Still a missionary

We were just sitting there talking

2006-08-29T11:25:00.000-04:00

I recently finished Dorothy Day's book The Long Loneliness. I once heard a Catholic priest at the Keur Moussa monastery in Thies, Senegal, give a homily on the love of God. God's love, he said, is like the water in Manon of the Spring. You know the source from the dirt in the water, even when you can't tell how it got to where you're seeing it now.

Here is Dorothy Day:

POSTSCRIPT
WE WERE just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.

We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, "We need bread." We could not say, "Go, be thou filled." If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.

We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.

We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm."

It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.

The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone any more.

But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned; that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.

Finding an answer to child soldiers

2006-08-23T10:59:00.000-04:00

When I was at Calvin College and hung around some with some philosophy majors, we used to joke about what they'd do when they'd get out of college. "Open a philosophy shop" was a common suggestion.

Keeping up with events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where I served in Peace Corps from 1982-86, has led me to one life after college for a philosophy major that none of us had ever considered: Edward Rackley works as a consultant to international agencies operating in conflict and post-conflict contexts, primarily in Africa. In a posting on his blog entitled No shame for the shameless, he says, "As most of you know, I've been working with child soldiers in the DR Congo most of this year."

Edward Rackley's blog is called Across the divide: analysis & anecdote from Africa and he has another article about the eastern Congo called Lawlessness and Lucre in Eastern Congo.

Finding an answer to child soldiers and what creates them is certainly one of the great spiritual challenges of our time. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere of "the great men who built up the Middle Ages", and one of the things they did was to limit war and who took part in it. We need to create our own limits, but this time we need to do it so that it applies for wars with other races and ethnic groups as well, something Europe in the Middle Ages never got to.

Rackley mentions reading P.W. Singers' Children at War. I checked and it's available in our local libraries here in West Michigan. It on my to-read list.

Vocation

2006-08-16T21:22:00.000-04:00

The following entry in Buechner's book is one I have always lived by and found most useful, and one of the reasons I always keep a copy of the book around.

VOCATION
It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.

By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

Peterson: "Eat This Book"

2006-02-11T22:50:00.000-05:00

I am listening to Eugene Peterson's lecture in the Calvin January Series as I write this, for the 2nd time tonight. http://www.calvin.edu/january/2006/peterson.htm

By the way, I did have change several things in the Realplayer Preferences on the Tools menu. Specifically, I changed the number in "More options" under Playback Settings to "Buffer up to 300 seconds of the clip before playing if needed", in addition to changing the Connection and Server settings to 300 seconds under Connection.

Peterson's lecture reminds me of the Bible entry in Frederick Buechner's Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC (or A Theological ABC, as the subtitle in the original edition put it. The book is still in print: see http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060611391/sr=8-1/qid=1139715409/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-8593109-6450365?%5Fencoding=UTF8.

It was from Beuchner that I first heard of Karl Barth's dusty windows. That struck me as TRUE, and I suppose that looking through the windows and getting out into the street is what I have been trying to do ever since (and maybe before, of course). This vision of things is one reason that I do not much worry about which translation I use, though I still tend to favor a more word-for-word translation. Any translation is good enough to see through, though, and of course what we're really supposed to do is to move out into the real world outside: the Christian claim is not that "religion is good" but rather, first of all, that each of us can know the God who spoke to Moses from the burning bush, and also that we truly will if we will but seek Him.

The prayer of Jabez

2006-01-26T11:33:00.000-05:00

I heard recently that Bruce (The Prayer of Jabez) Wilkinson's effort to make a difference in Africa has foundered and he has bailed out (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/002/8.76.html).

I never could bring myself to read The Prayer of Jabez. The specter of millions of rich, fat, contented American Christians praying, "Lord, enlarge my tent" has always repulsed me. OF COURSE they'll enlarge their tent. They're too fat to fit in their old one.

Maybe Wilkinson got it right in the book. As I said, I haven't read it. My reaction is to how American Christians reacted to it. That was definitely the rich wanting more and more. There may be a fifth thing that never says enough, that being Christians rich in the things of this world.

Jabez is about crying out in your pain to the Lord and what God does about that. Do that. Find where it leads.

Caring for our own

2005-10-12T10:46:00.000-04:00

We want other people to know our joys and our suffering, yet we fear people who would use what they know about us to hurt us.

Alcoholics Anonymous has built a powerful organization around people sharing their deepest hurts and joys with each other while at least pretending not to know more than the other people's first names. I think, though, that we long for more than that, even if we will settle for one of the "Anonymous" groups, should that be all we can find.

Church people pray for each other. But all of us know that sharing prayer concerns can very easily become "Did you hear about so-and-so?" I'm not always sure that I want church people praying for me.

I trust family more. Family know we're still family and will live or hang together, even when we don't think alike or even like each other all that much, even when we don't spend that much time together. Some people's experience of family, though, is very different from mine. And if I'm honest, I must admit that many of the people I treat as family are not blood relatives of any kind.

The people I trust are the people who have shown that the union between us doesn't go away even when we disagree strongly or when we don't see things the same. We do seek the best for each other, even when we don't agree very much about the means to that end.

The prayers of such people can make all the difference in the world. A woman at work told me of how she was going through a period in her life when she just couldn't make any sense of the suffering she had to endure. She told a friend about this. Over the next few months, she came to understand better and better what God was doing in her life. This amazed her, because she hadn't been able to see any of this before. One day she told her friend of what she had been experiencing and of her amazement at what she could see now, of how she couldn't understand why she hadn't been able to see it before. Her friend told her that she had been praying about this for her ever since she had spoken with her.

Sometimes, though, people will hurt us, intentionally or not. We must train ourselves to seek our identity in God alone and not in what others think or say. When others hurt me, I must make myself take what they say or think to God, for His appraisal. Unless He confirms it, it means absolutely nothing. It will be soon gone without a memory. If I fail to go to God, I will suffer, but I should recognize before long that my hurt is of my own making. I did not seek God's appraisal.

There is a mystery--and a joy--in all this and we are not often getting it right these days.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

(T.S. Eliot, East Coker)

It makes a difference for that one.

2005-10-03T23:52:00.000-04:00

I just received what I take as a high compliment. One of the men who has been around the mission for a long time now and works some in the emergency shelter told me I had to read the meditation for Monday, October 3, from the TODAY daily devotional.

The meditation contained the story about the boy throwing starfish back into the sea.

"What are you doing? the man asked as he walked up to the boy. "I'm saving the starfish," the boy said. The man looked along the shore and replied, "Don't you realize there are miles and miles of beach, and starfish along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!" The boy picked up another starfish and flung it into the ocean. "It makes a difference for that one," he said.

I read it just before heading for home tonight. I told him I knew that story, and I asked him why he wanted me to read the meditation. "When I read it," he said, "I thought of you."

Stillamissionary

2005-09-17T23:01:00.000-04:00

If you want to get a copy of these posts e-mailed to you when I post them, you can become of member of the Still a missionary Yahoo Group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Stillamissionary/.

Medications and misgivings

2005-09-17T22:41:00.000-04:00

I am way behind on the story of my sister-in-law's search for AIDS medication.

My sister-in-law went back to Labé, where she heard that AIDS medication could be had in Mamou, a town about a third of the way back to Conakry. She took the money that Salimatou and some of Salimatou's nieces in Europe had gotten together for her and paid a Labé doctor to drive her to Mamou and help her to get to the right people and get medication. He took all the money, but left her in Mamou with only the taxi fare to get back and not even any money for meals. Afterwards Salimatou said that he "did used to drink some".

Despite the lack of help from this doctor, my sister-in-law did get to the clinic in Mamou and learned that she can get the medications right in Labé. I guess she has started taking the medications.

I wish I could trust that this is being handled properly. My sister-in-law and Salimatou fixated on AIDS medicine until she got some. I tried to get copies of the AIDS tests she had sent to us here in the US, but as soon as it became apparent that we weren't going to get her any medicine here, my sister-in-law stopped making any attempt to get those to us. She is ashamed that she may have AIDS and she told us not to tell any of the other missionaries in Labé about this. My plan was to have her go to one of them and see if they could help her send the test results to us in some way. Her fears killed that plan. I have talked with her and tried to encourage her and to tell her not to be ashamed when we talked by telephone, and it certainly helps her to talk with Salimatou and another sister-in-law in Labé, but I fear she's still carry far too much of the burden by herself.

I wish I was even certain that she really has gotten a definitive answer as to whether she is HIV positive. I am not at all certain that she has. I wonder what this "free AIDS medicine" is and whether it's worth anything at all. I hope for now that she is NOT HIV positive and that the medications she taking are worthless placebos that at least make her think she's more likely to be feeling better soon.

Salimatou told me tonight that her sister sounded real good the last time they talked.

Knowing the poor by name

2005-09-12T08:34:00.000-04:00

Last week one morning I spoke by phone with a man I knew when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mbanza Ngungu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1985 and early 1986. He is now a high school teacher with a master's degree. He earns $5 a month from the government for his efforts. He'd like some financial help, whatever I can give.

I have a lot more money than this man does, yet I myself know where almost every dollar is going these days. I haven't found an extra $50 or $100 to send him. Even when I do, I am afraid I'll end up paying Western Union about as much as he gets.

A couple of weeks ago I made a list of Africans I know who could use some financial help from me. I had over 10 names without thinking hard at all. Knowing this need and NOT having any quick way to deal with it does weigh me down.

This is why I went first to Central and South America traveling and then to Africa with the Peace Corps and later with CRWRC. I wanted to know the poor by name. Today I do not find it very comfortable. This is where I am supposed to be, though. We shall see where it takes us.

You get your picture on a wall!

2005-09-04T17:16:00.000-04:00

My sister-in-law went to Conakry to see about an AIDS test and medication. The fear of what's going to happen to her weighs heavy on her and paralyzes her at times. She fears, too, that other people will find out she has AIDS and stigmatize her. When she went to the hospital in Conakry, an acquaintance told her that the money was gone and the medicine was gone. They could still test her, but if they did that and she was positive, they would just take her picture, and that was all they could do for her. "You get your picture on a wall with other people who have AIDS, " she was told.

She went to another clinic with a doctor from her own ethnic group and had a positive test for AIDS there, too. I suspect that this was just the same blood screening test she had in Labé, though, and NOT the confirmatory test she needs. She has gone back to Labé.

Left Behind--in a broken family

2005-08-30T10:09:00.000-04:00

On Monday Bob Herbert had a piece in the New York Times entitled "Left Behind, Way Behind" where he speaks of how poorly American children are doing in school and of a Program for International Assessment report that proposes to address this with changes to how schools operate.

I don't understand how he can write an article like "Left Behind, Way Behind" without any reference to all the broken families that those children he speaks of belong to. I am married to a woman from Africa, and with just the educational differences of two educational systems and two languages, we find it challenging to keep our children up to speed in school. But there are two of us. I do not see how grandma or mom by herself can possibly carry the load, even though I know some of them do. I have great respect for anyone with that capacity, and most of those are women. I also know that a lot of them do not and cannot. I hurt for them.

Since we returned to the US in 1999, I have been trying to come to grips with how American society and even just my hometown have changed in the years I was away. One of the biggest changes I see is in The terrible cost of broken families. In Africa I had gotten used to a whole extended family raising children. Africans never believed that raising children was something for just mother and father, but it always includes the whole extended family. Your grandparents, and your cousins, have a lot to do with how you grow up. Given the terrible difficulties of finding a job in much of Africa, your father might well be absent. But he is your father, he and your mother are usually still married, and he has lots of help in raising you. Given all the help built into the society, even when there is a divorce, there is usually remarriage on both counts and all those grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins help ease the pressure on any one individual.

I realize after reading this Bob Herbert article that when I wrote The terrible cost of broken families earlier this month, I was mostly writing about white kids. That's largely because of the area I live and work in. If I can pick up anything from all the African-Americans men I know, most all of them over 30, I'd say that their kids are just as scarred but live with a lot more violence and drugs that the young white kids I see firsthand. They're a generation ahead of where the white kids are--the men I know lived through this themselves. I think their kids are trying to rebuild that extended family with kids their own age--call it a gang if you want. As individuals, they are overwhelmed by the situation, even when they care for their kids deeply and long to see them do well--and I am talking about the African-American MEN. I think we need to work together to create an expectation, a way of being, in our families of a inescapable responsibility to raise our children as an EXTENDED FAMILY. Where the immediate family isn't there, then the religious community steps in, but it must be multi-generational and as many people as possible.

I do not believe that any school system can ever hope to do what Bob Herbert and this report calls for without this true family being there for these kids to belong to.

AIDS test

2005-08-10T09:58:00.000-04:00

My sister-in-law who had the positive test for AIDS in a screening test in Labé has gone down to Conakry to go to the John Paul II hospital in the the capital city to have a more definitive test done. She went once before to Conakry, and the test was negative in Conakry, but she suspects that she was just told the test was negative because there wasn't much she could do anyway. Now she is hoping that she will find someone she can trust to tell her the truth, whether it is good or bad news.

Taizé Worship

2005-08-07T14:00:00.000-04:00

I enjoy worshiping with the songs and silence of Taizé as much as any other way I know to worship.

Sing with all your heart to the Lord!

I am still worshiping at home with the kids, since last fall when Salimatou decided she was not going to let the kids go to church with me any more unless I sent them to mosque with her. Salimatou and I still live with our severe differences, and worshiping only at home has its problems, but I should have been leading them in worship at home before all this happened.

We have had some very good worship times. Abraham and Maria sing more than they ever did at our church in town. Partly that is because we have chosen songs they know and also sing songs more often than would happen with the greater variety of songs at the church in town. We have had good times of prayer, and each of us has also had a time when we really heard what the Bible says. Worship at the church in town just isn’t geared for a 7-year-old and a 9-year old.

We often use songs from Taizé. I love the Taizé songs, and I have found to my delight that Abraham and Maria like them more than I expected they would and have been participating more and more.

About two weeks ago now I also led a Taizé worship during the evening chapel time at the mission. I wondered if I was going to be singing by myself.

There was a time a couple of summers ago when I led many Taizé worships at the mission. There was a time when we were between chaplains at the mission when no one would show up for the chapel service for several nights each month, and many of the nights I led a Taizé worship. Once several of the men learned the songs, the participation was very good.

Now it had been a long time since I had led a Taizé worship at the mission, several months at least. This time, however, several men made an effort to sing along even though they didn’t know the songs. The good thing about the songs from Taizé is that, since the songs are short and you sing them over and over, you can pretty much learn a song even the first time you sing it.

At the mission I sing 2 to 3 songs and then have a Bible reading followed by 5 to 15 minutes of silence. I break the time of silence with an Alleluia response and then have sentence prayers for 5 minutes or more, following each prayer with the Alleluia response. The Alleluia response sung to God helps keep the prayers more focused on God and his power. After the prayer time, we sing 2 to 3 more songs to conclude the worship time.

A man who serves as resident assistant kept the phone and was in the back of the chapel for much of the service. After we finished our worship time, he asked me if I noticed that of all the men besides me who prayed, all but one were minorities.

I hadn’t noticed. I sit in the front row and face the front. (I also always remove the lectern to remove anything between the men and God.) I recognize some of the voices, but never all of them. However, I have noticed that minorities (mostly African-Americans and Hispanics) participate much more than the whites. For the Hispanics, perhaps you could say that it reminds them of some of the singing in Catholic churches. For the African-Americans, I think they’re already used to dealing with strange cultures and have things different from what they know forced on them all the time.

I hand out two sheets at the beginning, one page with the words to the songs in the order we’re going to sing them, and another sheet with at least the Bible text of the passage we read. After the worship time, I tell everyone they may take the sheets if they want but to leave them on the chairs if they don’t and we’ll pick them up. Very often either a man who liked the service a lot or, even more often, one of quieter or more unpopular of the men will make it his job to help me pick up the papers. Even the outsiders find a place where they belong.

The terrible cost of broken families

2005-08-06T20:49:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of kids paying a terrible price for all the broken families in America. Just among my kids' friends I know several who bounce back and forth between two parents. At the emergency shelter where I work we see some of the worst casualties of how many divorces we have today in America.

Africans raise kids as a whole community or at the least an extended family all helping out. And there are just a lot more kids around, and the older ones learn early to look out for the younger ones. America with its mom & dad and kids alone against the world can’t handle its family breakdowns as well as African communities can.

I don't know how many young men I've gotten to know in the time I worked at the mission who ended up homeless because mom might have accepted them but stepdad wouldn't have them. Other times it's mom who wants a better life and teenage boys, especially if they have any issues, don't fit into the picture. Many time these young men aren't very nice. Some of them are absolute jerks all the time and most all of them are jerks some of the time. Lots of times they're lazy and hope to find the easy life at the mission that they couldn't find at home. I wonder, though, how I'd have turned out if I had lived through even part of what so many of these guys have had to endure. Give glory to God if you had parents you could respect for how they lived and how they treated you.

I don't see the girls much. I wonder if it's easier for a boy to turn into an absolute jerk that mom and stepdad put out. Of course, I work in the men's shelter and wouldn't have much contact with such girls anyway. I know there's girls with real tragic stories, too.

I pray for these kids and these families. At the mission I try to call the guys I meet there to seek God and to live right even if people aren't doing right by them. I call them to a high standard as best I can. I have some who hate me for trying this or even suggesting it.

I wonder about what church outreach programs there are for these kids. There are some church programs for young people today call Christian young people to righteousness. It seems to me, though, that in what programs there are for young people outside the church, we're usually trying to reach out to young men like those I deal with at the mission with programs focusing on acceptance and not righteousness. We try to attract them with music like theirs and an accept-anything attitude and then hope they realize there's more to Christianity once they're "inside the church". I suspect that their mom and stepdad often tried the acceptance route as well and that's part of what turned so many of them into people who expect to always get their way.

Steeles were on that plane.

2005-08-05T00:28:00.000-04:00

Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2005 5:48 AM

Subject: Steeles

Greetings all,

Got a prayer request for you. You probably heard about the Air France plane crash in Toronto. Steeles were on that plane. They are pretty much okay but are shook up and lost everything except the clothes on their backs. Thank God with us for sparing their lives and pray for them as they work through the trauma of it all. Bill's comment was that God must still have a purpose for their lives. Amen!!

Looking forward to seeing you all soon.

Thanks,
Brenda

Typhoid? Aids?

2005-08-04T10:15:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning I was able to talk at length by phone with one of my sisters-in-law in Labe. She says she has been sick since January this year. She went to the doctor in Labe (where she also works), and he diagnosed her with typhoid fever and malaria. He also gave her a HIV test and that came back positive. He sent her to Conakry for a second test and that test was negative. However, she believes that the Conakry hospitals just produce negative tests because if they believe you have AIDS they write you off as dead.

She says that her whole body hurts and she is always very tired. She says she has no diarrhea or vomiting but she has lost a lot of weight. She can't eat any milk products like yoghurt or leaf sauces.

The doctor told her to take amoxycillin and paracetamol and two other drugs that I don't know how to spell the name for but that she gave us as Prosinide and Cinatine. The doctor also told her to eat well and avoid any really hard work. She has not been taking the medication for at least two months because she doesn't have the money. She does not know that her husband had any positive HIV test before he died in Dakar in 1999. She does say that he was not kept in the usual wardfor TB patients and she wonders about that. She wants AIDS meds NOW because she's sick and tired of being sick.