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.