cost to us and the risk to them of going to live among them? We have but one thing to offer: as Paul says, “I have decided that while I was with you I would forget everything except Jesus Christ crucified.” Whatever else we add, no matter how well intentioned, no matter how well it’s worked for us, we will regret. Which of us can leave behind so much?

All those colors

Yesterday Elai invited us to the movies, so of course we went. We wouldn’t have chosen an animated movie on our own, especially with the new Terminator out (just kidding!!), but she insisted, so in we went. After Up and Wally I had some hope. And I was not disappointed. I think the only two movies Elai has insisted we watch with her are Silver Linings Playbook and now Inside Out, both about living with extreme ends of emotion and finding the silver linings.

Elai and I were talking before the movie about how we process things so differently in our heads. I tend to think in terms of connections, metaphors, symbols, a constant linking of things, a constant seeing of one thing as being another, (of being, maybe, a much bigger or smaller “another,” which is why I exaggerate all the time). Elai, my artsy, feeling child, thinks in terms of colors and images, and both her color palette for visualizing and her emotional palette for responding to these images is so much broader than mine. Next to her I am color-blind. As our former principal used to say, who has a daughter with similar gifting, “they have a wide emotional range.”  Put your hands out in front of you a foot apart. That’s you and me. Now stretch them out wide. That is their range. They are rich in imagery and feeling.

And as a verbal soul, my words come quickly. I have so many words in my head that I can’t stand background noise, even music. I want total silence in the house, especially when I read or write or think or…yes, just about anything. Elai, on the other hand, wants stimulus. She has the music on all the time. She thinks better with surround-sound. And she thinks in pictures and wishes she could paint those pictures on canvas and paper and screen exactly as she sees them, and she struggles with the gap between the true image and the art. And she struggles with translating, always translating the pictures into w-o-r-d-s. Imagine typing ever letter of every word with a hyphen in between. It slows her down. It even shuts her down sometimes. Especially when we run ahead with our words or get impatient waiting for her words to surface. They come so easily for us. It’s easier for her sometimes to walk away.

I liked the way the movie put in images and sounds the way our feelings move us. I liked how it showed that inside different people’s heads there are different stories playing, and sometimes these stories don’t match up, and we misunderstand each other and react. I liked how it showed how emotions can be a tangled mess, and how they can trigger actions that we don’t even understand ourselves, and how even sadness has its purpose when there is true loss. I especially liked how it showed that emotions can color our memories retroactively. C. S. Lewis said heaven is retroactive, and so is hell, coloring every memory we take with us for good or ill. This is a family movie good to watch together and talk about (though Robert heard the little boy behind us ask his dad halfway through, “Can’t we change it now?” so not for all ages).

For an hour and a half, Elai, her dad, and I got to see feelings exposed as images, as brightly colored personalities moving, talking, and triggering those actions we have so much difficulty explaining, or explaining away. This is Elai’s world, an Oz to us.

P.S. Don’t miss the final shorts. Especially the cat. Elai and I? We both got it. Robert, the literalist one? Not so much. It was a mother-daughter moment.

Jesus Freak

I just finished a book that put my “I’m only passionate about Jesus crucified” idea to the test. The author, whose faith and relationships had been on the rocks, came back to Jesus in a liturgical church because of “a piece of bread.” She then became obsessed with giving other people “a piece of bread” and eventually ran a volunteer food pantry right around the church altar for 800 people. Every Friday night.  She met people who were drunk, addicted, poor, runaway, lost, foreign, gay, young, old, sane, crazy, sincere, and on the take. It transformed her.

This is what she says. “Embrace the wrong people. Jesus isn’t looking for the most religious people but the most trusting…God deliberately chooses the stranger, the outcast, the foreigner, the sick and the unclean—in short, the wrong people, to show the scope of his love. We, on the other hand, exclude people because outcasts define the center. We hear an accent and we know we aren’t the foreigners. We see a guy who acts like a fag, and we know we’re the real men. We see the slow kids sitting by themselves in the junior high lunch room, and we know we’re normal. And in the church, of course, we need heretics in order to establish orthodoxy. So outcasts are essential because they define the norm for the rest of the community.

“And the laws of religion, then and now, thrive on our need for outcasts. They codify who’s in and who’s out, what’s a right day for healing, and what’s a wrong one, who’s pure and who[is] untouchable. Then the priests, as Jesus knew well, become the only ones allowed to pronounce someone healed or contaminated, the only ones who can establish who’s in and who’s out. It’s a system that the world—and religion—run well on.

“Religion is a set of ideas about God…not an ongoing relationship with God. And from religion springs sin: the attempt to separate ourselves from others, the failure to see everyone [as beloved by God]. The feverish wish to practice correct religion with the right kind of people. The inability to comprehend that other human beings, not like me, are human beings and [are vital for me] precisely because they are not like me…”

The tornado moving this woman to Oz is the stream of human beings surrounding her every week that are nothing like her. This is what incarnation means, to move among people not like me and love them. It’s how Jesus saved us and how he uses us to bring his salvation to one another. It can be through the hospitality of an abbey, or a food pantry, or a dinner table at someone’s house. It can be through eating suicidally hot chile sauce with Mixtecs or a snack with a child at VBS. There’s a reason that when God sent Peter to the Gentile Cornelius, he first showed him a sheet full, not of doctrines, but of food. Peter knew the doctrine, but that wasn’t enough. It never is. “There are no unclean foods,” God was insisting through a whole sheet of food, “because there are no unclean people. Go eat with them. Share a meal with them.”

The hardest thing I struggled with as I read past the opening of this book (because there were other things that made me say, “WHOA!”) was that the author’s gay. She calls herself Jesus Freak and preaches a resurrected Savior and Lord, but she’s gay. The first time she mentioned talking “to her wife,” I put the book down.

And I realized that after all my words about incarnating Jesus, I still have “unclean people” on my list, people I would have trouble listening to, believing, or trusting. I judge. I do. I tune these people out. But is this what Jesus does? Is there a way to disagree with this woman who confesses Jesus like I do but has a wife? Can I hear her without pre-judging? I’m sure she’s asking the very same question about people like me.

Rules

For the first time in these months of being in and out of hospitals, both with Robert’s surgery and then with all my visits, I met someone, one of my nurses, young and Hispanic, who was…um…how do I put it…let’s just call her…Stickler Nurse. Robert says she was just doing her job. She’s someone who colors within the lines. She could bend a little to make my life easier, but she is just that tad bit authoritarian, using that tone that makes you want to tell her how old you are.

“No,” she says, just a bit too quickly,” I can’t unhook your IV line (so you can take a walk around the ward without bumping your toe Clunk against those rollered feet at every step.) Other patients take their poles with them. You have to stay hydrated.”

Hydrated? I have buckets of water going into my system. OK, bags.  I have so much saline going into my system I’m visiting the bathroom like I have hidden Dove dark chocolate bars in there. (Which I don’t because I can’t taste anything thanks to the chemo and the saline dripping from my IV pole.) I’m a bit taken aback, because other nurses have unhooked me when I asked and let me walk around unfettered.

I’m easily the youngest person on my floor, which is an oncology ward (it took two visits and five days to learn this because I am so observant). Most of the patients leave their doors open and as I walk around (Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.), I see some of them passed out on their beds. I can’t stand the idea of strangers watching me sleep, so I keep my door closed, but I realize that here, these snapshots of crumbling life are just scenery—no one’s watching. Very few of the rooms show movement, and when these people do wake, maybe their scenery through open doors of passers-by in the corridors gives them comfort. But as soon as I can, I want to get out of bed and walk around. The pace I keep these days of low red blood cells, meaning low oxygen and shortness of breath, is slow anyway, but the clunk slows me down even more, and I think of ways hospitals could make exercise easier. They tell you to get out of bed and move around and then hand you an eight foot pole with six ungainly feet to take with you. Hmm. What kind of traffic jam would it create if all of you took the therapist’s advice and moved around the halls with all those poles at once? What kind of glorious accident could you cause? What tangle of IV lines and meds and rollers and fluttering gowns? 

See what rebellious thoughts a hint of authoritarianism can cause? We are wired to bristle.

So in this visit to St Catharsis I learn about rules. They are good rules but not perfect: You can’t let your overtired husband nap on your bed while you and your friend take a long walk around the ward going Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.  You can’t take your own meds. (I know duplication could be dangerous, but I have yet to be offered mine.) And speaking of dangerous, if you have a red alert on your door, your visitors have to stay suited up the whole day. How long is a visit going to last like that!? Fortunately, I get this one revoked, but I have to go to the top. After a visit from the Infections Control Team, thankfully I get demoted from dangerous to “she has a cold,” (and it’s not Stickler Nurse that calls them.) I appreciate that they listen and are willing to reassess and take the alert off the door for me. Most of my experience with hospital staff has been like this. On my last visit, unhitched from my pole, I didn’t know the rules and actually walked right out the double doors and down the hall and into the maternity ward. Since I was wearing my green gown (oh yes, and my bald head), I was pretty obvious, and the heads at the reception desk snapped up and redirected me, and when I walked back sheepishly through the double doors into my own ward, my nurse was coming in from the elevators and joked with me, “It’s a good thing you came back. We were just about to call a code yellow (missing patient) on you.”

I’m sure glad it wasn’t Sticker Nurse that found me outside that door. She reminded me you can do a job competently and follow all the rules and still miss just a little something. It made me wonder how many times I do that, do something right but miss the opportunity to bend, to listen, to give a reminder good-humoredly, to adjust that extra little bit that means a lot to someone. And it made me grateful for the hundreds of people I’ve met in the last months that have done their job well and then added something more, something I didn’t deserve, something technically outside the rules but well within the spirit of the law, like a jaunt around the ward without an IV pole. For there is also grace on hospital floors.

Visitors

If you ever get lonely, get yourself admitted to the hospital. You are sure to have many visitors! And make sure you remark casually to the nurse admitting you in ER that you have a cold and hope you don’t drip on her by accident. This will get you a bright red sign on your door and even more visitors. All your visitors will keep you entertained by looking very exotic in their bright yellow suits and green gloves and special white masks, and even your regular visitors, who normally look like your husband and your good friend Petal, will now look like extras in an alien movie. Some of these regular visitors will even want to take the special masks home as souvenirs because where else are they going to get souvenirs since they are spending all their time suiting up and visiting you? And besides, these aren’t ordinary mouth masks, no, these are special masks with eye shields, like riot police masks, or like masks you would wear if you were an extra in an alien movie.

And you won’t be able to recognize your nurse from the guy who brings in the water from the lady who swabs down the walls, who, you see through the cracked door, is actually quite lovely but who, suited up, looks like a giant potato. And when she speaks to you, the creases in the mask rearrange themselves so that she looks like she’s wearing a gigantic fake smile, wider than a human face. Like the Joker’s smile or an alien’s.

Your visitors will start coming to see you even before you have wakened properly in the morning. They will lean over you, poke you politely with sharp things (hopefully not their teeth, because that would be the wrong sort of visitor), and take your blood. They will put objects in your ears and under your tongue and around your arms and over your fingers and onto your chest and down your back. What they are muttering through the mask as they work can sometimes be deciphered as a polite apology for causing discomfort, but it is best to listen carefully, as one never knows. When they leave, they shed their costumes neatly at the door in one practiced motion as if they are used to moving in and out of worlds.

The visitors will continue throughout the day. They will come to leave you water and a tray of food. They will come to swab the decks. They will come to leave you medicines in pills, in bottles, and in bags that drip into your arm. They will pick up the tray and change the water. They will ask you indiscreet questions about bodily functions and check for diseases in indiscreet places. One will check on your physical movements while another will check on your occupational movements and take to you a secret room where you must climb a stair that leads straight into a wall. No wonder it is in a secret room.

Surely there are no more people a hospital could hire to come see you, but the stream continues. There are the pharmacy people to question you about your medicine and, sizing you up, to figure they have been wasting antibiotic on you and reduce your dose. There is the floor doctor to decide whether you can survive without him, and your own doctor dressed in celebratory red to congratulate you on going out with a bang, and the disembodied voice to answer your call button, and some kind of manager to check whether all these visitors are treating you ok. Most impressive of all are the “We are members of the Infections Control Team,” to determine whether you pose a threat to humanity.  And I haven’t even mentioned the regular visitors who stop by to see if you are lonely.  Which is unlikely when you are tucked away in such a bastion of hospital-ity. So try to look your best and gather your strength before you get admitted to the hospital. You have a job ahead of you, hosting all your visitors. You might like going home afterwards to get some rest.