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Last week, I attended a memorial service for a woman I had never met—the mother of a man who was unable to see her before she passed away because he and his family are in the midst of a lengthy refugee claims process. They can’t leave Canada until their case has been decided, but their extended family is spread out across the globe. For more than a decade, their story has been shaped by war in their home country, and separation in other countries as various family members have had to settle wherever they could find asylum and safety. The “service” was an informal gathering of friends and fellow refugee claimants from diverse backgrounds and religious traditions. There were Muslim blessings and Christian prayers, heartfelt stories, tears, hugs, and hot tea. So many in the room could identify with the powerlessness of being halfway around the world, separated from loved ones whom they might never see again, unable to help in their distress or to be involved in their lives. I’m sure that nothing could have dulled the pain this family felt as they grieved the loss of a beloved parent, but perhaps being with others in this way was helpful in opening up a space to grieve well: to name their loss, to mourn deeply, and to begin to heal.
I saw so much of the Kingdom of God in that room: an inclusive and diverse community of people taking care of one another. I saw so much courage and strength in people who find the will every day to continue living in the midst of uncertainty, fear, and sadness; who learn a new language and raise their children and start a new life in a foreign place they never chose in the first place. In the midst of a bewildering situation of suffering that we all struggle to understand, they are asking their questions together, praying together, being together. In their compassion for one another, I sensed hope—despite all the evil and sorrow in the world, the people in that room have not been robbed of their humanity. They still choose to love one another. It was humbling to be allowed to take part in that community. My thoughts and prayers are with refugees around the world this week who find themselves waiting, in refugee camps or in boats adrift at sea, for someone to offer them safe harbor. I pray that more of us and our governments would be willing to make room for them in our societies; to open our borders and our hearts to extend the welcome of Christ to our neighbors. Today I have the chance to share some of the things I learned from my Muslim neighbors in India about life and faith in a guest post for the Missio Alliance blog. Writing about the experience of observing Ramazan and celebrating Eid with my friends in the slum brings back memories of breathtakingly difficult and beautiful times spent with wonderful people. I am so thankful for everything they have taught me, and for the ways that their friendship continues to shape my journey with Jesus. Head over to MissioAlliance.org to read the post!
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, Jonathan Hollingsworth and his mother Amy tell a very important story about spiritual abuse--one that exposes the secret pain of so many in the church who have been hurt by manipulative pastors and other leaders who maintain their own power with legalistic interpretations of scripture. On the other hand, the book seems to zero in on counter-cultural expressions of living out Jesus' "hard teachings" as the root of the problem, rather than the toxic individuals and theology that resulted in a traumatizing outcome for Jonathan.
At this stage in my life, it was necessary for me to leave the slum to begin working through my personal baggage. However, I have close friends who were able to sustain healthy lives in that same context for nearly twenty years, raising their children in the slum and building deep and meaningful relationships with their neighbors. I know others who have done the same thing in the slums of Cambodia, and Manila. My former pastor at a church in inner-city Los Angeles is also living a difficult, sacrificial, rewarding life with his family--hearing gunshots at night isn't "safe," but they have counted the cost. There are thriving communities of people across North America who have chosen "radical" paths of service and solidarity, and who have learned together how to sustain themselves emotionally and spiritually in the midst of that. The word "radical" is often conflated with the word "extreme," but the meanings of the two words are distinct. "Radical" comes from the Lain word for "root," and when we speak of the radical call of Jesus, we are not talking about going to extremes, but about getting down to the roots of something. The Way of Jesus is not concerned with outward action for its own sake, but with healing the heart: his message of compassion, forgiveness, and sacrifice addresses the roots of injustice in our world, and the roots of dysfunction in our own hearts. But sometimes the decisions and actions we need to make in order to dig up the roots of greed, fear, hatred, or indifference in ourselves and in our world may look extreme--especially to a culture and a society that has founded its prosperity and happiness on things remaining exactly as they are. Reflecting on my own spiritual journey towards grace and my experiences with pursuing justice, community, simplicity, and solidarity with the poor,I have written a review of the book for Sojourners. Click on over to check it out! The Huffington Post reported Sunday morning on a photographer who is fundraising for "A Beautiful Body Project" to show real women’s bodies—nude or nearly nude—along with inspiring stories about their bodies and their lives, in order to encourage healthy self-esteem. I understand the benefits of women getting to see what other normal, un-photoshopped bodies look like so that they have realistic expectations for their own. I understand the danger of being exposed to countless images of flawless models who embody cultural ideals and who exercise/starve themselves for a living. Most of the time, we don’t see bodies that we can relate to: the bodies of other women working, studying, raising kids, or generally just living life without the supervision of a personal trainer and a nutritionist, or the “luxury” of working out during half of their waking hours. I remember a very liberating and helpful experience during university when the primitive village stay conditions during our semester abroad meant that many of my female friends and I had to live in very close quarters and take “bucket” showers in the same room together. Seeing each other naked resulted in all of us becoming a little less self-conscious and little more accepting of our own bodies as we saw a broad range of body types and physical quirks that were apparently normal, despite never being featured in mainstream media.
Still, I have my doubts about this photography project. There’s a big difference between private, interpersonal interactions and public, impersonal displays. The intentions behind it are good, but after looking through some of the photos, I thought, “This is still women putting themselves on display for the public to scrutinize and discuss. It still feels like female bodies being treated like public property.” Men don’t have to pose naked for photo projects in order to be seen as more than just sex objects, or to have their worth affirmed to them by others’ approving gaze. Maybe trying to reclaim our portrayal in media—by replicating the very kinds of images which have exploited us all along—is not an effective tactic. Maybe the problem with how women are treated in our culture goes deeper than redefining beauty—it goes right down to questioning why it is so important for women to be beautiful in the first place. There have been photography projects depicting breast cancer survivors (naked), and mothers with their post-partum bodies (naked), but my question is why any of these women need to take off their clothes and have the public declare their bodies beautiful in order for them to feel valued, or in order to be able to accept themselves? Ironically, these campaigns seem to reinforce that the most essential part of one’s being—or of a female’s being, at any rate—is her body. Can we not recognize and honor the whole person without seeing them naked? Does seeing them naked bring us any closer to seeing the most unique and intimate parts of who they are? I’m not convinced that the fascinating complexity of a woman’s mind and heart, all of the experiences and decisions and determination and courage and vulnerability and creativity and whatever else makes her who she is, can be captured in a photo—with or without clothes. I worry that these photo shoots are not empowering enough because they do not question the socially-constructed idea that women must be physically attractive to be happy. I’m still waiting to see the naked photo shoots of men who have survived prostate cancer, or dads whose bodies have changed due to stress, sleep-deprivation, and missing their morning workouts because they’re busy being parents. Actually, I have no desire to see those photos, but the point is this: I highly doubt that any of these campaigns are forthcoming, because men don’t have to be deemed physically attractive (within a narrow, cultural definition or otherwise) in order to be taken seriously in society. No one assumes that a man will have lower self-esteem because of his sagging chest or pot belly or graying hair or wrinkled jowls. Though I realize that many men do struggle with physical insecurities in the hyper-sexualized advertising wasteland we all inhabit, they do not face the same blunt message that women do of needing to be physically attractive to matter. That is why, although I applaud the spirit behind what this photographer is doing, these bare-all campaigns to redefine beauty will ultimately fall short of garnering respect for women as whole people. They fail to bring us closer to gender equality because they play along with the unchallenged assumptions that physical beauty is a prerequisite for female self-esteem, and that it's the most important aspect of a woman’s identity. A wolf in sheep's clothing: Monsanto's public relations campaign. In North America, farmers often find themselves bullied into buying Monsanto's genetically modified seeds or else sued for growing copyrighted Monsanto crop varieties after accidental cross-pollination from neighboring GMO fields. In India, the cycles of debt created by reliance on the company's GMO seeds have led to a dramatic spike in farmer suicides in recent years. This week I had lunch with a human rights activist from Latin America who was forced to seek political asylum in Canada a few years ago because his work with peasant farmers in his home country had put his life in danger. Monsanto came up in our conversation, and although this activist’s work with land rights did not directly concern this corporate giant, he said that Monsanto was very active in his home country and he could see the negative effects of a single company taking control of the food supply. Once someone has power over food and water, he says, they are in complete control: you will either eat and drink what they give you or you will die. He hypothesizes that one day corporations will commodify respiration itself by forcing people to pay for the privilege of air that is clean enough to breathe.
Such a situation is not so far-fetched. In polluted cities in Beijing and Shanghai, air quality is already so bad that people are already wearing face masks outside much of the time and clamoring to buy air filters for their homes and offices. And since wealthier communities have more social power to back up their demands of “not in my backyard,” heavy polluters like oil refineries and petro-chemical plants often end up in the backyards of people too poor or marginalized in society to resist. Canada’s “Chemical Valley,” where the population of an impoverished First Nations reservation is submerged in the poisonous haze of the highly concentrated oil refineries and petro-chemical plants which surround them, is a dramatic example. But nationwide across the United States, studies have shown that people in nonwhite, low-income areas are breathing in more hazardous particles than people in affluent, white ones--in other words, air pollution disproportionately affects the poor. So perhaps clean air has already become a privilege rather than the basic right or the common grace provided by God to everything that has breath. The corporations which have the greatest effects on our food, water, and air today are larger than the economies of many of the countries in which they operate. They are also more powerful than the governments of the nations where they do business, and since their bottom line is profit rather than the welfare of the places where they harvest, manufacture, or sell their products, their ability to operate above (or in some cases, dictate) the law is incredibly dangerous. As we speak, seventeen of the world’s top oncologists have just released a report warning that the main ingredient in most commonly used herbicide in the world, Monsanto’s RoundUp, probably causes cancer. Monsanto is fighting to have the report retracted--but this is not surprising, given that the company depends on this chemical for $6 billion in profits every year. One way of resisting Monsanto's choke-hold on the international food system and their ability to operate at the expense of human health is to sign this petition calling for health authorities in the United States, Brazil, the European Union, and elsewhere to take the alarming findings of this new study into account and to ensure that that the public is not exposed to glyphosate until it can be proven safe. The dangerous trend in our food system of power being concentrate in fewer and fewer [corporate] hands is something that cannot be adequately addressed by something as simple as signing a petition, though our signature may be a significant, small component of broad-based resistance. It is necessary to start somewhere. The current situation is one in which food travels vast distances along supply chains long enough to prevent us from ever knowing, most of the time, where exactly our food came from, how it was produced, what is in it, and what effect its production had on the people and the landscape of its place of origin. It is a destructive system in which short-term profit too often trumps the long-term well-being of land and people. It is an unjust arrangement in which, to quote author Mark Winne, "the poor get diabetes; the rich get local and organic." A few months back, Andy and I took a “faith in food” class at our church here in Vancouver. It was basically an in-depth look at the historical development of the industrial food system, the way it operates today, and its negative effects on people, animals, and ecosystems around the world. We also examined scripture in order to figure out our place as followers of Jesus in this global story that is unfolding. Given the mission of the church to participate in God’s restoration of the world, how are we to respond to the specific social, political, and economic circumstances that we find ourselves in right now? What does it look like to pursue justice and wholeness in the context of an economy in which many people cannot afford to buy healthy food; in which the way that we feed ourselves does not honor or protect our fellow creatures of the natural environment on which all of our lives ultimately depend? What does it mean to love our neighbors when some of them are losing their land or working under exploitative conditions to provide the food on our tables, and when others are literally being poisoned by the food that they eat? In many ways, the time we spent praying, thinking, and talking about these issues raised more questions than answers and brought us to the realization that the simple act of eating has become fraught with complex ethical and practical problems. But we also reached clarity and consensus around the fact that seeking justice in the food system—which is hardly separable from environmental or economic justice overall—is among the most pressing moral concerns of our day. Responding to it is a task that we as Christians cannot afford to ignore. Thus, you have this blog before you. A blog will not save the world, but perhaps it can be the start of an important conversation, one that will build community and build momentum around living more justly and compassionately in a world where it is very hard to live well. As Wendell Berry, that octogenarian farmer-poet from Kentucky, has said, “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.” So in addition to writing, I hope to get my hands dirty growing some food over the next few months, and doing what I can to support local farmers instead of corporate supply chains. These are small acts that will be done imperfectly, but it is a start, and I will not be going about it alone. Tomorrow will be Christmas. This is the day that we celebrate the Incarnation: God entering into the human condition, revealing the dignity and beauty that lies hidden in our beings. Jesus comes to earth to reveal God’s love for us. This is not a severe holiness that cannot stand to be in the presence of sin. This is a humble and compassionate presence that makes its home amid the darkness, despair, and dysfunction of our misguided lives and our unjust society. This is not an angry deity demanding retribution with blood, but a gentle shepherd here to feed the harassed and anxious sheep who have no one to care for them. God takes on flesh and reveals Himself to be God with Us, the Human One, who derives his power from weakness and vulnerability, who comes not to be served but to serve. Jesus is born into the human race, and through his example, he invites us into the fullness of our humanity. He teaches us not to wait for heaven after death, but to concern ourselves with life before death by living in the reality of the Kingdom right now. Jesus shows the way for us to fully embrace this suffering world that God has made His home, and to be at home within ourselves despite our imperfections and our shadows. Being at home amid darkness does not mean that we do not work towards the transformation of our own hearts and of the world, but it means that we do so from the starting place of knowing that we are loved, that this love has filled every dark corner already, and that God is with us.
I have often attended Christmas Eve services that seemed to skip ahead from the birth of Jesus to his death and resurrection; services that finished with an altar call, as though Jesus’ birth and life were merely the back story to set up for the “the main reason” He came to earth. As though Jesus was simply born to die. We sometimes want to condense the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus into some cosmic formula instead of recognizing the significance of the entire story, and without entering into the story ourselves to learn what the incarnation means for us as we seek to grow into the nature of God while living an embodied existence among our fellow creatures. Crucifixion and resurrection are also things for each of us to experience in our own lives rather than simply one-time historical events for us to remember, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves—we have Lent and Easter to reflect on these mysteries. The incarnation alone is a mystery significant enough for us to spend an entire season entering into, and that is what Advent and Christmas are for. Three days ago, we had the first snowfall of the season, and it’s still on the ground. Here in Canada, everything is cold and white right now, and I sleep under thick blankets, type next to a space heater during the day, and try to learn how to dress properly with layers and layers of wool. I still remember those TV infomercials a few years ago about “Snuggies,” the blankets with arms that looked like cultic robes when the ad showed what looked like a family of suburban Druids enjoying a nighttime camp fire in their matching fleece ensemble. Now I am cold enough to wear a snuggie around the house without shame, cold enough not to care whether I look like an infomercial from the last decade or a member of a pagan cult.
Advent has just begun: the season of waiting for the first spark of hope in the dead of winter, of looking for signs of life in the midst of death. Even Christmas itself will not the triumphant victory of Easter--it will be the quiet celebration of hope born into the world, even while oppression reigns. Shepherds and wise men visit this child in secret, because baby Jesus will still have to flee Herod's genocide and grow up under foreign occupation before he leads justice to victory and inaugurates the Kingdom. I feel the tension and the hope of this waiting, this hope that is stubborn but uncertain of when fulfillment and completion will come. I look at squirrel and bird tracks in the snow on the roof outside my window as I edit the manuscript of my book. The scenes outside are so different from the ones that linger in my mind. I’m writing about my life in India: what it was like to be an outsider accepted into community across boundaries of race, religion, culture, and socioeconomic background. I’m writing about how life with Muslim friends shaped my own faith, and how confronting suffering in the lives of my neighbors who were materially poor has challenged me to make sense of where God is in the midst of all the pain. I’m writing about how Muslims and Christians and rich and poor need one another, about what it means for us to love our enemies, and about the changes that community brings in us as individuals and in our world. I’m primarily writing about my own journey, and the love that I have continued to discover no matter how far I travel in any direction. The process of writing has been good for me. It forces me to be present to process rather than destination, and this is certainly a process over which I have only limited control and knowledge about how long it will take or what the final result will be. But it’s difficult, because sometimes spending my days writing feels like living with ghosts—not only of my friends and neighbors in India, but of many of my own dreams, expectations, and self-definitions as well. Aside from that, daring to ask for help, to show my writing to others, or to even say out loud that I am working on a book brings my insecurities out of the shadows, revealing my fears about whether this story really will come together in the end, whether it will get published, what people will think about it (and about me) if it is published. But I believe that it is a story worth telling, even a story that needs to be told, and so I keep on writing. I am struggling, not to bring characters to life, but to allow the vibrant life of the real people I have known to shine through the pages. I want you to see them, to care about them, to learn from them. I am still learning from them myself. Advent has begun: the season of waiting, expectation, and hope. Whispered promises of new possibilities to come. I am living towards these possibilities, working towards what, as yet, I have never seen but still believe is possible. I struggle on despite my fears, my fresh memories of loss, and the uncertainties of the future. I trust that new life can begin even in the dead of winter, that those whispers of hope are trustworthy, and that we are but the midwives of the dreams God wants to birth into this world. Stay tuned. “You can no more win a war than win an earthquake.” Those were the words of Montana Republican Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, explaining her lone vote against America’s entry into World War II on December 8, 1941. Those are the words that explain my thoughts on this Veteran’s Day/ Canadian Remembrance Day seventy-three years later. Today, I remember the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have lost their lives in the thirty wars in which U.S. soldiers have fought since the birth of our nation; I remember the lives of millions of non-Americans that were lost in those same wars. I think also of the innumerable families and loved ones of soldiers who have suffered as a result of these casualties. I think of the 24.9 million American military veterans alive today, many of whom have suffered physical and psychological trauma, and many of whom struggle at the margins of our society as a result. According to U.S. government statistics, nearly one in seven homeless adults as of December 2011 were military veterans, and 30.2% of veterans between the ages of 18 and 24 were unemployed. Another 1.4 million are currently at risk of homelessness due to poverty, lack of support networks, and dismal living conditions in overcrowded or substandard housing. I recognize the acts of selflessness and heroism that have been displayed by young men and women in the intensity of battle over the years, and I respect and remember the people I love who have experienced war. I deeply care about everyone whose lives have been shaped by war in some way or another. But it is that same respect and love for human life which prevents me from being able to celebrate the suffering that has resulted from war. I don’t believe that the no-win situation of kill-or-be-killed is one that women and men should ever be forced into. I am not against the people who have ended up in this situation, but I am against the ideologies and systems of war that have landed them there. I am against the myth of redemptive violence, against governments advancing their economic and political interests with human lives (especially the lives of the poor, who always suffer disproportionately in war), against the idea that killing the families of other people is justified in order to defend the families of people that I know and love. I do not celebrate the tragic loss and destruction of lives that these wars have entailed, and I do not believe that continuing to depend on violence to protect our freedom and security can ever make us truly safe or free. For me, this is a day of somber remembrance and reflection. For any of us who would profess a higher allegiance to the Prince of Peace than to any nation on earth, this day is a reminder of the flawed logic of counting one nation’s “victories” over another as long as those victories come at the cost of slaughtering our fellow human beings. This day reminds me to pray and hope and live into creative new ways of engaging with conflict which will one day replace the cyclical violence on which we have come to rely as our first line of defense in any threatening situation. This day compels me to grieve for what has been, and to hope for what is yet to be, believing that the difficult and risky path of enemy love that Jesus lays out is no more costly than the bloody path we have walked up until now. There is a song by Tom Wuest, based on Paul’s conversion in Acts 9, which we often sing in our community as part of our collective worship and repentance. This is my prayer for all of us today, for our healing and wholeness: “In our blindness, lead us down that road. In our ignorance, lead us down that road. In our violence, hate and indifference, We pray Lord you give us new sight. Let something like scales fall from our eyes, Something like scales fall from our eyes. Jesus, lead us down that road. Lead us down that road.” In our house, we host a weekly event after Tuesday night community dinners called Creative World Justice. The purpose is pretty much what it sounds like—to worship, learn, and brainstorm together about the creative steps we can take towards promoting justice in the world, as individuals and as a group. We’ve just begun a series exploring violence and nonviolence, and last night I had the privilege of leading a discussion on nonviolence in the Bible, particularly in the life of Jesus.
I’ve read these verses so many times myself over the years, and I’ve often taken part in theological discussions and detached, intellectual conversations in which we have discussed violence on an impersonal, even hypothetical level. We hold the world’s problems at arm’s length, arguing back and forth about historical wars, current large-scale conflicts that are far enough away to exist for us only in newspaper headlines, or potential scenarios of aggression or crime in which self-defense would be necessary. But last night, Jesus’ words and example of forgiveness and enemy love had never felt more powerful. The room was full of people for whom violence is a personal issue. Many of them grew up in violent homes, were abused as children, belonged to gangs when they were younger, had boyfriends or husbands who beat them up, or perhaps served jail time for beating up someone themselves. One woman came into the discussion reeling from the news that a close friend had been the victim of an extremely savage crime this week—one which may yet take her life; it remains to be seen whether she will make a recovery in the hospital or not. Is it offensive or even ridiculous to talk about forgiveness against the backdrop of such vitriolic hatred and evil? Jesus’ teachings about forgiveness and nonviolence are difficult for us all, but especially for so many people in that room, whose lives have been shaped in significant ways by violence. I really respected the courage of my new friends to take his words seriously and to grapple with them right in the thick of it all. I admired their humility and honesty in sharing the difficult emotions and the fragile places in their lives that have made it difficult for them to respond to violence in any other way than with retribution. Some of them are also very new on their journey with Jesus, and I was inspired by their passion to soak up this new way of being in the world. In the face of so much raw honesty and pain, I was humbled myself by the reminder that this nonviolent path is not a solution that I have to hand out to people. It’s not anything I have mastered myself, and it certainly is no short-cut or cure-all for the pain. It’s a difficult and lengthy process of inner transformation, and it is a learning curve that we are all on together, stumbling and backtracking and finding our way forward again. But it is a potent anecdote to the fight-or-flight world and the survival mentality that we’ve all been raised with. In fact, it is exactly in the thrall of horrific violence that forgiveness and creative, compassionate resistance are needed: to overcome evil with good. |
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Photo used under Creative Commons from matsuyuki