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Enrique's Journey

San Diego has launched a "One Book, One San Diego" campaign with the book "Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario. I joined with "all of San Diego" and picked up this short non-fiction telling of a Honduran boy's journey from Tegucigalpa to the U.S. in search of his mother who immigrated before him. The tale left me chilled, upset, and with more than a little hope.

Much of the story takes place in Tegucigalpa, a city I left behind just short of a year ago. Nazario's rendering of "Teguc" sat oppressively on my chest, filling me with homesickness for a place I had only begun to know. Her telling of the commonplace daily life in abject poverty coupled with descriptions of places and sights I knew well made Tegucigalpa live in my present. I could almost smell the acrid smoke of burning trash, feel the burn of the tropical sun, hear the chatter of rapid slurred Spanish mixed with honking horns.

As Enrique journeys north to find the mother who left him when he was five, the one he is sure will fill the aching whole he feels in his life, he encounters unimaginable horror. He is repeatedly assaulted, robbed, stripped naked, and deported back to his Guatemalan starting point. Once he is beaten nearly to death by members of a mara, a Central American gang. These dangers all compound the already life-threatening journey atop freight trains that maim and kill thousands of migrants each year as they make the illegal trek.

So many of "my boys" at El Hogar wanted to come north. Most asked for my phone number repeatedly. I didn't sleep well last night. "Enrique's Journey" left me more anxious than I can remember being in a very long time. I don't know if I fear directly for my boys, or if Enrique reminded me about the fragility of human life and the presence of those who work exceedingly hard and who still live in the bleakest of poverty.

The Church ends up the real hero of Enrique's journey. In two places, Veracruz and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, we hear of communities who are reaching out to their migrant neighbors. Leaders in the Church set an example by throwing food and clothing to passing trains, or by sheltering those who are held up in making the final push to the United States. Their communities followed, and Enrique's journey is a testament to the Gospel LIVED OUT by Christian communities making the option for the migrant poor.

Am I doing enough? I think part of my lack of sleep came from feeling so detached from these communities, from a sense of guilt because of my wealth. Last year I lived among so many who were planning or had made the trek north. Enrique's Journey gave me new insight into what this via crucis actually entails. I feel so disconnected from those who suffer so much here in the affluence of San Diego. I am lucky that I will spend part of this summer in El Salvador and back in Honduras, that I can visit the children at Dorcas House in Mexico whenever I want, but I don't go enough. My privilege isolates me from the poor, among whom Christ dwells. I must continually ask God to surmount my fears, excuses, and misgivings. I must repent of all that isolates me from the reality of so many people's lives if I am to hope to have a glimpse of God's dream for the world.

DisPlaceD

Some friends of mine are helping out with "Displace Me," an event being run by Invisible Children this weekend. I remember when Jason, Bobby, and Laren first screened their movie at USD and how incredibly naive they were. At that point they were three very immature idealistic guys with a funny documentary. Now they've turned that movie into a huge organization/movement working to end war and poverty in Uganda...it's a little crazy.

Displace me is a night of solidarity with the women, men, and especially the children displaced by war in Uganda. Thousands of young people around the United States are going to sleep out in cardboard boxes.

I commend the audacity of Invisible Children, but it's still hard for me to see beyond the fresh white faces who run the organization. I think it's great how much awareness their sleek marketing raises, but I still question what long term effect this all will have. Still, getting thousands of hyper-privileged U.S. youth and young adults to spend one night thinking about how so much of the world lives, that amazes me. At the same time I think back to that original screening. Bobby answered one of my questions by talking about branding. Every time a world conflict or disaster happens, NGOs show up and try to get the word out that they are there, so that the world knows that their "brand" is doing something. I wonder how much Invisible Children has become the "brand" for young adults who want to get involved with Africa. Still, they impress me. I mean, I'm writing a blog about they're idea "Displace Me."

Being displaced comes with a toll. The more we move outside the expectations of our culture, the more we feel like a stranger in our own world. I was amazed how much Mira Nair's new movie "Namesake" resonated with me when she had one of her characters speak about the U.S. as "That lonely country..." I think for most people it's pretty hard to figure out who you are, which seems to be much of the work you do in your teens and 20s...figuring out who you are/want to be. Adding to that a disavowal of what your own culture markets as "success" definitely complicates the matter.

But God calls us to be displaced. Jesus and his band of disciples lived radically displaced lives among the poor and the left out. As Christians, we are called to embrace every opportunity for God to break through the walls our culture builds around us, to actively work to break down the barriers between ourselves and others. That feeling of frustrated loneliness, confusion, mixed loyalties, can be holy. We are called to be homesick for the Kingdom of God, we miss a place that we are called to be part of bringing about. Until then we feel DisPlaceD.

Virginia Tech, Columbine, and life

As events unfolded on Monday in Blacksburg Virginia, I felt a familiar hollowness in my chest. That sinking empty feeling, like something palpable dropping somewhere deep inside me brought about a frightening sense that I had been here before. Eight years ago yesterday, I remember sitting in English class when I heard the door open. A school administrator left a letter with my teacher, said something into his ear and then left the temporary building, locking the door behind her. We all craned our necks to look out the window and saw a squadron of police patrolling the walkway outside. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had just finished their terrible rampage at Columbine...we were one of the nearest high schools. Life in Jefferson County changed that day.

I remember flying kites on April 21, 1999. My friends Sarah, Jed, and I had nothing else to do. School was canceled for the rest of the week. I remember thinking how strange it was to fly a kite, to watch a beautiful bright piece of fabric play on the breathy wind. Kites are flown in times of celebration and on sunny summer carefree days...these days were heavy laden.

Those few days off from school were difficult, but also some of the most wonderful moments I can remember. In the midst of the horror, we reached out for one another and felt the depth of friendships, family, and community. We spent time together in prayer, time laughing, time flying kites. We were forced to stop and consider what happened and what mattered.

Wednesday night, I had the privilege of working with people from around UCSD to bring students together for a Vigil for Virginia Tech. Taking a very simple moment to come together in this time of grief brought me closer to my new University home than I have felt all year. We remembered all of those who suffered because of the violence at Virginia Tech.

We have a God who came to be with those who suffer, who entered fully into the human experience even surrendering to a humiliating and excruciating death. In those last moments on the cross I have to think Jesus experience that same sinking feeling. "How God, how could you let this happen. Why have you forsaken me." Jesus KNEW the painful isolation we feel from our fellow human beings and from God when such great tragedy occurs. He also gave us the supreme example of reaching out to others in love. May we reach out in love to one another, that no one may feel alone in this time.

A Better World through Global Living

My friend Rob plans to spend next year living and working in Tijuana Mexico with migrant laborers. We sat down this weekend to talk about what it meant to spend part of your life living "out there." What does it mean? I was struck by how many people I know and love who are living radically global lives, so I thought I'd share just a few of their stories with you:


My friends Nate and Jenny are living and working as Missionary teachers in Malawi Africa. Nate was my roomate sophomore year of college, and Jenny was one of my best friends all the way through. They were married right out of college and moved almost immediately to Africa. Jenny teaches 1st grade and Nate teaches 6th, 7th, and 10th grade Math and two grades of science.




My Buddy Corny is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Peru. He is working primarily in health and sanitation education in an extremely rural area of Peru, but like all North Americans in Latin America he also finds himself teaching English, playing soccer, and has recently been elected as a minor community leader for the Mayors office!
His blog is here:
http://cornelii.livejournal.com/


Jered and Erin participated in the same program that sent me to Honduras for a year: YASC, but they spent their time in Taiwan working at an Anglican college. Jered is now in Seminary in New York City and en route to becoming an Episcopal Priest. You can read their blog here: http://jeredanderin.blogspot.com/






Amy and Vince Denys-Zuniga are new friends from my recent trip to El Salvador. Amy is serving as rector (priest in charge of a church) of Saint Andrew the Apostle in San Salvador. Vince seems to have taught half of El Salvador how to play guitar, in addition to helping out with Agricultural projects and receiving groups. There blog is here:
http://updatesfromelsalvador.blogspot.com/


I have to end this small representative sample with Lyra Harris. Lyra served in Honduras with the Young Adult Service Corps, YASC, program. She arrived several months before I got to Honduras, but we spent 8 months living and travelling together. She was working with Development and Relief work through the Diocese of Honduras. She came as a co-leader on UCSDs recent trip to El Salvador, and we left her in Central America to go back to Honduras to re-photograph her work sites a year later. I have to share a quote from one of her emails: "As much as I am tempted to narrate the experiences I know I will fall short. It is impossible to describe the amount of beauty and sorrow, the feelings of being alive in the world, letting the world touch you and mold you. Being open to it all. So, I will continue to write hopefully interesting letters, but you too can do this! Just stand in the rain in the middle of a thunderstorm, or learn another language, or watch a sunset from the top of a mountain, or read psalm 16, or talk to someone you normally wouldn't, or swim in the ocean, or get swept up by a crowd and dance in the street."

Each and every one of these beloved friends honestly believes a better world is possible. They struggle through language barriers, personal doubt, cultural taboos, digestive disorders, depressing living situations, to witness that better world being born, to be the breathing coaches for the world through the birth pangs, inhaling and exhaling the wildness of the Spirit. This is only a small sample. I could talk about Krista in the Phillipines, Anne and Monica and Heidi in South Africa, Paul in Jerusalem, Kay and Bob in Syria, Lauren in the Sudan, Beth in Tanzania, Sarah in China, Angela in Panama, Adam in Brazil, Denise in Mexico, tons of friends in Honduras. God pleads with us to be the change this world needs. God dreams of a world where the painful borders economic, racial, sexual, geographic, and otherwise, the products of our structural sin DO NOT EXIST. God is on a mission to reconcile the whole human family, that we might not only feed the hungry and see the end of war, but so that we might Love One Another radically in community.

So will you dance in the rain? Will you give of yourself and your time to help this new world be born?

Were you there?

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

This question sits heavy on our chests over the days of Holy Week. Today is Holy Saturday, and today the tomb is full. Jesus has died a miserable and tortured death.

I just spent a week with students in El Salvador and every day we asked, "What was hard for you today?" There were a lot of answers to this question: watching our cook Mercedes cry as she explained that she hadn't seen her daughter for three years because she had crossed illegally into the United States to try to better the family's situation back home; listening to young people who were afraid to play in church soccer tournament lest they be caught up in gang violence; seeing depictions of bodies tortured and murdered during the war; the sights of the ongoing poverty throughout El Salvador.

David Moseley, a theologian who teaches at the Bishop's School, has been giving a course on Jurgen Moltmann's book "The Crucified God" during lent. Last night he preached for the Good Friday service at St. Paul's Cathedral. His theme was theodicy the question: "where is God when people suffer?" Often we think about Jesus of Nazareth's death on the cross as the "sacrifice to cover our sins" as if what was needed was a perfect man to die. Moltmann reminds us that in Jesus, God Himself suffers on the cross. God does not exact revenge on an innocent human, but comes to earth and reveals his love by suffering WITH us. It is God who is crucified, God who cries out in agony and feeling abandoned, God who dies. God enters into the absolute messiness of humanity and experiences excruciating loss out of a desire for relationship.

I was struck by one of the relics on display at the Centro de Mgr. Romero. It was here where in 1989 six Jesuit priests were martyred because they dared to write that God was on the side of the poor. On the night that the Salvadoran ejercito entered the theology center and executed the priests, one of them was reading "The Crucified God." The book soaked up so much blood from the priest that it appears waterlogged. Now it is displayed in a glass case like the relics of more ancient saints, reminding us of God's work through people who choose to follow.

The German Lutheran Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who died in a Nazi Concentration camp wrote that grace is costly. 70 years ago Bonhoeffer wrote against a Spirituality that provided what he saw as "cheap grace," salvation without struggle, supposed appeasement of the need to feel redeemed. This grace is not the salvation of Jesus, who calls on us to follow him in the way of the cross. Discipleship leads to suffering because the world still perpetuates the anti-Christian systems of oppression which diminish the humanity of the ones God created and loves. Those who follow Jesus are called to throw themselves into the gear-work of the world's machine of oppression.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? The disciples must have asked this question of God. Seeing him beaten, thrashed, bloodied, hanging by nails through his flesh. Jesus himself asks, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Where is God when those we love suffer? Our faith in the incarnation causes us to answer that it is God himself who asks that question, God himself who suffers with us unto death, God who today lays in the tomb.

God then is with the suffering of the world. The Crucified God died with the Jesuits in the UCA, He cries with the hungry children out in the campo, and is there when a teenager is murdered in the name of gang war.

Were you there? Will you be?

Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble...

Ash Wednesday Sermon

So this is a bit out-dated, but it's my sermon from Ash Wednesday at UCSD:

God of Reconciliation, restore us to unity with you and with one another, that we might practice your ministry of reconciliation in the Ashes of our broken world. AMEN

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the time in the Christian year when we remember the brokenness in our lives and in our world. We walk through the desert time of fasting and penance, preparing to be witnesses to the Resurrection of Christ.

Christians from the more liturgical traditions mark the season by “giving something up” for Lent. Oftentimes people give up chocolate, meat, or alcohol. My roommate Paul once gave up In and Out hamburgers. He said he chose In and Out burgers because he loved them so much, and that every time he craved those juicy patties, that toasted bun, and the amazing mixture of special sauce and grilled onions but couldn’t have one it would remind him of why it was important to sacrifice for God, and what God’s sacrifice meant to him. My other roommate and I ate a lot of In and Out that Lent. We would go through the drive-thru on the way home and eat it in the living room in front of Paul. I want to say that we were trying to help him remember the importance of sacrifice, but we were probably just being jerks. I gave up meat for Lent once, basing my reasoning along the same lines as Paul’s, but I’m pretty sure I mostly wanted to sample the romance of being a liberal vegetarian without the long term commitment.

Our Gospel reading today admonishes us not to be boastful in our fasting, not to allow others to know of our almsgiving. If we see our Penance as Performance, we will lose all benefit for our actions. Our sacrifice will mean little to God, and even less to us.

One Lent I decided to take something simple on instead of giving something drastic up. I was an RA in the freshmen dorms right near a footpath that passed along the bottom of a canyon next to my college. I decided that three times a week I would run, but not only would I run. As I ran I would listen to recordings of old hymns or sermons from Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on my mp3 player. You can see what a Church nerd I am. When I finished running I would sit on a bench that looks over the canyon out to the ocean, stretch out my legs, and pray.

One of the beautiful things about going to college here in San Diego is that, even though Lent generally falls between late February and early April, most mornings are warm and sunny and you can run with your shirt off. Listening as the sun poured down on my shoulders I let myself go into the rhythm of the running. My feet pounding the dirt path carried away the concerns of the day and allowed me to enter a space of contemplation. I thought about what the sermon was saying, about the beauty of the day; I felt the wind as it passed over my naked skin. Afterwards as I sat on that bench I would allow myself to just be in the presence of God.

Those were some truly miraculous moments. Somehow the running allowed me to quiet all of my other thoughts and just focus on the words of the sermon or of the hymns. Afterwards as I cooled down I could feel the impressive weight of quietness, like that feeling you get when you walk into a huge cathedral and the power of the cavernous silent space enters your mind and helps it to be quiet as well. The discipline of running gave God a space to inhabit in my life.

I think the discipline worked because it was new. I had never been a runner. It took that beautiful path in the canyon that Lent to teach me to enjoy running. Really it was less about running and more about doing something new, something that could be apportioned out of my normal life and reserved for God. I had carved out short periods of my morning in response to faith. And as if in response, God was born to me in those moments, incarnate in the quietness I felt as I sat on the bench looking out at the ocean, real in ways I had never experienced before, impressively present.

Father J.J. O’Leary, a Jesuit priest who used to teach down the road at USD preached perhaps the most memorable homily in my history of Ash Wednesdays. A prolifically brief homilist, his reflections seldom lasted over five minutes, something I can’t promise you this afternoon. J.J.”s homilies commonly concluded with the direction to “go into your hearts” and consider something.

That Ash Wednesday Fr. J.J. said simply that when we give something up for Lent, God doesn’t want us to give up things that make us happy. If we enjoy chocolate or a martini at the end of a long day we shouldn’t give them up. God wanted us to give up something that made us sad. He then invited us into our hearts to consider what that might be.

The poetic truth of Father J.J.’s sermon really impressed me. Disciplines are not meant to be muscular expressions showing what ascetic lives we can live, how much we can give up. Lent is not the Christian version of those late night ESPN shows where freakishly large Scandinavian men lift boulders and drag Volkswagens trying to show one another up.

Discipline, the act of following Christ, is nothing short of submitting portions of our lives to the transformative power of God. It is all about God’s ability to change us, and not at all about our ability to change ourselves.

This change God desires not only for us, but through us for the whole of creation. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa says, “God has a Dream.” God’s dream, God’s vision for a world where the hungry are fed, the left out are included, those who receive discrimination are counted as blessings, God’s hope for the world: The Kingdom of God must be realized.

God invites us to work toward this Divine Dream knowing that we will never offer perfect lives, perfect charity, perfect organizations, or universities, much less perfect churches. God invites us into God’s transforming work with the promise that the very ministry we offer the world, will continue to transform our lives, and to shape us.

In our reading from Corinthians we receive a charge. “So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us.” We are ambassadors for Christ. Today we dirty our faces and hands with the ashes of our world. We resolve to enter in to that messiness, seeking to hand over our lives to the one who desires to transform us, that we might work with God to transform the world.

So what ashy part of our world, of God’s world, will you enter?

What part of your life will you hand over to God?

Blow the trumpet, sanctify a fast. Not for the sake of performing a duty or boasting of a sacrifice, but so that we together might invite God into some small space in our lives, so that Christ can invite us into the work of God’s dream. Amen.