The Beautiful Inefficiency of God

For a long time, I have suspected that God doesn’t value efficiency in the same way that modern Americans do. I have found that stating this makes people uncomfortable. That’s because we know that God is perfect, and we think that efficiency is good, therefore God must be efficient. And it is good–up to a point–but it is not infinitely good. People are always more important.

God is extravagant. He is lavish. I have proof. Just look at Jesus. Let’s start with the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the one with the 12 baskets of leftover bread. Have you ever thought about that? Why were there leftovers? If an American was doing that miracle, there would have been just exactly enough for everyone to be full, but God kept going. Or the miracle at the wedding at Cana. It’s the end of the party, and Jesus just made gallons of excellent wine! I imagine all the guests saying, “Well, I could stay a bit longer!”

Or then there’s his travels. How he “had to pass through Samaria” in John 4, even though it was out of his way. It wasn’t the short cut to Jerusalem at all. But he was on his way to meet someone, and bring her peace and reconciliation, and she wins over efficiency of time. Or look at his teachings in Matthew 6. God creates little flowers with such extravagant attention to detail that they are beautiful beyond the most expensive designers, and they are literally here today and gone tomorrow. Think of an apple tree blooming pink and white in the spring in the middle of a forest glade, a forgotten remnant of a long-ago picnic, unseen. Or the way the sunlight catches the bend of a river at a certain time of year, a time when no one is there to appreciate it.

I was thinking about this because we had our annual Christmas party for the refugee and immigrant  community (primarily Middle Eastern) last week. We had about 330 people there, although getting an accurate count was impossible. The children swirled in and out of the main room, women popped in and out to get henna done, teenagers came and went, forming little groups on their phones in the hall, people arrived late. We had a henna table, and a photo booth, and a kids’ program, plus a gingerbread house decorating contest for teenagers. We had a huge buffet from a local Iraqi restaurant, featuring kabobs and chicken and falafel, rice and hummus and taziki, a separate table groaning under the weight of baklava, chocolate mint cookies, shortbread, oranges. There were 15 cheese pizzas from Costco in the kids’ room. We had live music and door prizes. And my husband gave a short message from Luke 2. In a year when things just seem to be falling apart, with protests and lives lost in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and many other places; in a time when our nation is divided and the administration has put a halt to any more refugees coming and many of our friends wait desperately for news of loved ones, he spoke of hope, of good news of great joy to all people, that a Saviour had come.

People mostly listened, although not all. This is a difference I’ve noticed between Arab and American culture. In a setting like that, Americans would listen politely whether they agreed or not, but Arabs will chat and wave to friends and in general carry on. I imagine it was like this during the time of Jesus as well. I doubt those huge crowds were sitting in rows like Sunday morning; I’m sure the women were chatting and gossiping, babies on hips, and the men listening a little more closely but still getting sidetracked by children darting amongst their legs.

One woman listened closely that night though. Afterwards she said to the one who’d invited her, “I have never thought about Jesus like that. This is amazing. I need to rethink everything.”

I follow a God who throws huge parties in heaven for one sinner who repents, and who loved humanity in the most costly way possible. He sent countless angels to a rag-tag group of shepherds, unwashed and sleeping rough in their fields at night, when only one was overwhelming enough. He exudes love and welcome. 

And so it is possible that our whole extravagant party, with all the expense and headache and sore feet and chaos, was just for that one woman. She went home with her heart alight, pondering these things like Mary of old. And if it was, I am content. 

Sermon on the Mount vs Second Amendment

 

Jesus said to them, “But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.” (Luke 22:36)

I have never heard anyone use this verse as a justification for gun ownership, but the way people act, it might as well be. Gun ownership is an extremely sensitive topic in the United States of America these days, it seems. There’s that pesky Second Amendment, for a start, which states that the right to bear arms can’t be infringed upon. Then there’s public opinion. Studies show that most Americans support some form of gun control, but the most vocal claim that even the smidgiest of controls–closing the loop that means buying a gun at a gun show gets you out of a 3 day waiting period, for example–are but a step off a cliff to where no one can have guns anymore, not even to kill ducks. Politicians claim their hands are tied, and turn the topic to mental illness.

I currently live in a really safe part of the world. I’ve left downstairs windows open at night, and a couple of times I’ve returned home to find one of the doors left unlocked, and yet nothing has happened as a result. I don’t feel afraid out at night. Obviously, I’m no safer than anyone else anywhere else, but carrying a gun here would do me no more good than carrying bananas, and it might do me a lot more harm. (cf the Monty Python skit: What to do if someone comes at you with a piece of fruit? just for fun)

I’m not even talking about the harm that would probably happen were I to attempt to use a gun to defuse a situation in which someone was threatening me. (Yes, I’d get shot. It’s a no-brainer) But I think that we do ourselves more harm by our actions than we realize. As believers, who claim to follow Christ’s teachings and not those of the world, I think that we need to seriously consider whether a love of guns can go along with this unchallenged.

Christ modeled giving himself for the sinners, the ungodly, the ungrateful, the angry, the arrogant, the good citizens, the criminals–all of us. It’s an odd stance for those who follow him to equate God with guns. When we do that, how much harm to we do to our faith? How do we unwittingly stunt our own personal growth, and stifle ourselves from being people who, in following Jesus, are commanded to put others needs ahead of our own? You may argue that your guns are only for protection not violence, but the fact remains that guns are a violent way of solving your need for protection. If it’s a matter of my life being lost–I who have known Christ since I was a child, I who have benefitted from years of good Bible teaching and studying and books and podcasts and more–versus the life of someone lost and desperate, what makes me think God would want me to choose my own safety? Is there a verse for that anywhere? If God wants to keep me physically safe, he can certainly do so. If he doesn’t, who am I to take matters into my own hands? And how dare I put my things, perishable as they are, as more importance than someone for whom Christ died?

Even in the Old Testament, God didn’t equate himself with human violence–not by a long shot. Psalm 11:5 says that God HATES the one who loves violence. When David, the man after God’s own heart, wanted to build God a temple, God refused to allow him because he was a man of violence–even though his wars were often self-defense and allowed by God. (I Chronicles 22:8)

Last summer, my husband attended a conference about refugees held in Lebanon, and he met some Syrian Christians. These brothers and sisters had faced the confiscation of their property, and threats to the lives, in a time of war and sectarian violence. At the conference, they shared how they struggled with whether or not it was right before God to defend themselves. “They don’t have the Second Amendment, so they have to rely on the Sermon on the Mount for guidance,” he told me wryly.

This post was sparked by yet another mass shooting. I wrote this article a couple of weeks ago, and the one I was referencing is already forgotten by the general public as we’ve moved on to more recent tragedies involving guns and mysterious motives. Good people tell me, “When I was a kid we took hunting rifles to school and it wasn’t a problem.” Sure, fine. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. It’s fine to rail against things that no doubt played a role in those changes, but it’s not fine to not recognize that those changes have happened. It’s fine to say, “What needs to change are hearts.” That’s true. But in the meantime, let’s use our God-given intelligence to do what we can to reduce gun violence.

So am I entirely anti-gun? For myself personally, yes, but I am not necessarily saying that is where the country should go. The Constitution isn’t Scripture and doesn’t need to be upheld with reverence, but it is the law of the land. There are lots of in-between measures: a limit to ammunition, a ban on weapons of war. But I think as believers, we should be willing to give up our rights if there is even a chance that it would keep other ones safe.

Thoughts?

 

Celebrating Refugees

Yesterday I was visiting a friend of mine who just graduated from the local community college as a certified Dental Assistant. I have walked through life with this woman for the past 8 years, since her arrival in this country a few months before I returned from living overseas. She arrived as a refugee, and today she is a citizen who owns her own home and car, with a personalized license plate saying her name.

When I first met her in 2011, she had been here about a year. She and her family fled Iraq after they received death threats from a local militia, because she and her husband have a mixed marriage–Sunni and Shia. This is not uncommon amongst Iraqis. She told me of a bullet left on their doorstep, wrapped in paper which said, “The next bullet is for you.” She also told of being outside in her own garden after curfew in a town where there was fighting between Iraqi and American forces. She was carrying her one-year-old and walking through the garden at dusk, when she became aware of a red sniper’s mark wobbling on the child’s back. She rushed inside to relative safety. They have many family members who were not so lucky.

The family went to Egypt, where they hung on for the 5 years it took the UN to process their case. This amount of time is not unusual. Refugees are severely vetted, and there were a lot of them even 10 years ago. But as refugees, they could not legally work. My friend sold the gold she’d received as a bride bit by bit, just to help the family survive. When they were approved, they were told they would be coming to America. They were assigned a state, a city, and a receiving organization, and they arrived to begin a new life in a place where they didn’t know the people, the language, the culture, or even the climate.

I walked with this friend through years at the local community college. She took only one term off, a summer class to deliver her youngest child. We got her through 8 levels of ESOL, which was cause for a party! Then she took other classes towards her Associate’s degree. She took medical terminology and passed with a high A, learning words I’d never heard of. She took zumba, and for her final produced a dance using the bellydance moves of her own culture. Every class she took, she found a way to somehow feed everyone in that class at least once. Meanwhile, I was often invited to parties hosted at her house–for birthdays, or Ramadan, or for her twins’ high school graduation. Every milestone was celebrated with lots of food and dancing.

Her husband got turned down for job after job, due to a lack of English skills. He was too impatient to stay in school; he wanted to work. So, in the time-honored tradition of immigrants, he started his own business.

They bought a house. They gained their citizenship. Her elderly in-laws were not granted a visa to visit them here because her father-in-law could not remember the name of the suburb listed as their address; he only knew the state. This was deemed suspicious. So the in-laws traveled to Jordan, and the family traveled from here to Amman to meet with them in a safe place.

Through hardship after hardship, I watched their perseverance and resilience. She used to shriek at fireworks because of PTSD from surviving war after war; now she buys small ones for her kids, and travels downtown to see the big ones set off over the water. She used to cook delicious food with lots of oil and deep frying, but after a class on nutrition she has learned to change that, although her food is still delicious. She is so generous to me that I can’t come close to keeping up. She lavishes her friends with gifts, celebrations, and joy, but I have also seen the pain and sorrow she carries.

I admire her deeply. And her story is just one of many that I know. In some ways she is exceptional, but in other ways, she typifies the determination and tenacity of new arrivals who struggle through their culture shock and PTSD and get up every morning to go to class, or to work, or to care for their families; who just keep going.

I heard on the radio yesterday that the number of refugees worldwide is the highest ever–70 million. That number is so high that it’s nearly meaningless, it’s so hard to wrap our minds around it. But I can tell you that number represents stories and people like this family I’ve been telling you about. Refugees in general are people who were living normal lives, mid-career, with houses and cars, only to have that taken away from them. By definition, they are ones who are the victims of war, not its perpetrators.

And so on World Refugee Day 2019, I want to celebrate the courage I see in my friends, who have come through unimaginable trauma and yet who take every opportunity to gather and celebrate life. I’m honored to be their friend. And I want to call out to the stable countries of the world. There is so much more we could be doing to relieve suffering and bring hope. There is so much room at our table. Won’t we open the door?

 

You Have to Understand

Home, by Warsan Shire 

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.

you only run for the border
when you see the whole city
running as well.

your neighbours running faster
than you, the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind
the old tin factory is
holding a gun bigger than his body,
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one would leave home unless home
chased you, fire under feet,
hot blood in your belly.

A group of 300 sub-Saharan Africans during a rescue operation by an Italian Finance Police vessel off the coast of Sicily, May 14, 2015. (Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

 

it’s not something you ever thought about
doing, and so when you did –
you carried the anthem under your breath,
waiting until the airport toilet
to tear up the passport and swallow,
each mouthful of paper making it clear that
you would not be going back.

you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.

Migrants hang onto flotation tubes in the sea after jumping from an overloaded wooden boat during a rescue operation 16 kilometres off the coast of Libya. August 6, 2015. (Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters)

 

who would choose to spend days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
unless the miles travelled
meant something more than journey.

no one would choose to crawl under fences,
be beaten until your shadow leaves you,
raped, then drowned, forced to the bottom of
the boat because you are darker, be sold,
starved, shot at the border like a sick animal,
be pitied, lose your name, lose your family,
make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,
stripped and searched, find prison everywhere
and if you survive
and you are greeted on the other side
with
go home blacks, refugees
dirty immigrants, asylum seekers
sucking our country dry of milk,
dark, with their hands out
smell strange, savage –
look what they’ve done to their own countries,
what will they do to ours?

the dirty looks in the street
softer than a limb torn off,
the indignity of everyday life
more tender than fourteen men who
look like your father, between
your legs, insults easier to swallow
than rubble, than your child’s body
in pieces – for now, forget about pride
your survival is more important.

i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to
leave what you could not behind,
even if it was human.

no one leaves home until home
is a damp voice in your ear saying
leave, run now, i don’t know what
i’ve become.

On why Romans 13 doesn’t mean what you apparently think it means…

Friday morning, I was on my way to a work meeting when I heard on the radio AG Jeff Sessions quote Romans 13 to justify taking children out of their parents’ arms when they enter the US and seek asylum before they get the formalities out of the way. Up until then, I hadn’t been thinking about politics. I’d slept as late as possible, then guzzled coffee while rushing around to prepare for the meeting. My thoughts were full of curriculum for our ESL classes, with remembering to bring the snacks, and with trying to text many of my friends to say “Eid Mubarak” just as they invariably text me with glittery memes proclaiming “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Easter.” So I listened with sinking hearts to Jeff Sessions’ particular accent, declaiming to his “church friends” that they were just following what the Apostle Paul said to do in choosing to take children as young as a few months old from their parents. He claimed that the verses in Romans 13 which call on Christians to obey their governments justify the Trump administration’s decision to treat people who are fleeing horror and pleading for help as criminals, and to deter them from seeking help in the US by taking their children from them at the border.

“It’s just for a short time, just a week or two,” Sessions said, like that made it okay. Once when my oldest was 3 he ran onto an elevator as the doors were closing, and we searched frantically for 10 or so minutes before we found him, chatting away with several new friends he’d made on that exciting elevator ride without Mum and Dad. Those 10 minutes, which happened in my home country where I understood everything that was happening, were longer than most plane rides.

Later that day, I got on Twitter. Happily I have not seen even one person defending either the policy or the use of Scripture. But I still want to address it.

First of all, yes Romans 13 does say we should follow laws. But read in the context of even just that one book, it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t mean following unjust laws that fly in the face of God’s law, which is summed up in this: Love your neighbor as yourself. When we go out to look at the entire Bible, we read of Peter and John arrested for proclaiming Jesus, and their response: We should obey God rather than men! (Acts 5:29) Or look at the Hebrew midwives in Moses’ day. When told to kill all newborn baby boys, they didn’t and then lied about it. And God blessed them, because they chose not to obey an unjust law. (Exodus 1)

As of Thursday, 11,432 migrant children are in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, up from 9,000 at the beginning of May. These numbers include minors who arrived at the border without a relative and children separated from their parents. (from WaPo article) If you click on that link, you’ll read of a toddler, heart-broken, crying inconsolably, because her mother has been taken from her.

This morning’s sermon was on the Lord’s Prayer. “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” Familiar words to many. But the speaker made the point: if we are truly focused on God’s kingdom, and his will, we will not be afraid of our own temporal kingdom (i.e. the USA, for example) being overrun, wasting away through generosity. Instead, when we look first to God, when we seek his kingdom not just on Sunday mornings but in every aspect of our lives, we will be ready to welcome the poor, the hungry, the desperate. Freely we’ve received, freely we are to give. (Matthew 10:8)

It’s easy to toss Bible verses around, pull out of context some words to give weight to our argument du jour. I don’t want to do that. If we are to take it seriously, that’s the last thing we can do with it. I give special weight to the life and teachings of Jesus though, and so I want to end with a sobering word from the risen Christ to the church of Ladodicea in Rev. 3: “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent.”

 

Decision Avoiding and the Will of God*

Last week, I was drinking coffee with a young woman when I realized that she views me as a person who has got it all together.  This was shocking to me, especially since my contemporaries tend to have the opposite view, and sometimes express it to me in the form of frustration at my laissez-faire style of ministry.

The young woman and I were chatting about what she should do with her life. She is on her third “gap year” and understandably starting to resent others questions about her plans. She assumed that I had clearly known my path at her age, that I had set out to become a missionary and an evangelist and all sorts of other things that, truth be known, I desperately wanted to avoid when I was 20.

The thing is, I have muddled my way through life. I don’t set goals, aspire to them, and attain them. I sort of figure out each day what I’m doing next. This is not the stuff of which inspirational articles are made, but I suspect it’s a lot more common than most of us realize. Unlike the people writing inspirational articles, I don’t think this is bad. The God I worship isn’t American and only some of our values are from him. I’m not saying he’s disorganized, only that I don’t think he values efficiency as much as a lot of us do. (I said “us” to be nice. I have yet to be efficient, unless you count how my laziness allows me to accomplish a lot in a really short period of time)

Efficiency is an odd concept. On the one hand, it’s a good thing. Waste isn’t pleasing to God. But on the other, I think we sometimes value time more than people, and that’s not the heart of God. After all, only 2 things will endure forever, and time isn’t one of them! (People and God’s Word, in case you were wondering)

We lived for several years in a developing country, and at night it got really dark. I mean REALLY dark. If you look up this country on one of those maps showing the world at night, it is mostly black. There is very little light pollution, and the stars are vivid. If we were in a village, and needed to go somewhere at night, we used a flashlight or a small lantern. And the words of Ps. 119 became very real to me. “Your Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” You cannot see even 5 steps in front of you. You can only see the next step. All else around you is the consuming darkness.

And that’s how it is when we walk with God. He doesn’t show us 10 years out, or even 5, or even 2. As Americans, we want him to. We make 7-year goals, What We Will Do Before 30, or 40, or 50. We plan our retirement. But God’s not like that. Ever since I got serious with him, my life has been kind of a roller coaster. I move to a new country, expecting to be there for 20 years or more, and instead I leave after 2 years, or I stay for 7 when I thought it would be 4. I’m finally getting smart about this. When people ask me where we’ll be in X amount of time, I say, “No idea! We think (whatever current answer is) will happen, and we are looking into (whatever we’re looking into), but we really don’t know.” This is actually Biblical–James 4:13-15 reminds us that we don’t really know our future, and ought to properly acknowledge that before God.

God’s word to us is usually like a flashlight in a world that is truly dark, showing us the next step, but not much beyond that. This fosters reliance on him, reminds us that we’re not ultimately the ones in control.

*Title taken from book that was a popular present for Christian high-school grads, back when I was one; Decision Making and the Will of God by Garry Friesen. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Feeling Very Opinionated

I pretty much let this blog die, because I’m too busy in my everyday life. But recent events–children ripped from parents’ arms at the US Border, for Pete’s sake;  or Franklin Graham preaching that if we just ask Donald Trump into our hearts, we’ll find peace, happiness, and the ability to be morally flexible on everything but abortion–well, I’m feeling a bit upset these days, too upset to write short, readable sentences! So this is just to let my 2 readers know I’m back (hi Mom!), and planning to finish posts I’ve started on racism in the church, attitudes towards immigration amongst people who say they follow Jesus who “so loved the world”, gun control attitudes amongst people who also lay claim to the Sermon on the Mount, and so much more. Why can’t I write about nice things? Well, maybe I will. Field trips, and end-of-the-year parties, and being able to sleep in this summer. I also plan to write more legibly, in sentences that express one complete thought and are carefully edited for clarity. Please come back.

 

Still Harping on Refugees

On the first day of class this term, I had my Advanced English as a Second Language class watch Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Even though they couldn’t understand a large part of it, especially his many poetic and scriptural references, they still responded to the cadences and emotion of his speech. Later, they read a transcript.

The next day, I went for coffee with 3 Syrian women. Recent arrivals, they came 6 months ago through another Middle Eastern country, where they left their husbands to earn money while they came on alone to seek asylum.* They are struggling with a new culture, a new language (although all 3 speak decent English), with getting kids adjusted to new schools, all while adjusting to being single mothers. It’s a lot to deal with, and they are very grateful for overtures of friendship.

picture from prefectdailygrind.com  Credit: LWYang, Flikr.

One wanted to talk about the speech. “Syrian people had the same wishes,” she told me. “And instead we all died. Why?” She was talking of the protests of the Arab Spring, and how their president’s reaction in gunning down those who spoke out against him was what sparked this bloody, brutal war that has been going 5 years with no end in sight. I could not answer her question. Why indeed? The Syrian situation is a quagmire, and while speedy involvement may have made sense, that moment is long past, swept into a maelstrom of ISIS and Assad and Aleppo and the Turks and the Kurds and the Iranians and the Russians.

I thought about our own history as Americans. Ironic, isn’t it? We love freedom fighters when they’re us, our own illustrious ancestors, but not when they’re anybody else. History as past and decided, with lines drawn sharp and definite, is one thing, but history as its being written is another, messy and blurry with sides that are sometimes indistinguishable. I believe, though, that we can make the right choice, figure out where we want to be whether or not history sides with us. And that is on the side of the civil rights marchers and the refugees, the ones marginalized and powerless.

“Syrian people had the same wishes,” she told me.

“And instead we all died. Why?”

The news is not all bleak. In the span of 3 days, I heard of 2 different incidents involving different women in different stores, both of whom wear the hijab. Both were approached by strangers, who assured them of their welcome and hugged them. One, a sensitive soul, cried great gulping tears of gratitude. She is still crying days later when she tells me about the 2 women who told her, “Just because one person says they don’t want you doesn’t mean we all feel this way” and then hugged her. “They had to find kleenex for me because I couldn’t stop crying,” she says. She joyfully recounts the tale to her family back in Iraq, along with stories of protest marches and stinging editorials and even my Facebook posts, proof that not all Americans are anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant, proof that compassion can be found in unexpected places.

Tomorrow in class we’re having a Valentine’s Day party, 3 days after the fact. This is partly because Fridays are just good party days. I have told them not to bring heavy foods, as experience has taught me that these parties at 10 a.m. tend to include enormous platters of rice and chicken dishes, fried meat pastries, and much more. “Just finger food,” I urge. “Small things. Cookies. Or nothing. You don’t have to bring anything.” On Wednesday I already came home with a dozen red roses wrapped in tulle and 3 plates of food, all gifts from students.

We will put our chairs in a circle and talk, awkwardly balance pink paper plates and heart-covered napkins, bought 50% off after the day itself. We will discuss, with small corrections of grammar, the various things that have brought us to this place–a mix of professors and housewives and teachers and electrical engineers and scuba divers and people who list “cleaning” as a hobby.  Not all of us are refugees according to our passports, but we are all looking for friendship and a sense of community. So we will struggle forward, learning acceptance, offering friendship.

*Asylum seekers can’t work until their cases get to a certain point in the process. It typically takes about 6 months to get a work permit. Imagine having to survive 6 months without an income!

On Teaching MLK the day of Trump’s Inauguration

We have had an unusual amount of snow this winter, with attendant ice storms, and the result has been over a month of Christmas vacation for ESL classes. And so it has come to pass that I am preparing the first lesson of the year for my advanced class. We do a lesson on MLK every year, the Friday before his holiday which is of course on a Monday, and it’s very well received. My students adore MLK. “The Middle East needs someone like that,” different students have told me several times.

Because of the weather, this year I’m doing the lesson a week late, and it falls on the day of President Trump’s inauguration. My students are permanent residents or new citizens of the United States, and this is history. I would be remiss if I didn’t do a lesson on the peaceful transition of power. It’s ironic: my Arab students, even those who are Christian, are more fearful these days, yet they understand why people voted for him. He makes sense to them. After all, they are used to Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Hosni Mubarak, and other dictator-types.

How to weave the two together? MLK and Trump; history past and history passing. The two seem diametrically opposed in many ways; one preaching non-violence in the face of offense, insult, and the very real threat of death, the other encouraging a mindless sort of violence towards rally-goers who heckled him. One steeped in a tradition of eloquence, using the power of words as a finely-wrought and skillfully-weilded sword, the other using words as a blunt instrument, putting the “bully” back in bully pulpit, his most common words “I” “me” “myself” “my”. One a member of an oppressed minority, with ancestral memories of slavery and beatings, growing up under injustice; the other a member of a elite group of rich white men, posting pictures of his family in an opulent glitzy room that makes up in money what it lacks in taste.

It seems comical, ridiculous to try to put the two into one 90-minute lesson. Yet I will try. This is the world we live in. It’s so broken that Martin Luther King can be assassinated, and Donald Trump can win the presidency. We have made some halting progress as a nation since King’s death; racism still exists, but frankly it exists in every nation on earth and at least we recognize it to a point and deal with it to a point. The mistake is to think it’s a thing of the past, and not look to our own hearts and see our own sin.

And while the two men are both flawed and imperfect, they represent all of us in our multi-faceted and fractured selves. In King, we see one who followed after Perfection; in Trump we see one who follows after Self. (Am I too harsh? No. Have you heard the things he says?)  And yet if we are honest with ourselves, if we examine our hearts, we can see times we have done both, I suspect. I know I can give you examples of both just from this week.

But this may be too subtle for English class. We will look at inaugural traditions, we will read the “I Have a Dream” speech and explain and expound it. I will assign them to watch what they can of the inauguration and to write a response to the speech, and I hope this starts a discussion that carries on in the weeks and months to come. This class likes to do that, stretching their tongues to express their thoughts and hearts in a language that remains elusive and slippery at times. And I will assure them of their welcome to this country, help them write letters when their health-care bills are too high, keep looking for more volunteers to help with ESL classes–just what I’m already doing. In fact, as MLK said, I will “continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”

Random Thoughts on the day of the Feast of the Innocents

At the end of a year in which our world seems even crazier than normal, our hearts are heavy. We stagger under it the weight of it–deaths of innocents in Aleppo, in Mosul, in the Mediterranean Sea fleeing death on land, in all countries on earth as Herod’s spirit lives on in despots clinging to power by whatever means necessary. Deaths caused because the victim is the wrong color, in the wrong place, the wrong kind of religion, the wrong side of the fence.

A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted
because they are no more.

Ever since I had children, these words have struck a chill in my soul. What could be worse? How could those mothers in Bethlehem have carried on? I know an Iraqi woman who was kidnapped and held for ransom by a militia practicing a different kind of Islam than hers; she was tortured and her youngest son was killed in front of her. She is a difficult woman to love; she’s secretive, she steals small things from the church where she comes for free English classes and day-old bread from a small food bank. She doesn’t tell her story. I knew her 3 years before her daughter, recently  arrived, told me. “We had to get mamma out,” she tells me. “That’s why she came by herself.” In that moment, I forgave her everything. She may have carried on, but she’s damaged, deep within her psyche. And I am in awe of her, and of all these mothers and fathers and grandmothers and wives and husbands, who have suffered unimaginable loss.

We have a friend here, a man on his own who fled when his life was targeted and whose wife and children said, “Go now; we will finish up here and join you.” And then ISIS swept into Mosul, and there they still are. The other day, my husband was visiting him and he showed him a news video from Mosul. A house blew up; there was gunfire; then a group of civilians emerged cautiously and ran to safety. He paused the video: “That’s my daughter,” he said, pointing; “And that’s my grandson. There’s her father-in-law…” This man is an artist and is selling prints of his paintings to raise money to send to his daughter and her family, now living in a tent, hungry and shivering in the cold desert nights of Northern Iraq. His wife and youngest two children are still in ISIS-controlled territory. He has no news, and doesn’t like to talk about it.

Image from The Times 

The other day I was feeling sorry for myself, thinking on damaged relationships and distant children (is it really true that they can rebel and it’s not your fault, at least partly? What could you have done differently? There are things you could have and should have done differently, that you know). And I caught sight of that painting, and all my sorrow fell into perspective, and I fell to my knees (metaphorically) and dried my tears and prayed instead for this family and others caught up in war and separation and starvation and desperation.

We are only 3 days after celebrating the Incarnation, the “good news of great joy to all people,” and we are already remembering sorrows that pierce the very soul. How can this be? How can the promises we cling to, that God will wipe every tear, that the lion shall lie down with the lamb and they shall not hurt or destroy, even be possible? What joy can erase seeing your beloved son killed by those who hate him and who disregard all lives but their very own?

I don’t know. I know Jesus, God With Us, who sees all things past and future and knows all things seen and unseen, saw such joy ahead of him that he went to the cross and despised its shame. I know that eternal perspective gives us a weight of glory that makes current troubles light and insignificant, and I believe this even though I don’t understand it. I think C.S. Lewis described it so helpfully at the end of The Great Divorce;

“Son,’he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”

As Lewis so often does, he makes reality sound both magical and logical, possible.

I don’t know what to do with all the suffering in the world, but I know what I need to do with those in front of me. Weep with them, dry their tears, carry their burdens as much as I can. What this looks like means visiting them, spending time listening to them, taking them out of their lonely apartments for a bit, helping them for a minute even see something beyond sorrow, even if it’s just pretty lights and decorated trees. Telling them that one day, even death will be no more, and there waits for us an eternal weight of glory.