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.

Tea mugs

Can you guess what is consumed most by humans all around the globe after air and water? Tea! Did you know that green tea and black tea come from the same plant just like green mangos and ripe ones? Yesterday I woke up early, the seroma was better, and I had the morning free, so after several false starts, I got myself out the door for a run. Ok, a jog. Ok, something that is supposed to be a jog but is hardly any faster than a walk. But I’m proud to say I kept up this lowly pace for two miles, aching all the way, and then walked another two after that, and returned stiff and sore, but I’m on my way back to normal. (Sort of.) What kept me going for that hour of misery was a BBC history podcast called “In Our Time” (with very cool accents) about tea. And what caught my attention about tea was how it was adopted and then adapted by Brits so that now it is the national hot drink, but drinking tea in Britain doesn’t look like drinking tea in China, where it came from. Brits don’t have the same tea ceremonies, or those fancy little bowls. No, you could catch a Brit chugging it unceremoniously from a mug. And Brits add milk and sugar. An entirely different flavor. The leaves are the same in both places, the essence of the thing, but the customs around drinking it change from culture to culture.

I thought about this as I got ready for the day but was interrupted when I glanced in the mirror.  Usually I avoid doing this because I haven’t gotten used to that alien, Grima Wormtongue look. But this time I was surprised to see two dark smudges above my eyes where my eyebrows used to be. Looks like I was trying to stop a headache by pinching those pressure points there and had charcoal on my fingers. The eyebrows are making a come-back! And I definitely have white peach fuzz growing on my head. Don’t know what the radiation will do, but I’m glad to have something finally going on up there. I went back to thinking about tea rituals as I struggled to keep awake after all that rigorous exercise but fell asleep on the couch. I was glad when a visitor came to pull me out of my lethargy, and I told her about the tea. 

Tea is important in my house because Robert drinks it first thing and last thing of the day with coffee in between. He even carries tea bags with him when he travels, and my kitchen has more tea-making paraphernalia than any other kind of paraphernalia, which rather supports that opening statistic.  I prefer coffee (though it’s verboten for me with tachycardia. I tried decaf on the Zocalo the other day because everyone else was having one, and it smelled so good…bad idea). It’s an American habit ever since we thumbed our nose at the British with the whole Boston Tea Party thing.

Culture changes so much about how we do things. Most of the world drinks tea, but it would probably not have become this popular if everyone had to drink tea the way Chinese drink tea, if they had had to import all the ceremonies and accouterments.

Missions is like that. We want Jesus to be loved everywhere. But He won’t be if we insist on importing the accouterments—the bowls and rituals—like having people worship in a language they hardly speak. Better to figure out the essentials and not sweat the rest. Better to run a few 20 minute miles than none at all. 

mugs Elai and Mikael gave us

Family Tree

Robert is in another market town tonight. Thursday he left Tlaxiaco at 7000 feet and went down to Ometepec (or as our friend Dan says, who visited us there for a few weeks: O Sweatepec) at sea level. In fact tomorrow, as he leaves, he and Jason will stop at the beach and take a swim, eat some ceviche, and chill until they head on to the next stop. (We never did this once when we lived in the area.)

He called me and out of the blue gave me some news that I didn’t expect and that is some of the best possible news he could have had. Not like the cryptic fb message I got from Philip that said, “I accidentally worked all night and got evicted” plus his new status of “Homeless.” How do you unpack that from several thousand miles away? I messaged back, “Should I be worried?” because I figured that if there was anything really wrong, he wouldn’t be saying cryptic things. He said, “Nope,” so I guess we’re ok. He said he had until midnight to move out. Something about mold in the room next door. How does this happen in the driest corner of Texas? It’s a mystery. Then I got a message from Elai saying she had a surprise for me, so I called her to see what  that was all about, and she told me she has a Frida Kahlo tabby kitten. I'm hoping that all these kitten adoptions means  she’s practicing for giving me some real grandchildren some day.

So the news. I have to go back to when we lived in another market town—Tlapa. We were at home one afternoon with the kids and a car drove up to the house. It was some Mexican mission mobilizers who had tracked us down (we had no phone, so they drove a bunch of hours to Tlapa to find us) and were inviting us to spend time in Acapulco, mobilizing missionaries there in churches that had participated in the latest Comiban (a worldwide Hispanic mission conference similar to Urbana). So off we went. We lived in a concrete jungle far away from any beaches or sea breezes, and it was the hottest, most uncomfortable place I have ever lived. The kids slept in hammocks to stay cool, and we would sometimes get up in the middle of the night to shower to cool off. The walls were always hot to the touch.

But while we were there, we gathered a team of women from the churches in the city and led it to O Sweatepec to plant churches among the Mixtecs there. One of the women, Celida, was a persistent and gifted evangelist. She brought her Mixtec landlord, Vicente, to the Lord, and several others and taught them the basics of being a church, but for a long time, not much happened. Vicente has been faithfully traveling to his home village to tell them about Jesus, and tonight I found out that finally, some have responded. Recently they were baptized. Now they want to visit other Mixtec towns and take their good news with them. And Vicente, who had been gathering just with his family in his home, has now grown a small congregation in O Sweatepec.

You plant. Someone else waters, but the plant that grows gives joy to everyone. Go Vicente. His name (it’s Robert’s middle name, too) means victorious, winner, overcomer, and this is true. Something good has been won. This chain of events has taken a while, but it’s why we came to Mexico. Seeds planted over ten years ago are bearing fruit, and that’s about the best news that could come to me over the phone from O Sweatepec. 

Some day...

Exotic

Robert and I had gone to a town called Tlaxiaco, which means in Nahuatl: place where it rains on the ball court, so you know that North Americans aren’t the first civilization obsessed with sports. We were visiting our team mates, Paco and Ofelia, and they introduced us to Pedro, a person as unlikely as the town. Because it’s not just the name. After driving three hours through mountainside, small towns, and corn fields, you suddenly enter this miniature city bristling with people and every trade imaginable. No two homes or buildings or streets are built the same. Or painted the same. And some people have brought back some ideas for houses from the States: “siding” made from concrete, or a chalet that looks transplanted wholesale. It’s an interesting place.

Ok, Neil Peart didn’t think so. Too crowded maybe, too compact for comfort, all those narrow streets with the houses closing in on them like sleeves too tight. When he took his therapeutic motorcycle tour through southern Mexico, his policy was to stop at dark and grab a hotel, but he made an exception: Tlaxiaco.

That’s too bad. Tlaxiaco has history. It calls itself the Heroic City because its militia helped turn the tide in the resistance movement against the French invaders who had added Mexico to its Empire in the 1860’s. And it used to be the second most important city in the state, even boasting a theatre. But when it got sacked during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the business folk packed up and moved wholesale to the capital, leaving the forlorn town with a few mementos like a clock tower and beautiful colonial buildings to remind it of its glory days. Today it’s coming back as a thriving market town for the dozens of Indian communities surrounding it.

Pedro is as exotic as the city. Smartly dressed, articulate, courteous, this young man was born to a Mixtec family but raised in the city, speaking only Spanish. Although his parents are animists, still turning in illness to traditional healers to purge evil spirits and cure imbalances of hot and cold in the body, Pedro spent time in Ohio busing tables and brought back an interest in Buddhism. He’s a Hispanic, Mixtec, Catholic, Buddhist, Ohian restaurant worker turned Mexican farmer. You just don’t get much opportunity to talk to someone like this…with a place like Tlaxiaco bursting in the background.

Fascinating conversation. Pedro said that to choose among all the religions out there was to limit yourself, to fragment your thinking. You could be enriched by listening to the variety of gurus, monks, Sufis, and priests willing to teach you. (His very first question was about Jainism; we were scrambling.)  He said he lived without ambition, without being corrupted by materialism, and without dividing his mind by settling for just one faith. He embraced them all, but especially Buddhism that freed you from guilt and fear of death. Christians tell you you’re a sinner and then try to save you, he said. Buddhism doesn’t believe in sin; it’s just the flip-side of Good. Death is the friend of Life, he said, a time to be liberated from the body. I live a tranquil life, he said, accepting everything. 

I won't give you my side of the conversation. You know it. Life is a game of poker, and I staked all my chips on a guy who came back from the dead.With a body. Pedro said He knew all about this guy, but I said, no, because this guy takes you all or nothing, like a spouse.  He said love has no limits. I said, no, it doesn't. But it limits itself for the other. For both of us, the tone was right. We were both listening, and it was enjoyable. We both wished we could have persuaded the other.

In the end he said he was thankful for the conversation. I was, too. I asked him why he was, and he said he’d learned that different people can be comforted by such different beliefs. True enough.

In case you’re wondering where Robert was during all of this—he and Jason had driven on to Guerrero for a week of checking in with carpenters and believers there. I had stayed visiting until my bus brought me back to Oaxaca for the night.

A Mixtec Buddhist. That’s got to be a first. We all prayed together at the end, holding hands in a circle, and I prayed a blessing over him, and a hope that he would meet my guy someday. Not sure what I'd have done if he'd have offered to pray a Buddhist blessing over me. Have to think about that. It would have started a whole new round of conversation.

I think he doesn’t know what he’s missing. I think he’s like the people who bypass Tlaxiaco, or southern Mexico, for that matter, and miss the truly Exotic. But you make your choices.

Needles

It’s five am. I’ve been writing since two. But it’s not been posts I’ve been working on. It’s my “other project.” And I find it’s frustrating. When I first started writing, there was an urgency, and I scrambled to get the words on paper. Now, after these months of writing and a long-term project, I find that it takes determination to keep going, and I don’t have words for full blogs and full pages for my project on the same day. So I decided to write something short to tell you what’s happening: I’m writing, just not for you.

And God has put a thorn in my side, a little one that is not life threatening or even painful, but just a nagging inconvenience. It involves a new medical term I learned and researched yesterday: seroma. I’m going to take a wild stab that I haven’t researched and say it’s related to the word serum. Because what I have is a build-up of serum in my side over the incision, making my side hard to the touch and tight and sore, It's difficult to stretch my arm up.

At first I was afraid it was something serious and I might have to go find a doctor here (no thank you) or even fly home early. So I started researching. I called my pharmacist in Canada, who said to contact her if I saw signs of swelling, but she said to call the cancer clinic. I tried that, but the nurse wasn’t in, and I had to wait til she called back. That nurse sounded a bit impatient with me; why wasn’t I calling my breast surgeon ( who hadn’t told me to contact her if there were signs of swelling)? So I tried that, and of course, her office was closed. Sigh. Thankfully, Robert has a cousin out west who is a breast surgeon, and I emailed her, and she responded immediately giving me my vocab word for the day and assuring me I wasn’t going to die or land in Emergency if I waited to get back to Canada before having things looked after.

I should have stopped there. Silly me. I did more research online and found that the remedy surgeons go for, if you insist, is to stick a needle into the sore area and drain the extra fluid by hand. Right. More needles. And this doesn’t necessarily just happen once but can happen several times a week over months. Right. Hmmm.

So life threatening or not, I’m praying God will take away this thorn in my side. You all keep praying for the big stuff, like my staying alive and all that, but if you find an extra spare moment, ask him to take the swelling away without the needles. There are some vocabulary terms I don’t need to learn. 

I don't need to know what this is called

Reoriented

It was raining, but there were fireworks to welcome me home. Not just little crackers, but big booming, sparking things overhead. Of course in Tlalixtac, Oaxaca (say that three times fast), I could have come home just about any day of the year, and there would have been fireworks. In fact, the fireworks for tonight weren’t for celebrating my return, or for celebrating any of the other occasions that merit fireworks—new house warming, birthdays, deaths, death anniversaries, patron saint parties for the neighborhood (which can last for weeks)—but was the routine practice for a safety class “for pyrotechnic teachers.” It tells you something about southern Mexico when you have schools setting up to teach pyrotechnic teachers.

It’s a good thing they have added a safety class. With that much “pyrotechnics” (techniques of fire), there are horror stories. I remember when I was a little girl growing up in a tiny town of Honduras and had been invited to someone’s birthday party to break open the piñata and scramble for candy, staying low to the ground to avoid the bat still swinging overhead until an adult waded into the crowd of children  to coax it from the hands of the bandana-blinded child still intent on cracking it, the firecrackers were going off everywhere, and one caught in my dress (dresses were the only thing girls wore back then) and burned a hole right through it. And I remember coming home and our big brave hound of a dog was huddled under a bed (he was not an inside dog at all, but we couldn’t keep him out on these occasions), trembling and salivating with fear. We guessed he’d had a firecracker come too close as a pup, too.

His name was Dicky, named after a member of our mission staff back in Wheaton (along with Rufo, named after the director, and Rhoda Bird, our parrot, named after the secretary. Rhoda Bird’s claim to fame was falling into the washing machine, one of those old timey round ones that just washed, and you had to put the clothes through the wringer by hand and rinse them in a tub of water yourself. It was my job to pass the clothes through the wringer. I remember how the sheets used to pop the rollers apart and you had to spread them apart, dripping all over, and put them through again. Anyway, Dicky (the dog) would not have approved of some of the places we’ve lived in southern Mexico. The town where we lived in Guerrero, called Tlapa of Comfort (now there’s an oxymoron) is cramped between a high shaggy mountain on one side and a river on the other, and a wash snugged up to one side that changes from a bed of gravel to a raging, five foot deep tributary when the rains wash down the mountain. There are fireworks almost every day, and they echo off the side of the mountain and rattle the tile roofs of the houses so that they have to be rearranged every so often to keep the light out.

No, the fireworks were not for me, but I had two parties in my honor. In the morning, our church got together a bit earlier than usual and laid breakfast out on the table, and we had chiles rellenos, and tamales de amarillo, de rajas, y de frijol, and tostadas, and chicharron con salsa, and pollo rostizado, and jello that looked like the Mexican flag, and if none of these sound like breakfast foods, then you’ll just have to come try almuerzo in Oaxaca for yourself.  We told them about doing the Grito in Canada. Someone at the table wondered if Canadians do fiestas. How do you answer that?  I mean, most parties don’t have fireworks there. And we prayed around the table, and studied the Bible together, wondering, in the gospels, what the preaching sounded like before Jesus had died and come back again (and no, that wasn’t Robert wondering).

Then in the evening (good thing I had a nap!) we had another party with team members, and that’s when the fireworks started (pyro techniques, I mean, not the other kind that people light off). This morning both Robert and I woke up disoriented in our own bed, thinking we were in Canada, until the dogs started barking, and the traffic on the Panamerican Highway started up in earnest. After today’s fiestas and fireworks, though, I think we are finally re-oriented. It’s good to be home.

Zippers and circuses

Today we get on a plane and go home. Home. That word sure changes meaning with this lifestyle. This way of living is sometimes called a third culture, because, as someone said, we’re really only at home flying between places. I wouldn’t go that far. At least get me off the airplane. But while most cultures are tied to a geographical area, this “third culture” is tied to movement, to integration, to incarnation. It means moving between homes, riding on the differences and drawing them together like the closing of  a zipper.  Our kids used to be called mk’s, missionary kids, but they have so much in common with the kids of diplomats, military personnel,  and others who  live cross-culturally, that now they are joined together as tck’s, third culture kids. I am a tck. My kids are tck’s.

I once read a book that has the best metaphor for tck’s I’ve ever found. The book is by John Irving, a Canadian who navigates between Canada and American audiences. I’m not recommending the book (check him out before you tackle him), but there is one scene that has stayed with me ever since I read it years ago. One of the characters is an Indian (from India) doctor who had immigrated to Canada years before the story begins. Haunted by the needs in India and all he has left behind, he returns to India, time and time again, realizing he can’t let go. Throughout the story, he is constantly wrestling with his identity as an Indian living in Canada. During his visits back, he researches dwarfism in India and, in order to collect his data, follows Indian circuses as they move around the country because they provide jobs for entire dwarf communities.

At the very end of the book, the doctor is standing at a bus stop, and there is a young mother and her son waiting for the same bus. It’s winter. Night. Snow is falling. The streetlight shines down on the three humans bundled against the cold. (If I were discussing this book in a class, which I won’t, I would call attention to the things in the scene that show its truthfulness: the light, the baptism in snow, the child’s innocence, the transitional nature of the place.) The little boy turns and looks at the man beside him, dark skinned, exotic-looking, and he asks in wonder, “Who are you?” The doctor realizes this is his chance. He has one opportunity to answer that question truly, honestly, transparently, the one question he’s been wrestling with for years. He knows that he needs to answer quickly before the mother gets uneasy and moves her son away. Or the bus comes and shatters the magic. He leans down, looks in the boy’s eyes and tells him the truth: “I’m a son of the circus.”

Tck’s are kids of the circus, carrying their culture invisibly inside them as they get moved around. They are children of Oz, zipper childen, children of airports, trails, and movement. Their culture is the one that falls through the crack and gets lost to view because it’s not tied to one place but to the seams between places. They connect things. Their own lives and worldviews are the thread.

Tck’s are not that by choice. The last time I was in a Mixtec town, we met an eight year old American boy, the son of one of our Mixtec friends, who had just come back to Mexico with his family. He did not speak Spanish. He’d never been out of the US, and here he was in a Mixtec village, learning how to live. How many migrants in the world give birth to tck’s? I read that when migrants arrived from all over Asia en mass to work in Hawaii, the children created a new language in one generation. There’s genesis there.

Jesus was a tck, carrying his own bi-culture with him wherever he went, pulling people together that were strangers before, blessing the good and redeeming the bad, and saying things like, “As you are going to all the nations…” As you are going. We all carry this human-divine culture with us now that sews people together that were strangers before.  We are all tck’s, even those of us who never move. “We are foreigners, nomads here on the earth, looking forward to a country we can call our own.” God’s makes us all, like his own Son, his third culture kids.