More Than Words

This week I'm sharing a series of stories and reflections from my time spent studying abroad in Central America. These are excerpts from my memoir in progress; stories that have shaped me, shattered my pretenses and preset beliefs, and sculpted the way I live and love and encounter God today. I hope in some small way, you can relate and be challenged to reflect more deeply on the experiences that have influenced you and your faith. Check out Monday's and Tuesday's posts to catch up. 

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More Than Words

I could handle the rants on politics and even the exposure to poverty. I’d never been that interested in political ideologies or campaign propaganda and I’d always known there were poor people in the world. The direct attack on my faith hurt most. 

Most days, our professor, Don Mike, would pace back and forth like a lion waiting to go in for the kill. His sporadic mumblings sounded like growls and soon he would be roaring. My jaw would clench as my heart pounded. He would reduce my beliefs and upbringing to egocentric self-validation. A means of exclusion. Judgment. My faith was offensive, a stench in the nostrils of the Almighty God. A darkened city on a hill. The tasteless salt of the earth. The hypocritical light of the world. The hair on my arms would stand up and it would feel like I’d swallowed a car battery. If anyone, he’d be the one to know when the church was being ineffective; he used to be a Catholic priest.

Don Mike lecturing to us on a field trip in Costa Rica.

He would be panting by now; his gruff voice would crack as he condemned American Christianity and everything it stands for. I felt personally attacked as he recounted the horrors of conquest-driven, smallpox-bearing missionaries and money scamming “Gospel of Wealth” televangelists. The blood of every person killed or exploited in the name of God since the dawn of time would stick in the crevices of my guilty hands.

By this point, the pulsating vein in the middle of his scrunched forehead looked ready to burst. I would forget that that he coined himself a “recovering Catholic.” I would forget that he did not hold a monopoly on truth. And while I hated him and everything he was saying, I still began to believe that maybe I was the enemy.

I began to question my entire life as a Christian—which was also my entire life as a person. Appearance was everything. Christianity was only rhetoric. I was only rhetoric—empty words that sounded pretty but meant nothing and helped no one. I could justify and preach and condemn, but loving didn’t come so easily. Although I had been plagued with guilt and self-doubt, I had always thought that I did enough when it came to giving and serving the poor. I was nice to my friends; I didn’t do drugs; I gave money to the church. I prayed. I read my Bible. All of my spiritual strivings turned irrelevant in the shadow of Don Mike’s angry eyes. I thought of the starving children I had seen digging through trash in the garbage dump, begging on the streets of San Jose, and knew that no amount of Bible reading and prayer groups could make the world fair.

I wanted to be more than words.

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How have you been challenged to live out your faith? Have you ever discovered hypocrisy or hollowness in your own faith journey?

The Breakdown

This week I’m going to share a series of stories and reflections from my time spent studying abroad in Central America. These are excerpts from my memoir in progress; stories that have shaped me, shattered my pretenses and preset beliefs, and sculpted the way I live and love and encounter God today.  I hope in some small way, you can relate and be challenged to reflect more deeply on the experiences that have influenced you and your faith.

The Breakdown

“You didn’t think the world was fair did you?” 

Don Antonio, our program director, smirked like the Cheshire cat while pacing the small study abroad classroom in San Jose, Costa Rica.  For the first day of class, he had proctored a little quiz to test our knowledge of global affairs.  

We all failed miserably. 

In this test we confirmed something we already knew—the world is not fair.  But what we did not know, and our professors would continue to illuminate for the duration of the semester, was that all of this poverty and injustice and death and suffering was somehow our fault. 

“You actually thought the United States had a positive influence on the world?  You thought the Bush administration actually looks out for anyone other than big business and the multinational corporations?” he asked incredulously, assuming that we were rich, snotty kids who’d never had a hard day of work in their lives—which was a pretty accurate appraisal as we were all, with the exception of one Albanian student, Americans who used 80% of the world’s resources satiating our lust for SUVs and bottled water.  Compared to the people of Costa Rica we weren’t poor college students, we were rich gringoswith ample financial and social opportunity.

That first day I learned startling and horrific statistics about global poverty and the horrendously unequal distribution of wealth.  Twenty percent of the world’s population consumes 86% of the world’s resources.  A child dies of hunger every five seconds.  One billion people around the world live on less than a dollar a day.  Statistics I’d heard, but never paid attention to.  Statistics that never meant anything before.  I was more ashamed of my ignorance than the miserable state of affairs in the world.       

        

And that was the beginning of the breakdown.

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Have you ever had your core beliefs about culture, politics, and your role in the world questioned or attacked? How did you react? How has that experience changed how you think and view the world now? 

I am not an island, You are not a "Them"

I thought this blog would be about hope, not anger. But anger is a very real part of my journey toward hope.

I used to be really angry about injustice in the world. Don’t get me wrong, it still breaks my heart, still brings tears to my eyes, but it no longer hardens my heart.

I used to be enraged on behalf of others. Particularly the plight of the rural poor.

I used to use this anger as an ideology. As my new religion.

I used this anger as an excuse not to move. To stay stuck. To lash out.

I used it as an excuse to dehumanize the poor. To reduce them to a “them” I could be enraged on behalf of. Not people that I knew and loved. Not people that deserved my hope and my efforts as much as my anger and indignation.

A while back I wrote a poem about this act of dehumanization I masked as romanticized, righteous indignation. And here it is:

I am not an island

You are not a “them”

I remember the romance of the pain

Weathered, leather face

Acidic fumes

I forget you

I talk anger

I feel smug

You are a story I heard

A feeling I felt

Not a person I know

I use you to feel pain

In pain I am Justified

I use you to reject Him

But you praise Him with your chapped lips

Chapped, I said it,

Romanticizing again

I put it on you

It’s never me

I’m the enlightened one

Finally free

Of the guilt on my hands

Of the burden of me

But am I angry for you?

Or angry for me?

In the fury of my rage

You become a “them”

I become a lie

I am not a martyr

Remind me yet again

I am not an island

You are not a them

Pictured to the left: Me with a woman, Grey, that I stayed with in Nicaragua. She shared not only her house and food--mostly pineapples--with me, but also her thoughts, her hopes, and her dreams. She was one of the women I wrote this poem for a year after I came back to the States.

Have any of you experienced a time when you used anger on behalf of someone or a group of someones as an excuse to stay stuck?