Day of the Dead

Yesterday I walked in a billion yellow maple leaves. They shuffled like feet beneath me as I walked, and the ground was a shifting mosaic, a working palette of yellow that made up for the dull grey sky. Threatening, they call it, that cloud-heavy ceiling weighted with water about to fall, once the clouds decide on the form—snow, sleet, hail, or just plain cold rain. We had an afternoon free after the day’s visit to the hospital, and we found the short hills (an oxymoron-that, but the best you can do in Ontario where “the mountain” is a 190 foot cliff made impressive not by height but by mighty waterfalls.) We wandered through the hills, finding leaves. On the drive back we noted the Halloween decorations in people’s yards, giant threatening figures made of black plastic, and giant threatening faces hacked into pumpkins.

In Oaxaca, my teammate Tiff has posted these photos of the Day of the Dead. It is the biggest holiday of the year. It spans 3 days, beginning the evening of October 31, and coincides with the three Catholic feast days All Saints’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, but it’s not Halloween. It’s a festival the Indians of southern Mexico celebrated for hundreds of years before the Catholic Church came to teach of Christ and to build its cathedrals on their holy sites. The Church moved the Day of the Dead from early August to November 1 to keep it within Catholic tradition. It’s hard to tell today who learned from whom in such moves.

If I were a Oaxacan Mixtec today, I wouldn’t be looking at leaves. I’d be cleaning and decorating the graves of loved ones with bright marigold flowers that represent the sun and building an altar in the living room with food my loved ones craved—tamales, atole, and the sweet bread of the dead. There’d be candy skulls with their names engraved across the forehead and candles, and I’d pull more gold flowers apart and lay a trail of petals to the door to light the way for my loved ones when they came at night to eat the essence of the food, and I and all my town would meet at the cemetery and wait for them there, and there would be musicians playing all night, and singing and partying, because the loved ones don’t come like the living dead but like good Mexicans, all glitter and sparkle and wide skirts, with huge smiles, ready for a party. And sure, there are chilling tales of what happens when people neglect the dead and forget to build the altars, but who wouldn’t be angry if you came up from the grave in your dancing clothes and you found your family in bed snoring?

One commemoration for the dead stands out for me. In a Mixtec town called Yuvinani, a man who had come to know Jesus and had pleaded publically with his town to come to Him was martyred. His name was John. A year later, his friends and family gathered early in the morning at his grave. They sang and prayed and reminisced about John’s life and sacrifice. But they were not waiting for him to come back on any Day of the Dead.  They knew well where he was and were glad for him.

 I am sure that on November first every bone in their bodies yearned to build that altar with all those marigolds and candles and food. It was the way they knew to show love. We have no idea what it takes to throw away a tradition that important. Imagine killing Christmas. Yet they did, because they now knew where their dead were going and how they would return, and this good news was the new axis of their lives. And yet, “the kingdom of God is a party,” so here’s the dilemma of missionaries. How do you redeem such rich and colorful traditions as building altars for the wandering dead? How could the truth of the resurrection unleash such creativity, such fellowship, and such joy in a Mixtec town that strolls, not over fallen yellow leaves, but over the strewn yellow petals of the sun?

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.