I went barefoot by choice and with pleasure around our home and grassy farm much of the time as a youngling, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t and don’t have a delight for shoes. Well made shoes, apart from being attractive, are a meaningful article of clothing. They not only protect our skin, they carry us to our destinations and hold us while we grow relationships with other people.
I have a tradition of burying my travel-worn shoes in far off places. The superstitious hope is that if I leave a piece of me, I’ll come back one day. It’s similar to throwing pennies in the Trevi Fountain.
Speaking of that boot-shaped country, when you leave your sneakers in Italy, it gives you suitcase space for one more bottle of Imagredi wine. I still have that one more unopened bottle. The grapes were grown and fermented on the outskirts of the little village I lived in as a student, at the foot of the Alps that demarcate the border between Austria and Italy.
The first time I left a shoe somewhere was an accident. I was probably 5. We were staying at a rental house in Maggie Valley with my maternal cousins. Occasionally our parents would walk us to the nearby river to play, to swim. In the midst of my romping about, one of my shoes—a fruit-print, strappy, German Birkenstock slider with a green rubber platform—slipped off and floated away down the river.
Streams to the river, river to the sea.
Shoes don’t have to be lost or left to be remembered. On Easter Sundays as a little girl, I always put on what were called “fisherman sandals”—or what I prefered to call, a little proudly and indignantly, my “fisherwoman sandals.” They were made of white leather, maybe faux I don’t know, and so strappy that they were almost close-toed and close-heeled. I liked wearing them to church. For some reason, when I wore those shoes as a 6 year old, I felt more connected to Jesus’ first disciples, who were fishermen, and the call to be “fishers of men;” in other words, to share the good news of Jesus with others.
I tell you, shoes are powerful things. As a very young kid, this particular pair functioned as a symbol that drew me to the very heart of the gospel.
I converted to Christianity before I needed two hands to count my age on my fingers, but as any Christian knows, there are times when you are practicing the disciplines of your faith more than others.
I moved to a new culture, got married and adopted 3 sons in the same instant. Since then I’ve struggled to find a new rhythm in my practices of prayer and reading Scripture. Never have they been left in the dust, but the consistency of my single college years is a thing of the past.
The Bible is a big book. For several months I’ve found myself not knowing where or how to begin again. As someone who is familiar with the Bible and the many different reading plans, this was never a problem I thought I would have. But here I am.
Then a week or so ago a friend posted a video to Facebook in which he gave a brief overview of the Bible and its historical and spiritual context, and how the Bible has encouraged Him through the years. He encouraged his viewers to pick the Bible up and, if they were unfamiliar with the Scriptures, to start in the Gospel of John.
When I heard that, I suddenly felt inspired. It was as if I’d been away from the Scriptures for too long and needed to start fresh, like a person approaching the Bible for the first time.
Every day since then, reading John has been like finding life. But there is one line that has resonated through my head over and over again this week. They are the first words of Jesus that are recorded by the apostle in the opening of the book:
“What are you seeking?” Jesus is asking it of two men who have approached him.
What are you seeking?
As the book of John comes to a close, Jesus asks the question again, this time of Mary Magdalene: “Whom are you seeking?”
The same question is at the beginning and end of the book. It’s accordingly what I’ve been asking myself.
What am I seeking?
Who am I seeking?
I put on my shoes and walked out the door—for what?
To seek Jesus, the person, the God.
And I’ve found Him.*
Have you found Him?
_______________________
*Yet I continue to seek Him.
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
The Hunt's Afoot
When flying over the Dominican mountains, it appears that birds have built nests precariously on the ridges, and are raising their young in the heights, princes and princesses of a verdant wonderland with an ocean view.
When you are human eye-level, however, you see they are not nests. Rather, they are small corrugated steel or cement block houses hanging on for dear life to the mountain side, clutching a serpentining, narrow road. The view of the valley and watercolor shore is free, sans property taxes, but worth a million dollars.
The people who live here are poor. Every time we drive past, I am sobered by the poverty, even as I am overwhelmed by the spectacle of mountain, earth, water and sky. I don’t understand how these families came to be here. Perhaps the houses were originally built by the men who constructed the road? And afterwards, people came and settled in them because they were available? I’m theorizing.
What is fact, is statistically speaking you are at higher risk of dying from natural disaster if you live here. Much higher. Hurricane Maria in point. What is more, you are a good hour from the private hospital, 2 hours from the regional government hospital that I’m assuming most of these people would be obligated to use. Emergencies aside, day-to-day is a struggle. Although food is available the variety is extremely limited from a Walmart perspective.
In some places, like parts of Haiti, the ground cries out with the people, hungry and thirsty. It is barren and ugly and can’t turn a carrot orange. The people are depleted too, of nutrients, of strength, of hope. The earth and the people are unified, and it births pure, simple emotions in your heart: sadness, anger, empathy.
But when hardship is set in the realm of natural glory, where every plant sings “life,” your heart compresses and bursts, compresses and bursts, until you are left in confusion, a melancholic state of wonder. You are stuck in a Shakespearean tragedy: marvelous prose, horrible story (sorry, my man Shakespeare).
I know that when Jesus took the punishment for all the sin of the world, all the horrible stories past, present, and future, giving His chosen ones the right to stand before the judgement seat of God and be declared redeemed, he also felt the pain of the world, of separation from God. He felt the pain of the poverty and hopelessness of those living in the rural mountains of the Dominican (or West Virginia, or Nepal, or wherever) and he gets this. He is not oblivious to their pain, or to my pain that I feel when I see it, live next to it every day. I also know that in this moment God is continuing to store up wrath which will be justly poured out on the causes of all this pain when the Day of the Lord appears. There is not one bacteria or amoeba or unrepentant dictator or demon that will not be duly punished.
So I can rest. Of course help people whenever it is in my power to do it, but there is no need to be overwhelmed by cruel emotions. One can feel the breeze as the sun sets behind the mountain and enjoy it, trusting that the coexisting darkness is not something you should let get you down.
Easier said than done, no? Sometimes I am still brought to tears, or entirely frustrated, like when I was sitting in the hall outside the ER, waiting for a family member of my husband’s to be admitted to a room, and the electricity kept coughing, taking down along with it the nebulizers attached to crying kids, the desktop computers.
It’s everywhere, every day, inescapable, it seems: the poverty, the pain, dysfunction. All set beneath a cerulean blue sky, tall coconut loaded palms, and an ambient of Latino music.
In the midst of everything, you have to let yourself enjoy the beauty that there is.
When the beauty is not evident, you must search for it. It is an obligation.
So in the midst of my everything—a bunch of boys; cooking; the dirty dishes and laundry that I carried to our new apartment from the old one because I didn’t get around to washing them; sitting in the hospital with a friend or in the shop with a car whose hobby is breaking down; being present in broken lives; etc.—my hunt’s afoot.
When you are human eye-level, however, you see they are not nests. Rather, they are small corrugated steel or cement block houses hanging on for dear life to the mountain side, clutching a serpentining, narrow road. The view of the valley and watercolor shore is free, sans property taxes, but worth a million dollars.
The people who live here are poor. Every time we drive past, I am sobered by the poverty, even as I am overwhelmed by the spectacle of mountain, earth, water and sky. I don’t understand how these families came to be here. Perhaps the houses were originally built by the men who constructed the road? And afterwards, people came and settled in them because they were available? I’m theorizing.
What is fact, is statistically speaking you are at higher risk of dying from natural disaster if you live here. Much higher. Hurricane Maria in point. What is more, you are a good hour from the private hospital, 2 hours from the regional government hospital that I’m assuming most of these people would be obligated to use. Emergencies aside, day-to-day is a struggle. Although food is available the variety is extremely limited from a Walmart perspective.
*****
And yet, the earth here is beautiful.
Tierra buena, tierra bella.
*****
Tierra buena, tierra bella.
*****
In some places, like parts of Haiti, the ground cries out with the people, hungry and thirsty. It is barren and ugly and can’t turn a carrot orange. The people are depleted too, of nutrients, of strength, of hope. The earth and the people are unified, and it births pure, simple emotions in your heart: sadness, anger, empathy.
But when hardship is set in the realm of natural glory, where every plant sings “life,” your heart compresses and bursts, compresses and bursts, until you are left in confusion, a melancholic state of wonder. You are stuck in a Shakespearean tragedy: marvelous prose, horrible story (sorry, my man Shakespeare).
I know that when Jesus took the punishment for all the sin of the world, all the horrible stories past, present, and future, giving His chosen ones the right to stand before the judgement seat of God and be declared redeemed, he also felt the pain of the world, of separation from God. He felt the pain of the poverty and hopelessness of those living in the rural mountains of the Dominican (or West Virginia, or Nepal, or wherever) and he gets this. He is not oblivious to their pain, or to my pain that I feel when I see it, live next to it every day. I also know that in this moment God is continuing to store up wrath which will be justly poured out on the causes of all this pain when the Day of the Lord appears. There is not one bacteria or amoeba or unrepentant dictator or demon that will not be duly punished.
So I can rest. Of course help people whenever it is in my power to do it, but there is no need to be overwhelmed by cruel emotions. One can feel the breeze as the sun sets behind the mountain and enjoy it, trusting that the coexisting darkness is not something you should let get you down.
Easier said than done, no? Sometimes I am still brought to tears, or entirely frustrated, like when I was sitting in the hall outside the ER, waiting for a family member of my husband’s to be admitted to a room, and the electricity kept coughing, taking down along with it the nebulizers attached to crying kids, the desktop computers.
It’s everywhere, every day, inescapable, it seems: the poverty, the pain, dysfunction. All set beneath a cerulean blue sky, tall coconut loaded palms, and an ambient of Latino music.
In the midst of everything, you have to let yourself enjoy the beauty that there is.
When the beauty is not evident, you must search for it. It is an obligation.
So in the midst of my everything—a bunch of boys; cooking; the dirty dishes and laundry that I carried to our new apartment from the old one because I didn’t get around to washing them; sitting in the hospital with a friend or in the shop with a car whose hobby is breaking down; being present in broken lives; etc.—my hunt’s afoot.
Wednesday, March 06, 2019
Foreigner
Just because you feel called to be somewhere doesn’t mean it’s easy to be there, doesn’t mean your roots don’t tell you every day that the soil you’re in is not your own, that you’ve been transplanted.
There is something incredibly alluring about living in a foreign country. Your senses are in hyperdrive all the time, and you notice things that people who have lived in the place their whole lives do not notice. For example, occasionally throughout the town of San Pedro--in the university, the sports complex, my own lane, or a random street between the heres and theres--every other waft of air I breathe is sweet, similar to yellow sweet corn. I love it. It’s soft and mysterious.
It’s soft because it’s gentle, like the smell of rising bread dough. Mysterious, because nobody else smells it so they can’t tell me what it is. They’ve breathed it their whole lives, are accustomed.
It’s possible it is corn, but I am pretty sure it’s the smell of sugarcane being refined; or maybe it’s the factory by the river that processes beer. I don’t know. I’m American.
I’m American.
I’m a foreigner.
I’ve been transplanted.
When I studied abroad in Italy, I didn’t fit in either, but it was different. Once I got my fashion a little bit more under control people frequently thought I was German; and whether “German” or American, if I kept to myself, often Italians wouldn’t look twice, whether male or female.
But here, even as I speak more and more Spanish, and thereby unlock the house that is culture, the way Khaled Hosseini said it would happen in his book And the Mountains Echoed, I remain a foreigner. It’s my skin, my hair, and--more so--my blue eyes. I do not fit in with the dominant culture, the way Haitians do not fit in either; except their ethnicity, in contrast to mine, gets them very few favors.
I am a foreigner.
It would be lovely, for a few hours, to feel normal. To not feel like all of the cultural parts of me, all of the colors of me, are alien.
But is that my mission in life? Is that what I am pursuing? Is that what I was created for? To feel normal, comfortable, in place, supported, at home?
Like I’ve written before, I feel all those things in the arms of my husband. He is my Knight, my best friend. But we do not live in a fairytale. He goes to work. Sometimes he’s away overnight.
And I am left as who I am without him: a stranger.
I am an exile of Eden, waiting to be able to go home to a city fashioned of precious gems.
We are all foreigners, truth be told. But we feel it more in some seasons of life than others. For me, it’s especially poignant right now because my strangeness is palpable. People treat me differently for how I look, shining the spotlight on me whether to give me positive or negative attention, and my cultural habits are an oddity, whether it be my propensity to prefer text messages over voice messages in WhatsApp (and be terrible at responding to either right away because dang it, if it’s an emergency call me), or my desire to always be on time.
Some days I feel like my entire personhood is in opposition to Dominican culture (“I don’t belong here”) and those are the days when I need to spend a lot of time looking at flowers. Those are the days when I also need to talk to people and remember that our differences are beautiful.
As Riley Armstrong wrote in a song a long, long time ago, it’s what every welcome mat is saying: “welcome,” only welcome, without discrepancy, without asterisks or clauses. It doesn’t matter if you’re different; in fact, different is beautiful. My parents’ welcome mat even says “welcome” in 7 or 10 different languages. Riley would be proud.
I may be a transplanted flower, I may look a little different, and move with the sun a little differently, but that does not mean that how I look or move is inherently wrong. The soil feels different, but I can still grow, still form bonds with those around me. If everybody in this exuberant, tell-it-like-it-is culture wants to call me out, okay. That’s beautiful. The excitement they are feeling makes their lives better and I can learn to do the same or at least appreciate it. In response to their enthusiasm in the street, much of the time the only thing my introverted self has to do is simply smile and wave and there, my job is done.
When, occasionally, the attention gets a little negative, I just have to breathe and think rationally and be brave and everything turns out fine.
I’m sitting here, at the desk in my room, kind of laughing right now, honestly. Because in the US, for much of my life, I spent so much time trying to be different. In such a big population, it’s difficult. I started wearing bohemian clothes and digging more into my pseudo-hippie roots as a young teen, and then what happens? The next year American Eagle decides that’s what we should all be wearing and boom, I was no longer original.
When I was 14, finding the wedding style of the day claustrophobic, I knew I wanted an exclusive wedding with a lacy, short white dress, wild flowers everywhere, in a barn or in a field, or both, with subs as the main course and pie for dessert. And then a few years later, that’s what everyone started doing. Like, America didn’t give me enough time to get married with my original idea.
Ya’ll know the state of the story: I got married without a wedding and now I wear mostly jeans and t-shirts.
(This doesn’t mean I don’t ooo and ahhh over everyone's wedding photos, and that I don’t glance through Free People occasionally.)
I guess one could say that my fight to be different backfired. Because now, I am certainly different, without even trying. Maybe that’s what it is: it’s one thing to be in control of your difference (you can change your clothes) it’s another to be intrinsically different (my birth certificate will always be from the USA).
It is one thing to be an American in America expressing my personal freedom (something that is culturally celebrated), and another thing to be an American in a different country, period.
In the first, I’m still not that unique, and in the second, I am a foreigner.
It’s an identity to embrace, not one to run from.
And no matter what I feel, like I said in the beginning, I have a genuine sense that I am called to be here, at least during this time of my life. One is called until they are not.
It is a coward who backtracks out from under their call.
Friday, January 04, 2019
True Love is the Greatest Thing in the World (except for maybe a nice MLT - mutton lettuce and tomato sandwich - where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe)
“Why do you like it here?” is a question I hear frequently from people I have just met. I don't readily fit into their mental schematics, so they are trying to figure me out. In the minds of many, I am doing life backwards. For the majority of Dominicans, the end goal is to move to the United States, or at least secure a 10 year tourist visa. But here I am, the US citizen who has moved to the Dominican Republic. Because of my age—it's not like I’ve retired here in an Italian-owned penthouse on the beach—it makes me a bit of a curiosity.
My response is always on the tip of my tongue, “I like it here because my husband lives here.” The answer gives people a high, even though now they are doubly astonished. Not only am I choosing to live here, I genuinely love my husband, I am actually married to my husband, and my husband is not using me to immediately gain a green card. In the Dominican Republic, all of those concepts are uncommon.
First, if two people are going to get together, it is generally not driven by love, but by infatuation and by prospect, i.e., what can this person give me? Within the relationship, the two maintain their independence. He has his life and she has her life. They try not to need each other. Accordingly, second, legal marriage is also uncommon. People might more or less live together for 20 years, and have children together, but not actually be married.
A few years ago, the Dominican Republic was only on my radar because my sister was working here in a private school. I remember her telling me that occasionally the church she went to held, essentially, mass marriages for all the couples who had been living together for years but had converted to Christianity and realized they should make some vows before God and men. At the time, it seemed like such a foreign concept. “Mass marriages.”
Granted, marriage is becoming less common in the United States, and we all know how most relationships on the mainland end. But, believe it or not, love and fidelity are even more scarce on this island. If one wants to get scientific about it, it is probably influenced by the scarcity of financial resources. Money is arguably the thing that puts the most stress on relationships, and even though the Dominican Republic is more Diestic and Christian than the US, it is poorer, which I believe has resulted in the breakdown of the marital unit. In other words, despite the presence of religion, the values of love and marriage cannot get footholds in this economic climate.
So here, the love my husband and I share is a countercultural oddity. The strangeness of the deal is sealed by the fact that we are choosing to live here. When an American marries a Dominican, the two almost always move directly to the United States since the majority of Dominicans who marry Americans do so to win residency. The stereotype runs deep. Case in point, two days after Victor and I married, he was released from his full-time job. The owner of the company, who had never even met my husband, assumed that Victor would be moving to the US within a year or two, and he did not want to invest in someone who would not be with the company long term. Victor’s coworkers and managers were shocked by the decision and one even tried to get him reinstated, but to no avail. The take-an-american-bride-and-run-off-to-the-States-with-her stereotype is engrained in people’s minds.
(Happy ending to the story: even though the layoff meant 2 months of financial discomfort in our brand spanking new marriage, the free time gave us the space we needed to cultivate our friendship as husband and wife, and the new job that came along has better hours, better pay, uses his giftings, and provided the relationship that lead to a full university scholarship for Victor and a job offer for me, if I can get my Spanish up to a professional level. So the owner’s biased, ruthless decision actually helped us).
Or, take just last week, for instance. One of my husband’s athletes told us that a few of her friends were talking to her about us. These other athletes don’t know us personally, but they are watching us, watching the “odd” life we lead. Her friends were asking her why Victor has not sent me to the States to work, or why I have not gone volitionally. Knowing us well, my husband’s athlete explained to her friends that being together is more important to us than having a lot of money. Because that’s another stereotype: the American wife who lives in the US, working and sending money, while the Dominican husband lives the high life on the island, forsaking sexual fidelity to his bride at the same time.
If it’s not yet apparent, there are many stereotypes and they are all negative. This is not to say that perhaps one day I would not find myself working in the States out of necessity, but our lifestyles
would still break the stereotype.
But what about love in the US? Even if Victor and I both move to the United States in the future, like his former employer thought we would, I think we would still find ourselves living in a countercultural love. That being said, at least in my circles, I wouldn’t say our marriage itself is comparatively that strange. I am blessed to know a remarkable number of couples where the husband and wife are radically in love with one another. It’s true that abuse and unhappiness are easily hidden, but it doesn’t always prevail, despite what cynics (and indeed my former self) might say.
What I do know is that when you are in love, it doesn’t ultimately matter where you live. For this, Victor and I are somewhat ambivalent about which country we call home. Separation has been, and will continue to be, inevitable in our relationship. We are both citizens of different countries, after all. What’s more, life doesn’t go as planned, and jams happen. However, I am 100% confident that even in separation our love will prevail, and that we will continue to be given the grace (because it is only by God’s grace that it happens) to have a stronger, more pure love than the majority, one that makes people say, “say what?”
PS. The title is a Miracle Max quote from Princess Bride, in case it was lost on you.
My response is always on the tip of my tongue, “I like it here because my husband lives here.” The answer gives people a high, even though now they are doubly astonished. Not only am I choosing to live here, I genuinely love my husband, I am actually married to my husband, and my husband is not using me to immediately gain a green card. In the Dominican Republic, all of those concepts are uncommon.
First, if two people are going to get together, it is generally not driven by love, but by infatuation and by prospect, i.e., what can this person give me? Within the relationship, the two maintain their independence. He has his life and she has her life. They try not to need each other. Accordingly, second, legal marriage is also uncommon. People might more or less live together for 20 years, and have children together, but not actually be married.
A few years ago, the Dominican Republic was only on my radar because my sister was working here in a private school. I remember her telling me that occasionally the church she went to held, essentially, mass marriages for all the couples who had been living together for years but had converted to Christianity and realized they should make some vows before God and men. At the time, it seemed like such a foreign concept. “Mass marriages.”
Granted, marriage is becoming less common in the United States, and we all know how most relationships on the mainland end. But, believe it or not, love and fidelity are even more scarce on this island. If one wants to get scientific about it, it is probably influenced by the scarcity of financial resources. Money is arguably the thing that puts the most stress on relationships, and even though the Dominican Republic is more Diestic and Christian than the US, it is poorer, which I believe has resulted in the breakdown of the marital unit. In other words, despite the presence of religion, the values of love and marriage cannot get footholds in this economic climate.
So here, the love my husband and I share is a countercultural oddity. The strangeness of the deal is sealed by the fact that we are choosing to live here. When an American marries a Dominican, the two almost always move directly to the United States since the majority of Dominicans who marry Americans do so to win residency. The stereotype runs deep. Case in point, two days after Victor and I married, he was released from his full-time job. The owner of the company, who had never even met my husband, assumed that Victor would be moving to the US within a year or two, and he did not want to invest in someone who would not be with the company long term. Victor’s coworkers and managers were shocked by the decision and one even tried to get him reinstated, but to no avail. The take-an-american-bride-and-run-off-to-the-States-with-her stereotype is engrained in people’s minds.
(Happy ending to the story: even though the layoff meant 2 months of financial discomfort in our brand spanking new marriage, the free time gave us the space we needed to cultivate our friendship as husband and wife, and the new job that came along has better hours, better pay, uses his giftings, and provided the relationship that lead to a full university scholarship for Victor and a job offer for me, if I can get my Spanish up to a professional level. So the owner’s biased, ruthless decision actually helped us).
Or, take just last week, for instance. One of my husband’s athletes told us that a few of her friends were talking to her about us. These other athletes don’t know us personally, but they are watching us, watching the “odd” life we lead. Her friends were asking her why Victor has not sent me to the States to work, or why I have not gone volitionally. Knowing us well, my husband’s athlete explained to her friends that being together is more important to us than having a lot of money. Because that’s another stereotype: the American wife who lives in the US, working and sending money, while the Dominican husband lives the high life on the island, forsaking sexual fidelity to his bride at the same time.
If it’s not yet apparent, there are many stereotypes and they are all negative. This is not to say that perhaps one day I would not find myself working in the States out of necessity, but our lifestyles
would still break the stereotype.
But what about love in the US? Even if Victor and I both move to the United States in the future, like his former employer thought we would, I think we would still find ourselves living in a countercultural love. That being said, at least in my circles, I wouldn’t say our marriage itself is comparatively that strange. I am blessed to know a remarkable number of couples where the husband and wife are radically in love with one another. It’s true that abuse and unhappiness are easily hidden, but it doesn’t always prevail, despite what cynics (and indeed my former self) might say.
What I do know is that when you are in love, it doesn’t ultimately matter where you live. For this, Victor and I are somewhat ambivalent about which country we call home. Separation has been, and will continue to be, inevitable in our relationship. We are both citizens of different countries, after all. What’s more, life doesn’t go as planned, and jams happen. However, I am 100% confident that even in separation our love will prevail, and that we will continue to be given the grace (because it is only by God’s grace that it happens) to have a stronger, more pure love than the majority, one that makes people say, “say what?”
PS. The title is a Miracle Max quote from Princess Bride, in case it was lost on you.
Wednesday, November 07, 2018
That Ritmo Tho
I have a sofa and chairs here in the living room, but sometimes, like now, I prefer to sit on the tile floor. It’s cool.
A little bird keeps flying in through the open shutters of my window, and straight out again through the open sliding glass balcony door. The air is soft from the rain last night; good for flying, I imagine.
It showers almost every day now. In the sports complex, the grass that grows in the ovular field circumvented by the 1000 meter track has gone from matted and brown to lively and green. In addition to a lot of rain, the days are now 12 hours long instead of 13. Night falls quickly, but it’s steady, mature, aged by a hot sun and salty breeze. It’s not finicky and girlish like in New York where night might come at half-past 4, or half-past 9, depending on the time of year, depending on her moods. She’s a pretty, wild, hippy child, though, so who can blame her enthusiasm?
Here, we are the children, and night is almost obligated to be wise, to try to control all the life that takes place in her regime. It’s a celebration that you’ve escaped the heat and toil of the day.
Just look at how we leave the complejo at night: boombox reverberating, spilling out colored lights that swirl with the stars. Music makes everything a celebration, even when you’ve got nothing else. Ask anyone, they’ll tell you it’s true. When we bought our Trailblazer, one of the first things we fixed was the sound system, even though there were supposedly more important mechanical items to repair. But see, any vehicle is gonna breakdown, and if you’ve gotta breakdown, do so in style, with joy, with music.
If at all possible, do it with someone you love.
It’s cooler weather now too, which makes hugs more enjoyable, less suffocating.
My mom always asks me what I mean by “cooler.”
It means that at night, it really does drop to 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the concrete walls of your house and the tile floors soak it up and hold it for you, and release it slowly throughout the new day, keeping your house relatively cool even though it’s still burning hot outside at 10 o’clock in the morning. Of course, no matter the season, our advantage is having a house that is “hembra”—a female. She was purposefully engineered to face East, and that makes her a girl, according to Dominicans.
When a house faces east, the main living space is being hit by the sun in the coolest part of the day. During the hottest quarter of the day, when the sun is shining directly into your house again, it is heating up the back. Thus, a “casa hembra” is designed to keep you cool in its East-West/front-back orientation, based on what rooms of your house you will be in at what times.
I am enjoying discovering the slight variations in the seasons—wether it’s the temperature, the length of day between sunrise and sunset, or the fruits that are ripe.
I think, after a year, I am starting to catch the rhythm (ritmo) of this country: her environment, her music, her heartbeat.
It’s so different from everything I’ve ever known, and when I am not literally in the arms of my husband I feel displaced.
That’s the trade off. There’s always a trade off. When you choose a life of adventure, of crazy love and faith, it comes with a lot of uncomfortable feelings.
Be warned.
But the discomfort, the displacement, in addition to the wonder-full moments, the vibrancy, is so much better than feeling nothing at all.
It is possible to catch a new rhythm.
A little bird keeps flying in through the open shutters of my window, and straight out again through the open sliding glass balcony door. The air is soft from the rain last night; good for flying, I imagine.
It showers almost every day now. In the sports complex, the grass that grows in the ovular field circumvented by the 1000 meter track has gone from matted and brown to lively and green. In addition to a lot of rain, the days are now 12 hours long instead of 13. Night falls quickly, but it’s steady, mature, aged by a hot sun and salty breeze. It’s not finicky and girlish like in New York where night might come at half-past 4, or half-past 9, depending on the time of year, depending on her moods. She’s a pretty, wild, hippy child, though, so who can blame her enthusiasm?
Here, we are the children, and night is almost obligated to be wise, to try to control all the life that takes place in her regime. It’s a celebration that you’ve escaped the heat and toil of the day.
Just look at how we leave the complejo at night: boombox reverberating, spilling out colored lights that swirl with the stars. Music makes everything a celebration, even when you’ve got nothing else. Ask anyone, they’ll tell you it’s true. When we bought our Trailblazer, one of the first things we fixed was the sound system, even though there were supposedly more important mechanical items to repair. But see, any vehicle is gonna breakdown, and if you’ve gotta breakdown, do so in style, with joy, with music.
If at all possible, do it with someone you love.
It’s cooler weather now too, which makes hugs more enjoyable, less suffocating.
My mom always asks me what I mean by “cooler.”
It means that at night, it really does drop to 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the concrete walls of your house and the tile floors soak it up and hold it for you, and release it slowly throughout the new day, keeping your house relatively cool even though it’s still burning hot outside at 10 o’clock in the morning. Of course, no matter the season, our advantage is having a house that is “hembra”—a female. She was purposefully engineered to face East, and that makes her a girl, according to Dominicans.
When a house faces east, the main living space is being hit by the sun in the coolest part of the day. During the hottest quarter of the day, when the sun is shining directly into your house again, it is heating up the back. Thus, a “casa hembra” is designed to keep you cool in its East-West/front-back orientation, based on what rooms of your house you will be in at what times.
I am enjoying discovering the slight variations in the seasons—wether it’s the temperature, the length of day between sunrise and sunset, or the fruits that are ripe.
I think, after a year, I am starting to catch the rhythm (ritmo) of this country: her environment, her music, her heartbeat.
It’s so different from everything I’ve ever known, and when I am not literally in the arms of my husband I feel displaced.
That’s the trade off. There’s always a trade off. When you choose a life of adventure, of crazy love and faith, it comes with a lot of uncomfortable feelings.
Be warned.
But the discomfort, the displacement, in addition to the wonder-full moments, the vibrancy, is so much better than feeling nothing at all.
It is possible to catch a new rhythm.
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
A Year of Life in Yellow
October 17, 2017 to October 17, 2018.
I’ve honestly been dreading the anniversary of my arrival in the Dominican Republic. Anniversaries are a time for reflection, and in many ways I am not where I wanted to be in regards to a few significant achievements, making reflection depressing and frustrating. It doesn’t matter that simultaneously I am unexpectedly ahead of schedule in other categories—I have a human brain and it is going to focus on my insufficiencies. To try to combat the disappointment, I decided to take a few hours and not dwell on either successes or perceived failures of this year, and simply remember some of the highlights, some of the moments that left me feeling like the color yellow.
1. Our trip to visit Victor’s dad in Santiago. This took place only a couple weeks after I arrived on the island, so I spoke almost no Spanish. Accordingly, I did not understand that we would be staying with his dad for not 1 but 3 days. Needless to say, I had to wash my underwear and t-shirt in the sink every night. Even though it was cool seeing the monument of Santiago and eating good food with extended family in La Vega, the highlight was riding in my father-in-law’s little pickup truck. First of all, it barely functions. Second, he barely knows how to drive. On the way to and from the city in heavy traffic one afternoon we literally bumped into or side-swiped 10 other vehicles at low speeds. Another night he forgot to check the gas gauge and he and the husband had to push the truck up an incline while I steered us to the nearest gas station. Besides all that, his dad is just the cutest person.
2. Sunday morning visit to the beach with both my families - the Wilber’s and Gonzalez’s. My sisters and the boys played in the sand and chased crabs along the rock pier like long lost cousins, and took turns jumping off my husband’s shoulders into the waves (ok, I did it a couple times too). Equally special was having my parents there to see with their own eyes how much their daughter’s husband, who they’ve just met for the first time, loves her. To this day I’m devastated that we can’t be more involved in each other’s lives, but I have hope for the future. Door to door, including layovers and drive time, when you have good flights it’s just 9 hours from my parents house to my house.
3. The military games. Those 4 days were fun, even though I felt out of place: too American, to white and blonde, too non-athletic, too non-Spanish speaking. My husband’s athlete won her event, qualifying her for the Central American games. The national anthem was played frequently to commemorate each event, of course, but the second to last night, after a moving speech by one of the champions, the crowd sang it with gusto. Maybe it was something in the breeze, but I suddenly teared up and felt like a part of this strong, vibrant country, instead of a foreigner.
4. The boys accidentally calling me “mami.” Doesn't happen often, but when it does...
5. Going to the church of my friend Neftalí - mi guarda espalda - one Sunday evening. Let’s talk about that music, baby. It was the sax that made the magic, with plenty of percussion backing it up. Doubly fun because I married a dancer, and he was next to me. I felt the same euphoria I get after running 3 miles uphill and finally cresting and seeing the mist rising up from the valley - except I didn’t have to sweat for it that Sunday night.
6. A week before my visit to the US. We made the drive over to Santo Domingo, the capital, so I could say goodbye to my in-laws. Victor and I bought chicken and mashed potatoes from the prepared foods section of the grocery store across the street from his mom’s house, and we all ate on the back patio with the rooster skulking around. Nothing eventful happened. But for some reason I finally felt like part of the family.
7. When my husband’s aunt died. Very sad event, and a low point of the year—but it resulted in our house filling up with relatives from Miches. For one night, we were all together under one roof, and it was incredibly comforting to have such wonderful family in such a hard time. We laughed, we smiled, we cheered each other up. It was a high point to discover such comfort in a low point.
8. The night before my conference in the university. We wrapped up practice in the complejo early, then drove the boys home and gave them dinner before hurrying out the door again just the two of us to make our 8 o’clock date with my translator, who I would be meeting in person for the first time. In Dominican fashion, we were late and my translator didn’t show. While we tried to get ahold of him by phone we bought sandwiches and batidas from a little cafe. A classic Dominican sandwich is a couple thin slices of sweet ham and mild cheddar cheese dressed with ketchup and mayo in a soft submarine roll that is hot-pressed panini style. It’s good (it's street food, it's like less than $1 US dollar), but it’s a hundred time better with a batida, or smoothie. Fruit, ice, sugar, and evaporated milk. What more could you want in this climate? When it’s available, we usually order batidas de zapote, which is a fruit related to the papaya. Sandwiches and smoothies in hand, we drove around San Pedro until we finally tracked down my translator a little before 10 o’clock. I don’t know why that loop around town is on this list of highlights, except it was an unexpected moment of just us, a sudden respite from presentation-prep and the glaring pile of laundry, and I do like Batidas.
9. Getting sick rather a lot. I have the immune system of an Appalachian. I now live on an island south of the Tropic of Cancer. Let’s just say there’s lots of bacteria to get acquainted with. Even though being unwell is awful, having my husband step into the mess and take care of me in ways he is not obligated to has brought me closer to him than days of “normal” ever could; especially in the first few months of our relationship when, even though I was deeply in love with him, he was still in many ways a stranger. I got to know him through my sickness.
10. Breaking out of the hospital. For reals. One of those times I was sick I landed in the hospital for 3 days. Technically, I should have only needed to be there 12 hours to get rehydrated and receive my test results so that I could start the most appropriate course of antibiotics. However, as confirmed by my trusted sources, it is notoriously difficult to get released from Dominican hospitals. Doctors like to keep you until you are practically 100%. Day 2 in the PM my doctor said I could probably go home the next day. But the next day, she never came to re-examen me, even though her nurses said she was coming. By 8 o’clock that night I was quite better, but anxious. One, I didn’t want to spend another night in the hospital. Two, I was still connected to my IV, receiving a solute of glucose and electrolytes—and dangerously at risk of developing problems associated with fluid overload. Victor, exasperated as well, looked at me and asked me how I felt. I said fine. He then asked, “do you want to break out?” I laughed, but when he didn’t crack a smile I realized he was serious. “Ok. Let's do it,” I said after a moments hesitation. We packed up as quickly as we could. By this time he knew the rounds of the security guards and we only had a few minutes—and not enough time to withdraw my IV and bandage me. So we just pulled the bag of fluid off the pole and stuffed it and the meter of tubing up my sweatshirt. I had to go downstairs first; he would follow at a safe distance so we wouldn’t be recognized as a couple (front desk security knew he was there with his wife, but they didn’t know what I looked like. Thus, I had to appear as a visitor leaving late; him as if he was off to run some errand). We checked the hall outside my room: coast clear. I walked downstairs quickly, heart flitting from the thrill. The personnel surrounding the front desk didn’t look up from their conversation, and the policeman I passed at the exit was preoccupied with some other mission. Outside, I turned left, searching frantically for our vehicle. It was on the other side of the street. I crossed, ducking around the SUV to be hidden on the other side. I tapped Victor’s name on my favorites list to ring his phone, letting him know I was ready. He arrived a minute later. I started the car while he slid into his seat. Checking the mirrors, he pulled out of park and we sped away, not breathing easy until we were a mile away and still unfollowed by sirens. (The next day Victor went back to settle our account, of course. We are not Bonny and Clyde). Once home sweet home, we finally got me disconnected from the IV and both slept soundly from our shenanigans.
11. One particularly fantastic trip to Miches
But after all, this year never was about the accomplishments anyway. Trying to enumerate the highlights is almost an exercise in futility too. The end of the matter is this: I am loved and I have someone to love. Love is not quantifiable. It goes beyond time, shatters the very concept of an anniversary. It is a miracle (milagro) that I live in every day. It heals the distortions of my misfiring synapses, and magnifies truth.
No matter what does or does not get done, love is my reality.
Love tops all.
I’ve honestly been dreading the anniversary of my arrival in the Dominican Republic. Anniversaries are a time for reflection, and in many ways I am not where I wanted to be in regards to a few significant achievements, making reflection depressing and frustrating. It doesn’t matter that simultaneously I am unexpectedly ahead of schedule in other categories—I have a human brain and it is going to focus on my insufficiencies. To try to combat the disappointment, I decided to take a few hours and not dwell on either successes or perceived failures of this year, and simply remember some of the highlights, some of the moments that left me feeling like the color yellow.
*****
1. Our trip to visit Victor’s dad in Santiago. This took place only a couple weeks after I arrived on the island, so I spoke almost no Spanish. Accordingly, I did not understand that we would be staying with his dad for not 1 but 3 days. Needless to say, I had to wash my underwear and t-shirt in the sink every night. Even though it was cool seeing the monument of Santiago and eating good food with extended family in La Vega, the highlight was riding in my father-in-law’s little pickup truck. First of all, it barely functions. Second, he barely knows how to drive. On the way to and from the city in heavy traffic one afternoon we literally bumped into or side-swiped 10 other vehicles at low speeds. Another night he forgot to check the gas gauge and he and the husband had to push the truck up an incline while I steered us to the nearest gas station. Besides all that, his dad is just the cutest person.
2. Sunday morning visit to the beach with both my families - the Wilber’s and Gonzalez’s. My sisters and the boys played in the sand and chased crabs along the rock pier like long lost cousins, and took turns jumping off my husband’s shoulders into the waves (ok, I did it a couple times too). Equally special was having my parents there to see with their own eyes how much their daughter’s husband, who they’ve just met for the first time, loves her. To this day I’m devastated that we can’t be more involved in each other’s lives, but I have hope for the future. Door to door, including layovers and drive time, when you have good flights it’s just 9 hours from my parents house to my house.
3. The military games. Those 4 days were fun, even though I felt out of place: too American, to white and blonde, too non-athletic, too non-Spanish speaking. My husband’s athlete won her event, qualifying her for the Central American games. The national anthem was played frequently to commemorate each event, of course, but the second to last night, after a moving speech by one of the champions, the crowd sang it with gusto. Maybe it was something in the breeze, but I suddenly teared up and felt like a part of this strong, vibrant country, instead of a foreigner.
4. The boys accidentally calling me “mami.” Doesn't happen often, but when it does...
5. Going to the church of my friend Neftalí - mi guarda espalda - one Sunday evening. Let’s talk about that music, baby. It was the sax that made the magic, with plenty of percussion backing it up. Doubly fun because I married a dancer, and he was next to me. I felt the same euphoria I get after running 3 miles uphill and finally cresting and seeing the mist rising up from the valley - except I didn’t have to sweat for it that Sunday night.
6. A week before my visit to the US. We made the drive over to Santo Domingo, the capital, so I could say goodbye to my in-laws. Victor and I bought chicken and mashed potatoes from the prepared foods section of the grocery store across the street from his mom’s house, and we all ate on the back patio with the rooster skulking around. Nothing eventful happened. But for some reason I finally felt like part of the family.
7. When my husband’s aunt died. Very sad event, and a low point of the year—but it resulted in our house filling up with relatives from Miches. For one night, we were all together under one roof, and it was incredibly comforting to have such wonderful family in such a hard time. We laughed, we smiled, we cheered each other up. It was a high point to discover such comfort in a low point.
8. The night before my conference in the university. We wrapped up practice in the complejo early, then drove the boys home and gave them dinner before hurrying out the door again just the two of us to make our 8 o’clock date with my translator, who I would be meeting in person for the first time. In Dominican fashion, we were late and my translator didn’t show. While we tried to get ahold of him by phone we bought sandwiches and batidas from a little cafe. A classic Dominican sandwich is a couple thin slices of sweet ham and mild cheddar cheese dressed with ketchup and mayo in a soft submarine roll that is hot-pressed panini style. It’s good (it's street food, it's like less than $1 US dollar), but it’s a hundred time better with a batida, or smoothie. Fruit, ice, sugar, and evaporated milk. What more could you want in this climate? When it’s available, we usually order batidas de zapote, which is a fruit related to the papaya. Sandwiches and smoothies in hand, we drove around San Pedro until we finally tracked down my translator a little before 10 o’clock. I don’t know why that loop around town is on this list of highlights, except it was an unexpected moment of just us, a sudden respite from presentation-prep and the glaring pile of laundry, and I do like Batidas.
9. Getting sick rather a lot. I have the immune system of an Appalachian. I now live on an island south of the Tropic of Cancer. Let’s just say there’s lots of bacteria to get acquainted with. Even though being unwell is awful, having my husband step into the mess and take care of me in ways he is not obligated to has brought me closer to him than days of “normal” ever could; especially in the first few months of our relationship when, even though I was deeply in love with him, he was still in many ways a stranger. I got to know him through my sickness.
10. Breaking out of the hospital. For reals. One of those times I was sick I landed in the hospital for 3 days. Technically, I should have only needed to be there 12 hours to get rehydrated and receive my test results so that I could start the most appropriate course of antibiotics. However, as confirmed by my trusted sources, it is notoriously difficult to get released from Dominican hospitals. Doctors like to keep you until you are practically 100%. Day 2 in the PM my doctor said I could probably go home the next day. But the next day, she never came to re-examen me, even though her nurses said she was coming. By 8 o’clock that night I was quite better, but anxious. One, I didn’t want to spend another night in the hospital. Two, I was still connected to my IV, receiving a solute of glucose and electrolytes—and dangerously at risk of developing problems associated with fluid overload. Victor, exasperated as well, looked at me and asked me how I felt. I said fine. He then asked, “do you want to break out?” I laughed, but when he didn’t crack a smile I realized he was serious. “Ok. Let's do it,” I said after a moments hesitation. We packed up as quickly as we could. By this time he knew the rounds of the security guards and we only had a few minutes—and not enough time to withdraw my IV and bandage me. So we just pulled the bag of fluid off the pole and stuffed it and the meter of tubing up my sweatshirt. I had to go downstairs first; he would follow at a safe distance so we wouldn’t be recognized as a couple (front desk security knew he was there with his wife, but they didn’t know what I looked like. Thus, I had to appear as a visitor leaving late; him as if he was off to run some errand). We checked the hall outside my room: coast clear. I walked downstairs quickly, heart flitting from the thrill. The personnel surrounding the front desk didn’t look up from their conversation, and the policeman I passed at the exit was preoccupied with some other mission. Outside, I turned left, searching frantically for our vehicle. It was on the other side of the street. I crossed, ducking around the SUV to be hidden on the other side. I tapped Victor’s name on my favorites list to ring his phone, letting him know I was ready. He arrived a minute later. I started the car while he slid into his seat. Checking the mirrors, he pulled out of park and we sped away, not breathing easy until we were a mile away and still unfollowed by sirens. (The next day Victor went back to settle our account, of course. We are not Bonny and Clyde). Once home sweet home, we finally got me disconnected from the IV and both slept soundly from our shenanigans.
11. One particularly fantastic trip to Miches
*****
But after all, this year never was about the accomplishments anyway. Trying to enumerate the highlights is almost an exercise in futility too. The end of the matter is this: I am loved and I have someone to love. Love is not quantifiable. It goes beyond time, shatters the very concept of an anniversary. It is a miracle (milagro) that I live in every day. It heals the distortions of my misfiring synapses, and magnifies truth.
No matter what does or does not get done, love is my reality.
Love tops all.
 |
| Us and his dad and the little pickup truck and sunshine |
Thursday, October 04, 2018
The New Hipster
The beach is common ground for the people. Sunday baptisms takes place on sand strewn with Saturday Corona empties. Talk about casting crowns. You can call it a mockery if you want, but also maybe it is unwitting practice for the days of redemption that are coming, the way Saturday rolls into Sunday.
I like to watch the baptisms, but I have sensitive blue eyes and it’s blinding. Everyone is dressed in white, and the sun refracts off not only the sand and sea, but the clothing as well. So I imagine instead. I imagine the push-pull of the tide as you enter the water with the pastor, what it's like to be submerged and then lifted quickly up again, how everything goes dark for a few seconds and all you can hear is the rush of water and muffled voices, and then you are in the world of sunlight and singing again, eyes stinging doubly now from the salt, a little breathless from the anticipation.
That resurrection feeling.
I was seven when I was baptised, in neither saltwater nor what one would dare to call fresh water.
In other words, a pond.
If I remember correctly, the day was a little cold and a little gray, and we ate pork barbeque sandwiches and macaroni and cheese afterward. God bless Fran Martin.
Because I was a member of the Mennonite church at the time, and have a certificate of baptism to seal the deal, I still kind of think of myself as a Mennonite, even though I spent the majority of my years in non-denominational settings. Even though, now, I attend a Pentecostal church.
Like most of my generation, I have been extremely disappointed by the evangelical church in general. There was a period of time when I was going to stop attending, or maybe convert to catholicism. But I’m glad I didn’t leave in the midst (mist) of my disappointment. Relationships were and are the trump card.
Honestly, I am still disappointed. In all of my searching in different church settings, I have found that, despite variation in style, doctrine, and culture, there does not appear to be a statistically significant difference among churches in the types of people that are produced. Observationally speaking, the methods, the denominations, the spiritual experiences or lack of them, are not changing outside-of-church behavior patterns and psychologies at different rates.
At the end of the day, no matter affiliation, Christians are still temperamental, still anxious, still depressed, still disrespectful, still abusers, still alcoholics, still sluts, etc.
I spent a few years of my life looking for a “type” of church/denomination that would in fact create not just “better” people, but people whose lives are full of more levity, more joy. I was looking for a unicorn. As I concluded above, type does not seem to matter, “better type” does not seem to exist. Hence, my disappointment.
That being said, I did find people hidden in churches. People who are still struggling, but whose lives are lighter, quietly inspirational. The church doesn't make them, they make the church.
The Spirit of God sets himself on people, not denominations. He works through our personalities, experiences, and cultures to change us. Some people respond; some don’t. Some people respond for 1 year, or 20 years, and then stop responding. Some people persevere.
And outcomes depend less on methods, less on how much C.S. Lewis you’ve read, and more on the heart’s inclinations. But then of course the question is where do those inclinations come from, “God or the individual?” and thus the absolute utter importance of doctrine in the midst of its frustrations and divisions—but I have a kitchen to clean so we have to move on.
In moving on, the take home for me is to continue pursuing peace and adaptability in the context of my church experience, so that no matter where I am attending I can be ready to enjoy the presence of the God who is always with me, ready to encourage all those who are around me, and ready to humbly receive, without being hypercritical of the church, the service, the people.
As I write this in my bedroom, I keep getting the feeling that the best place for these thoughts is not my blog, but a coffee shop. This is a discussion to have with a friend over a cappuccino—all the better if said espresso was prepared by Morgan and features her froth art.
Living in Republica Dominicana, where their coffee culture is different from ours in the States, I have realized how much the coffee house is somehow a part of my theology, a method I use to process information.
It’s ridiculous how much hipster espresso joints are intertwined with my Christianity.
We do have exceptional coffee here. In my neighborhood, it is sold two corners from my house, 6 AM to 10 AM, Monday through Saturday, in 3 ounce plastic cups for 10 pesos (about 20 US cents). It's the new hipster, I'm telling you. The guy who sells it beneath a big red and white umbrella is probably 17 or 18. His mom brews the strong, sugary coffee in their home at the end of the street, along with a sweet and spicy ginger tea and hot chocolate made with Rica milk. There are a couple of plastic chairs in the shade of a low tree, and it’s a pleasant place to sit with my husband at 6 AM, even if it's only conducive to small talk and you have to watch out for fire ants. We are only stealing a few moments before we have to hurry home and wake the army of boys, anyway.
The ironic thing is, the life I am living now is the culmination of many conversations that took place in American coffee bars. I was, ultimately, discontent sitting in their shop windows, analyzing but feeling empty somehow. So even though I dreadfully miss the atmosphere, perhaps I should be grateful that I don’t have a coffee shop in which to spill my thoughts, and that instead I have to upload them to the internet from far away in a different country, where I have a big family and the occasional professional project keeping me extremely busy.
I like to watch the baptisms, but I have sensitive blue eyes and it’s blinding. Everyone is dressed in white, and the sun refracts off not only the sand and sea, but the clothing as well. So I imagine instead. I imagine the push-pull of the tide as you enter the water with the pastor, what it's like to be submerged and then lifted quickly up again, how everything goes dark for a few seconds and all you can hear is the rush of water and muffled voices, and then you are in the world of sunlight and singing again, eyes stinging doubly now from the salt, a little breathless from the anticipation.
That resurrection feeling.
*******
I was seven when I was baptised, in neither saltwater nor what one would dare to call fresh water.
In other words, a pond.
If I remember correctly, the day was a little cold and a little gray, and we ate pork barbeque sandwiches and macaroni and cheese afterward. God bless Fran Martin.
Because I was a member of the Mennonite church at the time, and have a certificate of baptism to seal the deal, I still kind of think of myself as a Mennonite, even though I spent the majority of my years in non-denominational settings. Even though, now, I attend a Pentecostal church.
Like most of my generation, I have been extremely disappointed by the evangelical church in general. There was a period of time when I was going to stop attending, or maybe convert to catholicism. But I’m glad I didn’t leave in the midst (mist) of my disappointment. Relationships were and are the trump card.
Honestly, I am still disappointed. In all of my searching in different church settings, I have found that, despite variation in style, doctrine, and culture, there does not appear to be a statistically significant difference among churches in the types of people that are produced. Observationally speaking, the methods, the denominations, the spiritual experiences or lack of them, are not changing outside-of-church behavior patterns and psychologies at different rates.
At the end of the day, no matter affiliation, Christians are still temperamental, still anxious, still depressed, still disrespectful, still abusers, still alcoholics, still sluts, etc.
I spent a few years of my life looking for a “type” of church/denomination that would in fact create not just “better” people, but people whose lives are full of more levity, more joy. I was looking for a unicorn. As I concluded above, type does not seem to matter, “better type” does not seem to exist. Hence, my disappointment.
That being said, I did find people hidden in churches. People who are still struggling, but whose lives are lighter, quietly inspirational. The church doesn't make them, they make the church.
The Spirit of God sets himself on people, not denominations. He works through our personalities, experiences, and cultures to change us. Some people respond; some don’t. Some people respond for 1 year, or 20 years, and then stop responding. Some people persevere.
And outcomes depend less on methods, less on how much C.S. Lewis you’ve read, and more on the heart’s inclinations. But then of course the question is where do those inclinations come from, “God or the individual?” and thus the absolute utter importance of doctrine in the midst of its frustrations and divisions—but I have a kitchen to clean so we have to move on.
In moving on, the take home for me is to continue pursuing peace and adaptability in the context of my church experience, so that no matter where I am attending I can be ready to enjoy the presence of the God who is always with me, ready to encourage all those who are around me, and ready to humbly receive, without being hypercritical of the church, the service, the people.
*******
As I write this in my bedroom, I keep getting the feeling that the best place for these thoughts is not my blog, but a coffee shop. This is a discussion to have with a friend over a cappuccino—all the better if said espresso was prepared by Morgan and features her froth art.
Living in Republica Dominicana, where their coffee culture is different from ours in the States, I have realized how much the coffee house is somehow a part of my theology, a method I use to process information.
It’s ridiculous how much hipster espresso joints are intertwined with my Christianity.
We do have exceptional coffee here. In my neighborhood, it is sold two corners from my house, 6 AM to 10 AM, Monday through Saturday, in 3 ounce plastic cups for 10 pesos (about 20 US cents). It's the new hipster, I'm telling you. The guy who sells it beneath a big red and white umbrella is probably 17 or 18. His mom brews the strong, sugary coffee in their home at the end of the street, along with a sweet and spicy ginger tea and hot chocolate made with Rica milk. There are a couple of plastic chairs in the shade of a low tree, and it’s a pleasant place to sit with my husband at 6 AM, even if it's only conducive to small talk and you have to watch out for fire ants. We are only stealing a few moments before we have to hurry home and wake the army of boys, anyway.
The ironic thing is, the life I am living now is the culmination of many conversations that took place in American coffee bars. I was, ultimately, discontent sitting in their shop windows, analyzing but feeling empty somehow. So even though I dreadfully miss the atmosphere, perhaps I should be grateful that I don’t have a coffee shop in which to spill my thoughts, and that instead I have to upload them to the internet from far away in a different country, where I have a big family and the occasional professional project keeping me extremely busy.
Thursday, August 09, 2018
Revel
They say the sun is always rising somewhere, but what they don’t say is it’s always rising on someone who has lost a family member during the night. It happened here, in our part of town, a few mornings ago. We received the text at 2AM, and by 3AM we were in the house of my husband’s former neighbors, a house of tears. It was the cries of the 12-year-old that brought me to tears as well.
“Mommy, come and get me.”
“Mommy, don’t leave me.”
“Mommy I’m still here, I need you.”
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”
The pain of the whole world was summed up in her wails. This is the third death I’ve been close to while living in S.P.M., and every time I’m a little caught off guard by how people mourn—like, truly express their grief, truly express their longings for the world to return to how it was, to how it should be, with the lost loved one in their house or in their arms.
In my experience in the USA, which is, granted, slightly limited, we don’t mourn much publicly. That is to say, we certainly do not wail at a funeral or memorial service. We do not let our hearts break open publicly. We shed tears, our shoulders shake, but we suppress the sobs. What is more, we often call memorial services “celebrations of life” in order to set the tone.
It’s a beautiful tone.
But I wonder if we expressed our longings through a more vibrant form of grief if our hearts wouldn’t reach a better equilibrium. If we plumbed the depths of darkness with our community, maybe, once our job was done, we would float better afterwards. I wonder, of the various gravesides at which I have stood, if I had echoed the laments of the Old Testament, expressed with my voice how much I longed to have him or her back again, what would have happened.
Perhaps nothing. But it’s a question worth asking when you see that in another culture the women grieve differently than you.
(So I’m not talking about “better,” just different.)
We give emotion to our longings in different proportions.
In response to what I see, I’ve been reminded to revel in my longings more, to draw them out, to feel them deeply, to, again, revel in them in the way my mom occasionally revels in a glass of Lemberger. The dark color, the tannins, and the Germanic bouquet that homeopathically hints of wild berries all bite back.
If there is wisdom in the house of mourning, perhaps there is wisdom in the longings that live there, even in longings in general. Instead of distracting ourselves from the longings, perchance we could discover something in them.
And come back stronger.
In consideration of my experience—should one care to know—much of the time through the years I longed for a life I’d never lost in reality, but felt like I had. When you are unmarried for so long (I apologize for calling marrying at 24 “so long” to those whose justified perspective is that that is short) eventually it’s easy to feel as if he did exist at one point, in your teenage dreams and post-19 hopes. But dreams fade and hope hits the hard wall of reality and suddenly you take a headcount and realize your lover is lost, dead. And you grieve a person who never was.
And you long for life.
Sometimes the longing was vague, and tired, like that deep despondency I felt driving I-95 North in the hours between midnight and 6 AM, awake in a sleeping world. Yet I was determined to carry on—probably more because I was 20 ounces deep into 32 ounces of Starbucks coffee, less because I was tapping into some inner source of tenacity.
Other times, it was a gentle ache, just a desire to share a beautiful moment: the view of the ocean from a high point in Sardinia, or the stars as I lay on my back in a soccer field, or pine needles on the trees in our woods that were hand-planted in lines 90 years ago.
Or still other times, in my bedroom, or walking home late from another shift of waiting tables, the longing was agony. I think at such instances the longings were several, compounded. Too many longings unfulfilled. It felt like my soul needed to be ripped out and replaced with one that had more faith.
In Scripture, pretty much every person who is heralded for their faith came from a dark, faithless place—or even, in the midst of great faith, suddenly failed miserably. It’s a little confusing that such normal people would be so celebrated, their mistakes overlooked. Okay, it’s super confusing. Like, Noah of the rainbow of faith was a drunkard in his old age, Abraham was a liar, Sarah laughed at the promises God made to her, and Elijah ran scared at the threats of one queen, even though like 5 minutes before he had called down fire from heaven, rallied against a group of infidels, and then prayed for and received rain to end a drought affecting an entire country.
The list of so-called heroes and their failures goes on and on, and so could I, mimicking all the other people who matter-of-factly expound on the Bible’s contradictions. But I’ll just touch on one more: that of the apostle Peter.
He denied knowing Jesus—his friend, and the man he believed was the Son of God—three times. There’s not much worse you can do than deny the truth.
Peter and Jesus were near enough in proximity during the denials that Jesus was able to make eye contact with Peter after the third “no, I don’t know him.” After that brief moment of connection, Peter ran out of the high priest’s house and, we are told, “wept bitterly.”
I think Peter was grieving the absence of what he longed for: faith. Faith to claim a relationship with the God-man who was his (almost) everything. Faith to let Jesus be his everything. Faith to believe that Jesus was still going to save the world, even though the power of darkness gripped the night, and, it appeared, the future too.
In his failure he grieved and longed, and out of his failure he, eventually, grew. He became more of a faith leader, more of a rock, than he ever was. (The Catholic Church even designates him as their first pope. Go figure. Talk about heroism.)
When we are told that without faith it’s impossible to please God, and that faith entails living a crazy life, drastically different from the norm, we still need to not lose sight of the forest for the trees, and live in the tension of the grace we are always being given, and the striving to which we are always being called.
If we don’t strive, we will be stuck in grief forever. But if we don’t luxuriate in grace as we learn from our griefs and longings—as we let them tell us what we really want—we won’t move forward rhythmically in faith.
Maybe our journeys from the valleys to the peaks are never as drastic as those of Elijah or Peter, but faith tends to come from dark places, from our longings that we search out as we grieve the absences in our lives.
And then, when the time is right, we rise again.
Or rise for the first time.
So if you are longing for life, or for faith, take hope, because they come to those who have none.
“Mommy, come and get me.”
“Mommy, don’t leave me.”
“Mommy I’m still here, I need you.”
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”
The pain of the whole world was summed up in her wails. This is the third death I’ve been close to while living in S.P.M., and every time I’m a little caught off guard by how people mourn—like, truly express their grief, truly express their longings for the world to return to how it was, to how it should be, with the lost loved one in their house or in their arms.
In my experience in the USA, which is, granted, slightly limited, we don’t mourn much publicly. That is to say, we certainly do not wail at a funeral or memorial service. We do not let our hearts break open publicly. We shed tears, our shoulders shake, but we suppress the sobs. What is more, we often call memorial services “celebrations of life” in order to set the tone.
It’s a beautiful tone.
But I wonder if we expressed our longings through a more vibrant form of grief if our hearts wouldn’t reach a better equilibrium. If we plumbed the depths of darkness with our community, maybe, once our job was done, we would float better afterwards. I wonder, of the various gravesides at which I have stood, if I had echoed the laments of the Old Testament, expressed with my voice how much I longed to have him or her back again, what would have happened.
Perhaps nothing. But it’s a question worth asking when you see that in another culture the women grieve differently than you.
(So I’m not talking about “better,” just different.)
We give emotion to our longings in different proportions.
In response to what I see, I’ve been reminded to revel in my longings more, to draw them out, to feel them deeply, to, again, revel in them in the way my mom occasionally revels in a glass of Lemberger. The dark color, the tannins, and the Germanic bouquet that homeopathically hints of wild berries all bite back.
If there is wisdom in the house of mourning, perhaps there is wisdom in the longings that live there, even in longings in general. Instead of distracting ourselves from the longings, perchance we could discover something in them.
And come back stronger.
In consideration of my experience—should one care to know—much of the time through the years I longed for a life I’d never lost in reality, but felt like I had. When you are unmarried for so long (I apologize for calling marrying at 24 “so long” to those whose justified perspective is that that is short) eventually it’s easy to feel as if he did exist at one point, in your teenage dreams and post-19 hopes. But dreams fade and hope hits the hard wall of reality and suddenly you take a headcount and realize your lover is lost, dead. And you grieve a person who never was.
And you long for life.
Sometimes the longing was vague, and tired, like that deep despondency I felt driving I-95 North in the hours between midnight and 6 AM, awake in a sleeping world. Yet I was determined to carry on—probably more because I was 20 ounces deep into 32 ounces of Starbucks coffee, less because I was tapping into some inner source of tenacity.
Other times, it was a gentle ache, just a desire to share a beautiful moment: the view of the ocean from a high point in Sardinia, or the stars as I lay on my back in a soccer field, or pine needles on the trees in our woods that were hand-planted in lines 90 years ago.
Or still other times, in my bedroom, or walking home late from another shift of waiting tables, the longing was agony. I think at such instances the longings were several, compounded. Too many longings unfulfilled. It felt like my soul needed to be ripped out and replaced with one that had more faith.
In Scripture, pretty much every person who is heralded for their faith came from a dark, faithless place—or even, in the midst of great faith, suddenly failed miserably. It’s a little confusing that such normal people would be so celebrated, their mistakes overlooked. Okay, it’s super confusing. Like, Noah of the rainbow of faith was a drunkard in his old age, Abraham was a liar, Sarah laughed at the promises God made to her, and Elijah ran scared at the threats of one queen, even though like 5 minutes before he had called down fire from heaven, rallied against a group of infidels, and then prayed for and received rain to end a drought affecting an entire country.
The list of so-called heroes and their failures goes on and on, and so could I, mimicking all the other people who matter-of-factly expound on the Bible’s contradictions. But I’ll just touch on one more: that of the apostle Peter.
He denied knowing Jesus—his friend, and the man he believed was the Son of God—three times. There’s not much worse you can do than deny the truth.
Peter and Jesus were near enough in proximity during the denials that Jesus was able to make eye contact with Peter after the third “no, I don’t know him.” After that brief moment of connection, Peter ran out of the high priest’s house and, we are told, “wept bitterly.”
I think Peter was grieving the absence of what he longed for: faith. Faith to claim a relationship with the God-man who was his (almost) everything. Faith to let Jesus be his everything. Faith to believe that Jesus was still going to save the world, even though the power of darkness gripped the night, and, it appeared, the future too.
In his failure he grieved and longed, and out of his failure he, eventually, grew. He became more of a faith leader, more of a rock, than he ever was. (The Catholic Church even designates him as their first pope. Go figure. Talk about heroism.)
When we are told that without faith it’s impossible to please God, and that faith entails living a crazy life, drastically different from the norm, we still need to not lose sight of the forest for the trees, and live in the tension of the grace we are always being given, and the striving to which we are always being called.
If we don’t strive, we will be stuck in grief forever. But if we don’t luxuriate in grace as we learn from our griefs and longings—as we let them tell us what we really want—we won’t move forward rhythmically in faith.
Maybe our journeys from the valleys to the peaks are never as drastic as those of Elijah or Peter, but faith tends to come from dark places, from our longings that we search out as we grieve the absences in our lives.
And then, when the time is right, we rise again.
Or rise for the first time.
So if you are longing for life, or for faith, take hope, because they come to those who have none.
Sunday, July 08, 2018
We Are Not Ready for the Insanity of Faith
People give a lot of prescriptions about who you should marry. One of the things I was told through the years is “marry someone who is a better person than you.” As good as it sounds, it’s rather unrealistic advice. After all, if you are uneducated, unsymmetrical (physical handsomeness generally being regarded as symmetry, across cultures), and evil, you will have a hard time attracting someone who is educated, symmetrical, and good. Realistically, you’ve got to have a more “give-and-take” approach: in some ways they will be better, but in other ways you will be better.
Victor is better than me in a lot of areas, some more obvious than others, such as athleticism (though for the record, I’m the better swimmer and I will always hold that over his head, even if it’s not true one day ;).
In all seriousness now, one area he’s got me in is faith. It’s stronger, it’s bigger, it’s better.
Luck was on my side because he married me, the girl who has historically struggled with her faith, and still struggles. But that’s how his faith is: he sees potential in people. So he put some of his faith in me.
His faith, though in some manners so foreign to me, was and is extremely attractive, like how a glass of ice water perspiring diamonds on a marble kitchen countertop looks when you are dehydrated.
Less than 2 months after our quiet, informal engagement, in a moment when I was—admittedly—questioning our crazy decision, he woke me up with this text (not your typical “good morning, babe”):
In the design of God for our lives, it does not matter the situations we walked through in the past, nor the deserts we crossed. They could not stop and will not stop what God has prepared for us and our families. You are not coming to Rep. Dominicana simply to come to Rep. Dominicana. God has great plans for our lives and his design is perfect to deliver us grand things. Or again, we are not united because it is simply natural for a man and woman to unite—God has the marvelous for us, mi amor! And things that no eye has seen, no mouth spoken, no ear heard...this is what the Father in his infinite mercy has prepared for us.
Like, who says things like that, let alone believes them? Mine is the generation of disbelief. We are the sleepless logicians who don’t put hope in heroes, be they gods or men. The leaders who led our parents’ generation in spiritual revival are, in their later years, failing my generation with their debauchery. We don’t believe in men and we barely believe in God—I mean, maybe on a good day when our tax refund arrives on time to cover our medical bill; but even then it only strengthens our faith in a God who is sardonic.
To believe that God has a plan that is 1) unstoppable and 2) marvelous, even when it includes suffering and loss, is a counter-cultural, counter-generational belief. Considering the state of global affairs, it’s a crazy belief.
But crazy, I’m realizing, is the definition of faith—or at least of faith that is radical, the faith that is the faith of my husband, the faith that is growing in me.
See, Biblical Christianity doesn’t ultimately make sense. Oh sure it’s organized. Sure there are bookshelves of books written by people who reasoned their way to faith. But if Christianity really made sense, we wouldn’t be having the crisis of faith we are today in the US.
Faith is crazy and we are not ready for crazy.
We are not ready to call a collection of manuscripts written by different authors across thousands of years a coherent book inspired by God himself.
We are not ready to take that same book literally.
We are not ready to pray.
We are not ready to preach.
We are not ready to serve the church.
We are not ready to foster or adopt.
We are not ready to sing.
We are not ready to care for the elderly or disabled.
We are not ready to confront abuse.
We are not ready to be faithful to our partners.
We are not ready to give up easy access to safe food and modest healthcare.
We are not ready to forgive our enemies.
We are not ready to donate the money we need to fill our gas tank.
We are not ready to move to a hard place where our skills would make more of an impact: an inner city, a Native American reservation, another country.
We are not ready to take up our crosses.
We are not ready to be called fools for our insane decisions.
We are not ready to be crazy.
I was not ready.
But I was ready to be loved hard by a man who, in terms of faith, is the definition of ready.
I was ready to have two big, strong hands grab mine and share faith with me like when one plane shares jet fuel with another while flying over the majestic breadth of the Pacific ocean.
Don’t get me wrong, I still feel foolish for all the insanity in my life. But in the overused yet somehow still profound words of Jim Elliot, he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation.”
“Without faith it is impossible to please God.”
(Hebrews 11:1-2, 6)
Victor is better than me in a lot of areas, some more obvious than others, such as athleticism (though for the record, I’m the better swimmer and I will always hold that over his head, even if it’s not true one day ;).
In all seriousness now, one area he’s got me in is faith. It’s stronger, it’s bigger, it’s better.
Luck was on my side because he married me, the girl who has historically struggled with her faith, and still struggles. But that’s how his faith is: he sees potential in people. So he put some of his faith in me.
His faith, though in some manners so foreign to me, was and is extremely attractive, like how a glass of ice water perspiring diamonds on a marble kitchen countertop looks when you are dehydrated.
Less than 2 months after our quiet, informal engagement, in a moment when I was—admittedly—questioning our crazy decision, he woke me up with this text (not your typical “good morning, babe”):
In the design of God for our lives, it does not matter the situations we walked through in the past, nor the deserts we crossed. They could not stop and will not stop what God has prepared for us and our families. You are not coming to Rep. Dominicana simply to come to Rep. Dominicana. God has great plans for our lives and his design is perfect to deliver us grand things. Or again, we are not united because it is simply natural for a man and woman to unite—God has the marvelous for us, mi amor! And things that no eye has seen, no mouth spoken, no ear heard...this is what the Father in his infinite mercy has prepared for us.
Like, who says things like that, let alone believes them? Mine is the generation of disbelief. We are the sleepless logicians who don’t put hope in heroes, be they gods or men. The leaders who led our parents’ generation in spiritual revival are, in their later years, failing my generation with their debauchery. We don’t believe in men and we barely believe in God—I mean, maybe on a good day when our tax refund arrives on time to cover our medical bill; but even then it only strengthens our faith in a God who is sardonic.
To believe that God has a plan that is 1) unstoppable and 2) marvelous, even when it includes suffering and loss, is a counter-cultural, counter-generational belief. Considering the state of global affairs, it’s a crazy belief.
But crazy, I’m realizing, is the definition of faith—or at least of faith that is radical, the faith that is the faith of my husband, the faith that is growing in me.
See, Biblical Christianity doesn’t ultimately make sense. Oh sure it’s organized. Sure there are bookshelves of books written by people who reasoned their way to faith. But if Christianity really made sense, we wouldn’t be having the crisis of faith we are today in the US.
Faith is crazy and we are not ready for crazy.
We are not ready to call a collection of manuscripts written by different authors across thousands of years a coherent book inspired by God himself.
We are not ready to take that same book literally.
We are not ready to pray.
We are not ready to preach.
We are not ready to serve the church.
We are not ready to foster or adopt.
We are not ready to sing.
We are not ready to care for the elderly or disabled.
We are not ready to confront abuse.
We are not ready to be faithful to our partners.
We are not ready to give up easy access to safe food and modest healthcare.
We are not ready to forgive our enemies.
We are not ready to donate the money we need to fill our gas tank.
We are not ready to move to a hard place where our skills would make more of an impact: an inner city, a Native American reservation, another country.
We are not ready to take up our crosses.
We are not ready to be called fools for our insane decisions.
We are not ready to be crazy.
I was not ready.
But I was ready to be loved hard by a man who, in terms of faith, is the definition of ready.
I was ready to have two big, strong hands grab mine and share faith with me like when one plane shares jet fuel with another while flying over the majestic breadth of the Pacific ocean.
Don’t get me wrong, I still feel foolish for all the insanity in my life. But in the overused yet somehow still profound words of Jim Elliot, he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation.”
“Without faith it is impossible to please God.”
(Hebrews 11:1-2, 6)
Tuesday, June 05, 2018
Water on the Floor
Friday, May 25, 2018
On this island, people talk about the lights "la luz"—that is, the electricity—the way we in the USA talk about the weather. The daily power outages are common to almost all mankind in the Dominican Republic, the only difference being if your power gets cut for 2 hours or 8 and during which part of the day, so it's an easy subject to talk about when making polite conversation.
I'm lucky because in our neighborhood we generally fall in the middle of the 2 to 8 hour duration. However, when the switch gets flipped varies every day, so it's hard to anticipate. You might set out to do laundry one morning, or think it's okay that your phone only has a 40% charge, and then find out 5 minutes later that you were terribly wrong.
Sometimes I picture the men in the power plant sipping strong, sweet coffee and laughing maniacally as they throw entire neighborhoods into darkness at whatever hour fancies them.
I digress. From an environmental standpoint, less electricity means less coal, and power cuts might be something my congress should consider.
Sometimes, though, the loss of light and all things related is atypical. Sometimes, it's not the fault of the men in the power plant, and it's not just 6 hours—it's days. Because the majority of my life I had the capability to live off the grid, compliments of a generator and the accompanying 1,000 gallon tank of diesel hidden in the woods, I don't have much experience coping with the effects of extended blackouts.
The absence of Wifi is annoying, sure, but not terrible. Not being able to turn on a fan to combat mosquitoes is a little worse, but still one can grin and bear it. Candlelight at night, I'm told, is romantic. And, since I buy fresh every day, there's usually not much food to lose in the fridge besides tomato paste or a jar of mayo.
What I find challenging is water.
Every morning I have to sneak through my downstairs neighbor's living quarters (she's a nurse who often works the night shift) to plug in the little engine that pumps cold water from the earth up to the roof. On the roof—my favorite part of the house apart from the veranda—sits a big, black tank. It takes about 45 minutes to fill. From the roof, water arrives in my kitchen sink and showers with a little help from gravity, pressure, and some sort of physics I don't understand.
Obviously, when there's no electricity, there is no way to pump water up to the roof. Which means when the black tank is empty, you have to start hauling buckets of water from the cistern up to the 2nd floor for washing and flushing and cooking and that is just really inconvenient from my entitled American perspective. I mean, my husband and the boys don't like it either, and they aren't American. Thus, we do what we can to conserve the water on the roof.
So this morning, when I woke up at 5:20 with my husband's alarm to face day 2—a full day—of no electricity, I admit I was feeling stressed. First, Friday is one of the days I don't have Victor by my side, like, at all. He's at work from 6 to noon, and then immediately has classes at the university until 9pm. Second, usually the boys don't come home from school until 12:30pm, but this was an exams week and they had today off. Our neighborhood is far from the neighborhood they grew up in—and thus their friends—as well as the basketball court and baseball field. And with no electricity, they can't use the PS3 that a baseball player gave us in exchange for a physical therapy session.
What's more, since vigorous cleaning happens on Saturday in my house, you could see all the band-aids and touch ups and just plain explosions of the past 6 days. We are not going to talk about the pile of laundry. I will, however, bemoan publicly the fact that every single dish and pot I own was waiting dirty in the sink and on the counters because when trying to conserve water it's most efficient to wait and wash them all at once.
Okay, so it's not like I had to give a presentation to the UN today. That is a large part of my consternation. For millions of women—around the globe, or the strong women I share this country with—this light-less lifestyle with a fight for water is a daily reality and they manage. But it does phase me, perhaps like delivering a presentation to high profile people would.
Speaking of those resilient Dominican women, 2 of them showed up at my gate at 9am. I hate to admit it, but when I realized there were people here, my heart jumped unpleasantly. Even though I love these 2 girls—my companions from the sports complex who I have been training—I did not feel like navigating Spanish with people outside my family, with people who speak fast no matter what. With the addition of this new mental challenge, on top of everything else, I wanted to run away. As I felt the adrenaline pour into my bloodstream, I internally screamed, "No!" because the truth is, I am almost desperate for female companionship—and like I said, I love these two athletes. It's just that conversing in Spanish is difficult for me, and it makes me want to chose solitude over camaraderie.
Anyway, I had no choice this morning.
I was cleaning chicken at the time when they arrived. I had set it aside, and for 20 minutes we conversed--stressfully, on my part--of wonderfully girly topics. When she saw me uncover the bowl of chicken again, since I really had to continue, one of the girls, Stefani, offered to start the seasoning. The other, Ana, who loathes cooking unlike Stefani and I, grabbed a broom and headed outside the kitchen. She returned 30 seconds later with a status report:
Half of my house was flooded.
"The boys."
To their credit, they were cleaning their rooms. They are pretty good about doing that occasionally, and without being asked. Also, I, too, have once or twice forgotten to turn off the water when filling a 5 gallon pail; so I understand how it can happen.
It's just this morning the significance was now all our water wasn't on the roof.
It was on the floor.
Ah, so this was why God had sent me two women this morning: I needed physical help. I needed double-x's in the house, even if my English-wired brain was going to send me into the fight or flight zone either way.
I needed other women to help me take control of my house, and do so in 4th or 5th gear, not slowly in 2nd. I needed someone with whom to laugh at it all.
So by 10:45am, all the floors were remarkably clean, the midday meal was on the stove, the boys were occupied cleaning, and I felt encouraged because I was reminded there are other women on the planet. Stefeni and Ana left, brushing kisses on my cheeks, as is custom. And I pulled a chair onto the balcony to write because, for a few minutes at least, everything was in a safe holding pattern.
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
Obviously, lacking electricity and internet, I couldn't post this when I wrote it. The same funky electric system zapped my computer too, so it only turns on when it wants. And it decided to go 2 weeks without turning on.
So here I am, 11 days later. I had pretty much concluded I would not be making this post public, but you know, it's a snapshot of, actually, what day-to-day life is on a default level—and thus perhaps valuable to the story. Morning to morning, afternoon to afternoon, evening to evening, life here on a basic level is so much more complicated and emergency-filled than life in the USA.
Yet in the middle of all the somethings, life has never felt more meaningful in thanks to the profound sort of love I share with Victor.
And, I'm not bored.
When I was in Italy, I spent a fair amount of time working in ministry with a guy named GT. I was the same age as his younger sister who lived back in SoCal, and he was the same age as my older brother who lived in another part of the world with palm trees, only a little more dangerous; thus, our dynamic was quickly intuitive, maybe filling a bit of a familial absence we both felt. Anyway, one afternoon we were in the kitchen on campus, talking. The room was warm from the cookies baking in the oven—a pleasant contrast to the days before when we'd gotten soaked distributing tracts in the cold, pouring rain that had been pounding Pordenone as of late.
In response to something I'd been saying, but still rather out of the blue, GT concluded, "Your greatest fear is boredom, isn't it?"
In a blink I new the answer was yes, but I paused anyway, a bit taken aback by the realization. GT continued, "You're on a precipice, Mattea. God's going to do something."
He walked out of the kitchen, footsteps crunching in the gravel courtyard.
That was 3.5 years ago, and here I am now, with plenty of God-given mountains to climb, mountains that keep me from boredom.
On this island, people talk about the lights "la luz"—that is, the electricity—the way we in the USA talk about the weather. The daily power outages are common to almost all mankind in the Dominican Republic, the only difference being if your power gets cut for 2 hours or 8 and during which part of the day, so it's an easy subject to talk about when making polite conversation.
I'm lucky because in our neighborhood we generally fall in the middle of the 2 to 8 hour duration. However, when the switch gets flipped varies every day, so it's hard to anticipate. You might set out to do laundry one morning, or think it's okay that your phone only has a 40% charge, and then find out 5 minutes later that you were terribly wrong.
Sometimes I picture the men in the power plant sipping strong, sweet coffee and laughing maniacally as they throw entire neighborhoods into darkness at whatever hour fancies them.
I digress. From an environmental standpoint, less electricity means less coal, and power cuts might be something my congress should consider.
Sometimes, though, the loss of light and all things related is atypical. Sometimes, it's not the fault of the men in the power plant, and it's not just 6 hours—it's days. Because the majority of my life I had the capability to live off the grid, compliments of a generator and the accompanying 1,000 gallon tank of diesel hidden in the woods, I don't have much experience coping with the effects of extended blackouts.
The absence of Wifi is annoying, sure, but not terrible. Not being able to turn on a fan to combat mosquitoes is a little worse, but still one can grin and bear it. Candlelight at night, I'm told, is romantic. And, since I buy fresh every day, there's usually not much food to lose in the fridge besides tomato paste or a jar of mayo.
What I find challenging is water.
Every morning I have to sneak through my downstairs neighbor's living quarters (she's a nurse who often works the night shift) to plug in the little engine that pumps cold water from the earth up to the roof. On the roof—my favorite part of the house apart from the veranda—sits a big, black tank. It takes about 45 minutes to fill. From the roof, water arrives in my kitchen sink and showers with a little help from gravity, pressure, and some sort of physics I don't understand.
Obviously, when there's no electricity, there is no way to pump water up to the roof. Which means when the black tank is empty, you have to start hauling buckets of water from the cistern up to the 2nd floor for washing and flushing and cooking and that is just really inconvenient from my entitled American perspective. I mean, my husband and the boys don't like it either, and they aren't American. Thus, we do what we can to conserve the water on the roof.
So this morning, when I woke up at 5:20 with my husband's alarm to face day 2—a full day—of no electricity, I admit I was feeling stressed. First, Friday is one of the days I don't have Victor by my side, like, at all. He's at work from 6 to noon, and then immediately has classes at the university until 9pm. Second, usually the boys don't come home from school until 12:30pm, but this was an exams week and they had today off. Our neighborhood is far from the neighborhood they grew up in—and thus their friends—as well as the basketball court and baseball field. And with no electricity, they can't use the PS3 that a baseball player gave us in exchange for a physical therapy session.
What's more, since vigorous cleaning happens on Saturday in my house, you could see all the band-aids and touch ups and just plain explosions of the past 6 days. We are not going to talk about the pile of laundry. I will, however, bemoan publicly the fact that every single dish and pot I own was waiting dirty in the sink and on the counters because when trying to conserve water it's most efficient to wait and wash them all at once.
Okay, so it's not like I had to give a presentation to the UN today. That is a large part of my consternation. For millions of women—around the globe, or the strong women I share this country with—this light-less lifestyle with a fight for water is a daily reality and they manage. But it does phase me, perhaps like delivering a presentation to high profile people would.
Speaking of those resilient Dominican women, 2 of them showed up at my gate at 9am. I hate to admit it, but when I realized there were people here, my heart jumped unpleasantly. Even though I love these 2 girls—my companions from the sports complex who I have been training—I did not feel like navigating Spanish with people outside my family, with people who speak fast no matter what. With the addition of this new mental challenge, on top of everything else, I wanted to run away. As I felt the adrenaline pour into my bloodstream, I internally screamed, "No!" because the truth is, I am almost desperate for female companionship—and like I said, I love these two athletes. It's just that conversing in Spanish is difficult for me, and it makes me want to chose solitude over camaraderie.
Anyway, I had no choice this morning.
I was cleaning chicken at the time when they arrived. I had set it aside, and for 20 minutes we conversed--stressfully, on my part--of wonderfully girly topics. When she saw me uncover the bowl of chicken again, since I really had to continue, one of the girls, Stefani, offered to start the seasoning. The other, Ana, who loathes cooking unlike Stefani and I, grabbed a broom and headed outside the kitchen. She returned 30 seconds later with a status report:
Half of my house was flooded.
"The boys."
To their credit, they were cleaning their rooms. They are pretty good about doing that occasionally, and without being asked. Also, I, too, have once or twice forgotten to turn off the water when filling a 5 gallon pail; so I understand how it can happen.
It's just this morning the significance was now all our water wasn't on the roof.
It was on the floor.
Ah, so this was why God had sent me two women this morning: I needed physical help. I needed double-x's in the house, even if my English-wired brain was going to send me into the fight or flight zone either way.
I needed other women to help me take control of my house, and do so in 4th or 5th gear, not slowly in 2nd. I needed someone with whom to laugh at it all.
So by 10:45am, all the floors were remarkably clean, the midday meal was on the stove, the boys were occupied cleaning, and I felt encouraged because I was reminded there are other women on the planet. Stefeni and Ana left, brushing kisses on my cheeks, as is custom. And I pulled a chair onto the balcony to write because, for a few minutes at least, everything was in a safe holding pattern.
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
Obviously, lacking electricity and internet, I couldn't post this when I wrote it. The same funky electric system zapped my computer too, so it only turns on when it wants. And it decided to go 2 weeks without turning on.
So here I am, 11 days later. I had pretty much concluded I would not be making this post public, but you know, it's a snapshot of, actually, what day-to-day life is on a default level—and thus perhaps valuable to the story. Morning to morning, afternoon to afternoon, evening to evening, life here on a basic level is so much more complicated and emergency-filled than life in the USA.
Yet in the middle of all the somethings, life has never felt more meaningful in thanks to the profound sort of love I share with Victor.
And, I'm not bored.
When I was in Italy, I spent a fair amount of time working in ministry with a guy named GT. I was the same age as his younger sister who lived back in SoCal, and he was the same age as my older brother who lived in another part of the world with palm trees, only a little more dangerous; thus, our dynamic was quickly intuitive, maybe filling a bit of a familial absence we both felt. Anyway, one afternoon we were in the kitchen on campus, talking. The room was warm from the cookies baking in the oven—a pleasant contrast to the days before when we'd gotten soaked distributing tracts in the cold, pouring rain that had been pounding Pordenone as of late.
In response to something I'd been saying, but still rather out of the blue, GT concluded, "Your greatest fear is boredom, isn't it?"
In a blink I new the answer was yes, but I paused anyway, a bit taken aback by the realization. GT continued, "You're on a precipice, Mattea. God's going to do something."
He walked out of the kitchen, footsteps crunching in the gravel courtyard.
That was 3.5 years ago, and here I am now, with plenty of God-given mountains to climb, mountains that keep me from boredom.
Tuesday, May 08, 2018
Madre
I owe my mom an apology. We only speak on the phone, at best, once a month. I remember when my brother was overseas for 2 years, he, too, struggled staying in touch with the woman who had pushed him into the world (okay, so a doctor had to pull him out with a pair of forceps but my mom made a valiant, 18-hour effort). I think we all find it a little difficult to make space for a FaceTime call to family when we are far away. There’s a lot of excuses I could make for why it’s this way with me. But I think, at the root, it’s because I know that whether or not we talk, nothing is going to uproot my relationship with my mom. So I get lazy.
But also sometimes I get lost in differences.
I am so very different from my mom, from what her life was when she was 25. The difference still makes me feel a little sad.
For the longest time, my “plan” was to build a house on my parents’ land and whenever I made apple pie from the trees that grew outback, I’d make two so I, or one or my babies, could walk the extra down the road to my mom.
It’s the family life, the close-to-the-earth life—the Wendell Berry life, if you will.
I’ve always been enchanted by my mom’s lifestyle and have wanted to emulate it. Yet the emulation has proved elusive. It started when, at the end of my 18th year, I was unmarried. And then plot by plot, we sold our farm. As I stumbled into my 20s, still single, my mom was always quick to admit that she didn’t understand, from experience, what I was going through.
Even so, she always held me, always listened, always shared some words, always reminded me that she was praying for me. She held me through each relationship that didn’t quite work out, was there to blow the tears off my face. Once, she caught my tears in a little blue bottle, symbolically.
After all that, she couldn’t be there for my victory. She wasn’t there to share my joy when I got married in a back office 6 months ago today. She let a man she had never met take her job of holding me.
And our lives diverged drastically in a way I’d never anticipated.
...or, did they?
Maybe our tides are different, maybe the moon has pulled us in different directions, but the heartbeat in the chest sunk deep in the ocean is the same.
A couple thousand years ago, Paul, a founder of the early evangelical Christian church, wrote a letter to a young man named Timothy. He said, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well” (2 Timothy 1:5, ESV).
Like Timothy, I have my mother’s faith. Every day of my childhood she carefully, creatively persevered and put her faith in me through how she treated me, how she guided my pursuits, through the books she read to me, whether Laura Ingles Wilder or Isabel Kuhn. And just, how she lived day-in and day-out, you know?
My mother and I have a common faith.
In the midst of all the differences, in the midst of the miles between us, faith binds us together. It’s my mom’s faith that made drastic changes in her own life.
Years before I was, my mom and dad were in the Dominican Republic, “catching vision,” as they say, for a future of missions. My mom decided while in the DR that she was going to become a registered nurse mid-life. If someone does something as crazy as that, how could her daughter not do something crazy too?
And though the theme of this entry is my mom, I need to pull my dad into the picture here too, because he and she are one. One faith. As if it’s not apparent, anything she does, he’s giving it energy.
All of us in this faith, we are all one.
But we all know there’s potential for a unique connection between a mother and her daughter.
So Mom, I’m looking at you. I’m thinking about you all the time. I’m sorry I don’t talk to you more.
You gave me life. Thank you. Even though I have my own family now in a different country and this life I’m living is my passion—you are in everything I do, dawn to sundown, sundown to dawn.
I haven’t built that bridge yet between our two countries, like I told you I was going to do. But look and see—there’s already a rainbow, streams of colors, the colors of faith, arcing over the water.
But also sometimes I get lost in differences.
I am so very different from my mom, from what her life was when she was 25. The difference still makes me feel a little sad.
For the longest time, my “plan” was to build a house on my parents’ land and whenever I made apple pie from the trees that grew outback, I’d make two so I, or one or my babies, could walk the extra down the road to my mom.
It’s the family life, the close-to-the-earth life—the Wendell Berry life, if you will.
I’ve always been enchanted by my mom’s lifestyle and have wanted to emulate it. Yet the emulation has proved elusive. It started when, at the end of my 18th year, I was unmarried. And then plot by plot, we sold our farm. As I stumbled into my 20s, still single, my mom was always quick to admit that she didn’t understand, from experience, what I was going through.
Even so, she always held me, always listened, always shared some words, always reminded me that she was praying for me. She held me through each relationship that didn’t quite work out, was there to blow the tears off my face. Once, she caught my tears in a little blue bottle, symbolically.
After all that, she couldn’t be there for my victory. She wasn’t there to share my joy when I got married in a back office 6 months ago today. She let a man she had never met take her job of holding me.
And our lives diverged drastically in a way I’d never anticipated.
...or, did they?
Maybe our tides are different, maybe the moon has pulled us in different directions, but the heartbeat in the chest sunk deep in the ocean is the same.
A couple thousand years ago, Paul, a founder of the early evangelical Christian church, wrote a letter to a young man named Timothy. He said, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well” (2 Timothy 1:5, ESV).
Like Timothy, I have my mother’s faith. Every day of my childhood she carefully, creatively persevered and put her faith in me through how she treated me, how she guided my pursuits, through the books she read to me, whether Laura Ingles Wilder or Isabel Kuhn. And just, how she lived day-in and day-out, you know?
My mother and I have a common faith.
In the midst of all the differences, in the midst of the miles between us, faith binds us together. It’s my mom’s faith that made drastic changes in her own life.
Years before I was, my mom and dad were in the Dominican Republic, “catching vision,” as they say, for a future of missions. My mom decided while in the DR that she was going to become a registered nurse mid-life. If someone does something as crazy as that, how could her daughter not do something crazy too?
And though the theme of this entry is my mom, I need to pull my dad into the picture here too, because he and she are one. One faith. As if it’s not apparent, anything she does, he’s giving it energy.
All of us in this faith, we are all one.
But we all know there’s potential for a unique connection between a mother and her daughter.
So Mom, I’m looking at you. I’m thinking about you all the time. I’m sorry I don’t talk to you more.
You gave me life. Thank you. Even though I have my own family now in a different country and this life I’m living is my passion—you are in everything I do, dawn to sundown, sundown to dawn.
I haven’t built that bridge yet between our two countries, like I told you I was going to do. But look and see—there’s already a rainbow, streams of colors, the colors of faith, arcing over the water.
Sunday, March 18, 2018
Of Rocks and Trees and Motorcycles
Living in a country that is still growing up, where aspects of life are very different from my life in the USA, I’ve found myself changing a lot of my heavily academic, but not heavily experienced, opinions. So while my tulip still has five petals (more because I’m a fan of Fibonacci than anything else), other matters, like my Systematic Theology Against the Use of Motorcycles, have been overturned (please laugh and break the awkward silence that just ensued).
Some rules can change because wisdom never does. So now, out of necessity, I often find myself on top of a motorcycle, whether our tall blue beast, or the cruiser of our trusted Motoconcho, Cesar.
Generally, we only use motorcycles for short trips in town. However, on Saturday afternoon a week ago we suddenly had a spur of the moment opportunity to scout baseball players on the opposite side of the island. The battery in our 2004 SUV was dead, so we squeezed 24 hours worth of clothes, vitamins, and duct tape in my faithful Victorinox backpack, snapped on our helmets, and roared out of town. It was already mid-afternoon and we had to cross the island before dark.
When Victor had told me the trip was an option, I was initially hesitant to go. Our weeks are a string of—often—18 hour days not going according to plan, and for me, events that are relatively simple in the USA, like buying food, making a phone call, or driving the kids to school, here, are intense. I’m constantly expanding the limits of my capabilities, which is satisfying; however, there’s a corresponding deep expense of energy. Sometimes I feel in debt, especially emotionally. Thus, the temptation is to spend any free time with my pillow, in hiding from the world.
But seclusion is where dreams become delusions.
So to Miches, to our cousins’, we went.
San Pedro lies in the plains region, and to go North you have to go up (feels intuitively right, yes? No Nile here). The ascent to El Seybo, the largest town between here and Miches, is gentle. The majority of cultivatable land is devoted to sugarcane fields that terminate in Haitian bateyes. Though thousands of fresh Dominican troops are currently being sent to the boarder to tighten security; deportations are becoming more frequent for those without papers; and I’ve seen videos of Haitians burning Dominican flags; there are also many in the bateyes like this one young athlete I know. She lives miles outside of San Pedro on a path off a dirt road that’s off another dirt road—yet somehow she finds her way to the complejo to practice, somehow she’s honestly, determinedly forging a future so that her life will probably be better than her parents’ lives in Haiti.
Where there is no sugarcane, cattle—brown, black and white, white and brown, or a shade of gray that needs to be Cloroxed to restore it to its former glory—graze on the slopes behind tired fences. Rivers, rolling their way to the Caribbean, curl around rocks beneath canopies of green. The trees near Seybo look like the ones in the picture books mom read to me when I was a girl: whimsical creatures whose gnarled wing spans are broader than their height.
In Seybo, we stopped briefly for bananas being sold out of the back of a pickup truck parked in the shade. They were big and sweet, not like the ones I’m obligated to buy from the corner market in our neighborhood. We ate fast, hungry since we’d skipped lunch. Plus, the sun was shining on our heads less and on our backs more. Setting.
Seybo is small, and inland RD becomes very rural very quickly. Thus, as we were speeding through one of many dells, I was surprised when we came upon a crowd of people walking on the right side of the road. “Catholics!” Victor shouted above the engine, sensing my curiosity.
There were hundreds of them, some carrying big white crosses, some singing. The march went on for a few kilometers. They stared at me, at the blonde braid hanging out of my helmet and flapping in the turbulence (somehow my hair is always a tangled mess after a bike ride, no matter the braid). Of course I returned their stares, but covertly through my aviators that are progressively becoming quite beat up.
It was surreal to be flying past all these people, surrounded by hills and grass and trees in the middle of nowhere. Yet maybe it was somewhere, since we were all there. Every place is beginning to feel like someplace as I painfully lose my egocentricity.
The music faded, the marchers thinned. We drove through one more small village—a single row of dwellings lining either meridian, plus a basketball court—and then we started the grand ascent. Miches was on the other side of this mountain.
The road narrowed, and the moment we would pull out of one curve we had to downshift and push into another one. The flora became bushy, wild, like it would eat the road if Hurricane Maria hadn’t territorially left her teeth marks everywhere. Though RD as a whole faired well in the storm, Miches did not. My cousins’ house, a stones throw from the ocean, was flooded, and electricity wasn’t restored until four months after Maria left.
Leaning into Victor’s back to keep us balanced as we climbed, I wished I could pick a bouquet of the bright orange flowers—the ones that spiral up some of the trees—for Marcia, Marci, and Fleri, the sisters who are my cousins by marriage. I also wished I could capture those few moments as we drove across the summit, thousands of meters high. The ocean slept placidly beneath us, while the treetops acquiesced and swayed with the wind.
Even if our upstairs apartment in San Pedro catches some of the best breezes in San Pedro, it felt good to feel cool air. It also felt good to breathe fresh air because this past week they’d been burning sugarcane and my throat hurt. I’d swept ashes out of the house every day. But all of the hurt, all of the weight besides my backpack, evaporated there on the ridge.
Okay, I was still sucking on Halls like candy the next day, but you catch my drift.
I thought the trip to Miches was beautiful, but the return was even more so. We had a pleasant time visiting lots of family, and made promising connections with another baseball academy, but 24 hours after arriving we were obligated to leave. The sun was not quite as low in the sky as it was Saturday afternoon when we reached the top of the mountain Sunday afternoon, and for this, everything changed.
Leaves that I had thought were a simple shade of green became the prisms on chandeliers; for as it turned out, the undersides of the leaves were not green. They were either a pale gray-green or, the other variety, a packing paper shade of brown. When the sun’s rays glinted off the leaves at the perfect angle, gray became silver and brown became gold. The top of the mountain is full of divots, and these divots are full of scores of such trees with such leaves that shiver and shimmer silver and gold. I thought I was looking down on Lothlorien.
At times during the descent, Victor would cut the engine and all would go silent save for the rubber tires catching the pavement and the air catching our bodies. We glided down through the royal jungle.
We are commoners in a devastatingly beautiful world.
But God can stop a hurricane with the tip of his finger the way I stop a spinning top. And God can make ashes—ashes of sugarcane, of houses, of trees, of...us—sing.
Shortly after my maternal grandmother passed away, I had a memorable dream one night. It came to mind again last week when my sister performed a spoken word on social media about my grandma’s life and the tender wounds mental illness inflicts, not only on the person with the diagnosis, but also on her or his friends and family.
In my dream, I was standing in the back of a traditional church. Light streamed in the stained glass windows. Despite the empty oak pews, I thought I heard singing; but if it was singing, it was as quiet as a breath in a breeze. Unsure, I moved towards the front of the church. There was a simple, small box on the alter. It was the box that held my grandmother’s ashes and yes, when I put my hands on my knees and leaned in close, in complete awe, I heard those ashes singing this old hymn—in a different language but I could still understand:
This is my father's world
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres
This is my father's world
The birds their carols raise
The morning light, the lily white
Declare their maker's praise
This is my father's world
I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas
His hand the wonders wrought
This is my father's world
Oh, let me never forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong
God is the ruler yet
This is my father's world
Why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is king, let the heavens ring
God reigns, let the earth be glad
Some rules can change because wisdom never does. So now, out of necessity, I often find myself on top of a motorcycle, whether our tall blue beast, or the cruiser of our trusted Motoconcho, Cesar.
Generally, we only use motorcycles for short trips in town. However, on Saturday afternoon a week ago we suddenly had a spur of the moment opportunity to scout baseball players on the opposite side of the island. The battery in our 2004 SUV was dead, so we squeezed 24 hours worth of clothes, vitamins, and duct tape in my faithful Victorinox backpack, snapped on our helmets, and roared out of town. It was already mid-afternoon and we had to cross the island before dark.
When Victor had told me the trip was an option, I was initially hesitant to go. Our weeks are a string of—often—18 hour days not going according to plan, and for me, events that are relatively simple in the USA, like buying food, making a phone call, or driving the kids to school, here, are intense. I’m constantly expanding the limits of my capabilities, which is satisfying; however, there’s a corresponding deep expense of energy. Sometimes I feel in debt, especially emotionally. Thus, the temptation is to spend any free time with my pillow, in hiding from the world.
But seclusion is where dreams become delusions.
So to Miches, to our cousins’, we went.
San Pedro lies in the plains region, and to go North you have to go up (feels intuitively right, yes? No Nile here). The ascent to El Seybo, the largest town between here and Miches, is gentle. The majority of cultivatable land is devoted to sugarcane fields that terminate in Haitian bateyes. Though thousands of fresh Dominican troops are currently being sent to the boarder to tighten security; deportations are becoming more frequent for those without papers; and I’ve seen videos of Haitians burning Dominican flags; there are also many in the bateyes like this one young athlete I know. She lives miles outside of San Pedro on a path off a dirt road that’s off another dirt road—yet somehow she finds her way to the complejo to practice, somehow she’s honestly, determinedly forging a future so that her life will probably be better than her parents’ lives in Haiti.
Where there is no sugarcane, cattle—brown, black and white, white and brown, or a shade of gray that needs to be Cloroxed to restore it to its former glory—graze on the slopes behind tired fences. Rivers, rolling their way to the Caribbean, curl around rocks beneath canopies of green. The trees near Seybo look like the ones in the picture books mom read to me when I was a girl: whimsical creatures whose gnarled wing spans are broader than their height.
In Seybo, we stopped briefly for bananas being sold out of the back of a pickup truck parked in the shade. They were big and sweet, not like the ones I’m obligated to buy from the corner market in our neighborhood. We ate fast, hungry since we’d skipped lunch. Plus, the sun was shining on our heads less and on our backs more. Setting.
Seybo is small, and inland RD becomes very rural very quickly. Thus, as we were speeding through one of many dells, I was surprised when we came upon a crowd of people walking on the right side of the road. “Catholics!” Victor shouted above the engine, sensing my curiosity.
There were hundreds of them, some carrying big white crosses, some singing. The march went on for a few kilometers. They stared at me, at the blonde braid hanging out of my helmet and flapping in the turbulence (somehow my hair is always a tangled mess after a bike ride, no matter the braid). Of course I returned their stares, but covertly through my aviators that are progressively becoming quite beat up.
It was surreal to be flying past all these people, surrounded by hills and grass and trees in the middle of nowhere. Yet maybe it was somewhere, since we were all there. Every place is beginning to feel like someplace as I painfully lose my egocentricity.
The music faded, the marchers thinned. We drove through one more small village—a single row of dwellings lining either meridian, plus a basketball court—and then we started the grand ascent. Miches was on the other side of this mountain.
The road narrowed, and the moment we would pull out of one curve we had to downshift and push into another one. The flora became bushy, wild, like it would eat the road if Hurricane Maria hadn’t territorially left her teeth marks everywhere. Though RD as a whole faired well in the storm, Miches did not. My cousins’ house, a stones throw from the ocean, was flooded, and electricity wasn’t restored until four months after Maria left.
Leaning into Victor’s back to keep us balanced as we climbed, I wished I could pick a bouquet of the bright orange flowers—the ones that spiral up some of the trees—for Marcia, Marci, and Fleri, the sisters who are my cousins by marriage. I also wished I could capture those few moments as we drove across the summit, thousands of meters high. The ocean slept placidly beneath us, while the treetops acquiesced and swayed with the wind.
Even if our upstairs apartment in San Pedro catches some of the best breezes in San Pedro, it felt good to feel cool air. It also felt good to breathe fresh air because this past week they’d been burning sugarcane and my throat hurt. I’d swept ashes out of the house every day. But all of the hurt, all of the weight besides my backpack, evaporated there on the ridge.
Okay, I was still sucking on Halls like candy the next day, but you catch my drift.
I thought the trip to Miches was beautiful, but the return was even more so. We had a pleasant time visiting lots of family, and made promising connections with another baseball academy, but 24 hours after arriving we were obligated to leave. The sun was not quite as low in the sky as it was Saturday afternoon when we reached the top of the mountain Sunday afternoon, and for this, everything changed.
Leaves that I had thought were a simple shade of green became the prisms on chandeliers; for as it turned out, the undersides of the leaves were not green. They were either a pale gray-green or, the other variety, a packing paper shade of brown. When the sun’s rays glinted off the leaves at the perfect angle, gray became silver and brown became gold. The top of the mountain is full of divots, and these divots are full of scores of such trees with such leaves that shiver and shimmer silver and gold. I thought I was looking down on Lothlorien.
At times during the descent, Victor would cut the engine and all would go silent save for the rubber tires catching the pavement and the air catching our bodies. We glided down through the royal jungle.
We are commoners in a devastatingly beautiful world.
But God can stop a hurricane with the tip of his finger the way I stop a spinning top. And God can make ashes—ashes of sugarcane, of houses, of trees, of...us—sing.
Shortly after my maternal grandmother passed away, I had a memorable dream one night. It came to mind again last week when my sister performed a spoken word on social media about my grandma’s life and the tender wounds mental illness inflicts, not only on the person with the diagnosis, but also on her or his friends and family.
In my dream, I was standing in the back of a traditional church. Light streamed in the stained glass windows. Despite the empty oak pews, I thought I heard singing; but if it was singing, it was as quiet as a breath in a breeze. Unsure, I moved towards the front of the church. There was a simple, small box on the alter. It was the box that held my grandmother’s ashes and yes, when I put my hands on my knees and leaned in close, in complete awe, I heard those ashes singing this old hymn—in a different language but I could still understand:
This is my father's world
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres
This is my father's world
The birds their carols raise
The morning light, the lily white
Declare their maker's praise
This is my father's world
I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas
His hand the wonders wrought
This is my father's world
Oh, let me never forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong
God is the ruler yet
This is my father's world
Why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is king, let the heavens ring
God reigns, let the earth be glad
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Redemption
When I was walking to my little pharmacy to purchase yet another antibiotic—I have been on so many during my short duration here—I realized—that is, I really felt—like I was walking in my neighborhood, in my home.
Perhaps it took so long for me to feel this way because sometimes you have to leave a place for a bit and then come back to be able to say, “I’m home again. Where I was was not home. But this is home. I can feel the difference.” You need the contrast, sometimes.
Late Thursday night I came home from the clinic. I was there for 3 days and 2 nights. I have never before been under the care of medical personnel for more than a few hours, never before needed an IV, never before been so continuously drugged up to make my body function. Yay for new experiences.
While in the clinic, I longed for home. I had the thought that perhaps home—the thing we are always trying to define—in its truest sense is a longing. After all, my truest home is a place I’ve never been, and thus a place I can only long for day and night. Here on earth, then, home is a longing. In the clinic, I wanted to be back at my home with the fruit trees; but I admit that often through these months I have longed for my birth country.
I’ve been an expat for almost 4 months now. For comparison, the longest I was ever in Europe was 90-some days. It’s normal to miss your familiar people and places, but for me it’s an admission because I’ve contained such a good deal of contempt for my country, her citizens, and her church. But now that the tropical rains have beaten down the smoke and I can see more clearly for the first time in a decade, I realize that God is more just than I knew.
What I mean is, for a long time culture and I, along with deoxyribonucleic acid, were in a 3-way battle. If so much about one is controlled by those twisty strands of 4-letter code, and the mirroring, monkey-see monkey-do of our families and communities, how can one feel like anything but an unjustly incarcerated prisoner? How can God hold me accountable to a life that not I, but my culture and genetic makeup, are writing? If the culture trap were legitimate, then American culture was not something I wanted any part of. But, also, as I spent more time in more cultures (affluent, impoverished, Amish/Mennonite, European, Hispanic), I came to the realization that no culture was a culture I wanted to be a part of.
This was a somewhat shocking revelation to me, especially in the case of Italy. It’s true that I still talk about Italy the same way I talk about Cloud 9, but that’s because I’m talking about it in the vacation sort of way. When you are there, really mixed in with the people, you are in a culture of darkness and despair—just like all the other cultures in the world.
The thing is, in the search for a better culture—which turned out to be a unicorn hunt—I always found Jesus. Every time. No matter where I was or who I was with, he was always there too. And he always told me something. He always told me I was redeemed. He redeemed me and my DNA and the whole kit and kaboodle of my upbringing and all my mental perceptions.
He said he is in fact redeeming culture, is in fact redeeming the world.
But it’s one thing to be told; it’s another to believe.
I finally—or as they say in Spanish, al fin—believe. And thus, I am free. Free from the bitterness that stemmed from my determinism; free from wishing things had been different; free from the clammy clasp of despair; free even to miss my American people, my coffee shop, my streets, my doctor, my waterfalls; free to revel in the beautiful aspects that are a part of each culture, free to despise and pray for and press for reform in the despicable aspects of culture.
I’m free to follow the old New Commandment, “Love one another.”
If God is the God of the evangelical Christian Bible, then we can trust that when he says he is making “all things new” he means he is making all things better. Far, far better than we could ever imagine.
And all the ways that you got done wrong by your DNA; or your family; or your school; or church; or job; or your own mind...will be justified. Will be beautified.
That’s redemption.
Perhaps it took so long for me to feel this way because sometimes you have to leave a place for a bit and then come back to be able to say, “I’m home again. Where I was was not home. But this is home. I can feel the difference.” You need the contrast, sometimes.
Late Thursday night I came home from the clinic. I was there for 3 days and 2 nights. I have never before been under the care of medical personnel for more than a few hours, never before needed an IV, never before been so continuously drugged up to make my body function. Yay for new experiences.
While in the clinic, I longed for home. I had the thought that perhaps home—the thing we are always trying to define—in its truest sense is a longing. After all, my truest home is a place I’ve never been, and thus a place I can only long for day and night. Here on earth, then, home is a longing. In the clinic, I wanted to be back at my home with the fruit trees; but I admit that often through these months I have longed for my birth country.
I’ve been an expat for almost 4 months now. For comparison, the longest I was ever in Europe was 90-some days. It’s normal to miss your familiar people and places, but for me it’s an admission because I’ve contained such a good deal of contempt for my country, her citizens, and her church. But now that the tropical rains have beaten down the smoke and I can see more clearly for the first time in a decade, I realize that God is more just than I knew.
What I mean is, for a long time culture and I, along with deoxyribonucleic acid, were in a 3-way battle. If so much about one is controlled by those twisty strands of 4-letter code, and the mirroring, monkey-see monkey-do of our families and communities, how can one feel like anything but an unjustly incarcerated prisoner? How can God hold me accountable to a life that not I, but my culture and genetic makeup, are writing? If the culture trap were legitimate, then American culture was not something I wanted any part of. But, also, as I spent more time in more cultures (affluent, impoverished, Amish/Mennonite, European, Hispanic), I came to the realization that no culture was a culture I wanted to be a part of.
This was a somewhat shocking revelation to me, especially in the case of Italy. It’s true that I still talk about Italy the same way I talk about Cloud 9, but that’s because I’m talking about it in the vacation sort of way. When you are there, really mixed in with the people, you are in a culture of darkness and despair—just like all the other cultures in the world.
The thing is, in the search for a better culture—which turned out to be a unicorn hunt—I always found Jesus. Every time. No matter where I was or who I was with, he was always there too. And he always told me something. He always told me I was redeemed. He redeemed me and my DNA and the whole kit and kaboodle of my upbringing and all my mental perceptions.
He said he is in fact redeeming culture, is in fact redeeming the world.
But it’s one thing to be told; it’s another to believe.
I finally—or as they say in Spanish, al fin—believe. And thus, I am free. Free from the bitterness that stemmed from my determinism; free from wishing things had been different; free from the clammy clasp of despair; free even to miss my American people, my coffee shop, my streets, my doctor, my waterfalls; free to revel in the beautiful aspects that are a part of each culture, free to despise and pray for and press for reform in the despicable aspects of culture.
I’m free to follow the old New Commandment, “Love one another.”
If God is the God of the evangelical Christian Bible, then we can trust that when he says he is making “all things new” he means he is making all things better. Far, far better than we could ever imagine.
And all the ways that you got done wrong by your DNA; or your family; or your school; or church; or job; or your own mind...will be justified. Will be beautified.
That’s redemption.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Victorious
When I graduated in May of last year, I made a last minute decision to join my sister on her trip to the Dominican Republic. She had an itinerary, was freelancing missionwork.
I was on the island only for personal reasons, trying to gain perspective and make wise decisions in regards to my next steps in life.
In the middle of everything, I ventured out one day a little after dawn and rode to the sports complex by motorcycle. Squished between my sister and her friend, weaving our way quickly through the systematic mayhem that is traffic in San Pedro, and braking frequently for speed bumps and the occasional chicken, I had no idea that this was going to be a remarkable day.
We parked the bike under a tree with a slew of other bikes, walked through the gate, and there he was standing between the track and the grandstand underneath an almost-equatorial sky.
Maryah introduced him as the man who lead Filipenses 4:13, the non-profit group we would be working out with. Meeting him was just like meeting anyone else—a pleasure. We couldn’t converse much because of the language barrier, but soon I couldn’t speak at all in thanks to squats and sprints galore.
Maryah didn’t understand why the workout was 90 minutes instead of the usual 45. We didn’t know he was buying time; then again, I couldn’t think of anything. I was just sweating and in pain. In fact, for 3 weeks afterward my abs cramped whenever I stretched. And that is why I thought of him every day after meeting him. But I wasn’t in love with him—I didn’t even consider him in that context.
Thus, once my body recovered, I stopped thinking about him. I was busy working at the cafe in Corning for quick cash and spending early mornings and late nights meeting with colleagues, fellow young entrepreneurs.
Then he contacted me, and on July 11 of this summer he essentially asked me to marry him and I essentially said yes. “Essentially” because we were holding everything loosely.
Even so, it all came together. The United States and Dominican governments granted us permission to marry and after 3 different attempts at the civil court in San Pedro de Macoris (FYI if the power goes out they won’t process you), we got that official marriage certificate on November 8. I’m not sure if it counts as eloping because our families knew about it and the marriage itself, if not the date, was planned. But, while he told practically everyone in República Dominicana that we were getting married (he and I are complete opposites), Stateside I kept our relationship on the down-low.
I was honestly terrified of what people would think of my decision, of our relationship. Who says “yes” to someone you only met once, someone who lives in a different country and culture, someone who doesn’t speak your language, someone who your family and friends have never met?
Me, apparently.
The few people in my community who I told—people who know me, love me, people who I respect—gave me very different reactions. Some supported my engagement whole-heartedly. Some just went with it. Others told me I needed to reevaluate my decision.
I admit I was extremely conflicted. As someone who has difficulty owning her decisions, I care very much what the people think. But it’s not just that. Though decisions are ultimately personal, it’s healthy and biblical to invite others to join you in the process. I reevaluated again and again.
Eventually, I harnessed all my faith, dug deep, and did what I wanted, what I was compelled by joy to do: I got on a plane at 5:45am in Rochester NY, flew to a Caribbean island, and married the man who loved me before I loved him, the man who pop-started my heart with his love, the man who loves me kinda like Jesus.
It seems opportune to add: there were times when I wasn’t sure it was all that important to marry someone who shares my evangelical Christian faith. But it is important (understatement of the century). Indeed, our common faith is the substance that bridged the chasm of culture, language, and personality, and permitted us to love each other. Our faith will keep us together in all the uncertain days of our lives (the only certain thing is that it’s going to be hard, very hard).
So here I am, the spouse of Victor Gonzalez Melo. I’ve also become a second mother to his 3 sons—a challenge but also a great gift because for so long I’ve wanted the house I live in to have kids in it.
Victor is my desire fulfilled. A couple years ago, after a tragedy, my mom told me to make a list of the qualities/skills I wanted in a husband, and to pray over it. I thought it was a useless, cliche exercise. Every millennial Christian female is told to make a list.
In an anger that was full of broken desire and grief, I typed up a list in my iPhone Notes that was cynically exact. I didn’t believe anyone could live up to it. When I showed it to a couple of guy friends they raised their eyebrows incredulously.
I also texted the list to my mom. It was probably her prayers that brought Victor to me, not mine. Or his prayers, too. He was on his knees for 7 years asking for me.
I’m incalculably thankful to have him, incalculably thankful to be conquering life with the man who is the Victor of my heart.
I was on the island only for personal reasons, trying to gain perspective and make wise decisions in regards to my next steps in life.
In the middle of everything, I ventured out one day a little after dawn and rode to the sports complex by motorcycle. Squished between my sister and her friend, weaving our way quickly through the systematic mayhem that is traffic in San Pedro, and braking frequently for speed bumps and the occasional chicken, I had no idea that this was going to be a remarkable day.
We parked the bike under a tree with a slew of other bikes, walked through the gate, and there he was standing between the track and the grandstand underneath an almost-equatorial sky.
Maryah introduced him as the man who lead Filipenses 4:13, the non-profit group we would be working out with. Meeting him was just like meeting anyone else—a pleasure. We couldn’t converse much because of the language barrier, but soon I couldn’t speak at all in thanks to squats and sprints galore.
Maryah didn’t understand why the workout was 90 minutes instead of the usual 45. We didn’t know he was buying time; then again, I couldn’t think of anything. I was just sweating and in pain. In fact, for 3 weeks afterward my abs cramped whenever I stretched. And that is why I thought of him every day after meeting him. But I wasn’t in love with him—I didn’t even consider him in that context.
Thus, once my body recovered, I stopped thinking about him. I was busy working at the cafe in Corning for quick cash and spending early mornings and late nights meeting with colleagues, fellow young entrepreneurs.
Then he contacted me, and on July 11 of this summer he essentially asked me to marry him and I essentially said yes. “Essentially” because we were holding everything loosely.
Even so, it all came together. The United States and Dominican governments granted us permission to marry and after 3 different attempts at the civil court in San Pedro de Macoris (FYI if the power goes out they won’t process you), we got that official marriage certificate on November 8. I’m not sure if it counts as eloping because our families knew about it and the marriage itself, if not the date, was planned. But, while he told practically everyone in República Dominicana that we were getting married (he and I are complete opposites), Stateside I kept our relationship on the down-low.
I was honestly terrified of what people would think of my decision, of our relationship. Who says “yes” to someone you only met once, someone who lives in a different country and culture, someone who doesn’t speak your language, someone who your family and friends have never met?
Me, apparently.
The few people in my community who I told—people who know me, love me, people who I respect—gave me very different reactions. Some supported my engagement whole-heartedly. Some just went with it. Others told me I needed to reevaluate my decision.
I admit I was extremely conflicted. As someone who has difficulty owning her decisions, I care very much what the people think. But it’s not just that. Though decisions are ultimately personal, it’s healthy and biblical to invite others to join you in the process. I reevaluated again and again.
Eventually, I harnessed all my faith, dug deep, and did what I wanted, what I was compelled by joy to do: I got on a plane at 5:45am in Rochester NY, flew to a Caribbean island, and married the man who loved me before I loved him, the man who pop-started my heart with his love, the man who loves me kinda like Jesus.
It seems opportune to add: there were times when I wasn’t sure it was all that important to marry someone who shares my evangelical Christian faith. But it is important (understatement of the century). Indeed, our common faith is the substance that bridged the chasm of culture, language, and personality, and permitted us to love each other. Our faith will keep us together in all the uncertain days of our lives (the only certain thing is that it’s going to be hard, very hard).
So here I am, the spouse of Victor Gonzalez Melo. I’ve also become a second mother to his 3 sons—a challenge but also a great gift because for so long I’ve wanted the house I live in to have kids in it.
Victor is my desire fulfilled. A couple years ago, after a tragedy, my mom told me to make a list of the qualities/skills I wanted in a husband, and to pray over it. I thought it was a useless, cliche exercise. Every millennial Christian female is told to make a list.
In an anger that was full of broken desire and grief, I typed up a list in my iPhone Notes that was cynically exact. I didn’t believe anyone could live up to it. When I showed it to a couple of guy friends they raised their eyebrows incredulously.
I also texted the list to my mom. It was probably her prayers that brought Victor to me, not mine. Or his prayers, too. He was on his knees for 7 years asking for me.
I’m incalculably thankful to have him, incalculably thankful to be conquering life with the man who is the Victor of my heart.
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