The Year of Two Easters

Joy: Panajachel Guatemala

8 am Easter morning.

The church is transformed; white banners, edged in gold, cascading from the ceiling and down the wall, the somber Lenten purple disappearing over night. In the quiet hush, we choose a seat near the back, hoping that our lack of familiarity with the Catholic service goes unnoticed there. We're not there long, however. To our confusion, the priest starts recruiting women to carry the statue of the risen Christ, and everyone starts filing out the door. 

We join the group, wondering over the lack of service and ceremony, and cross the plaza in front of the church to the street.  Realization sets in: "Easter mass and parade" is what the sign said when I stopped in to find the service time.  Apparently the parade is first. The women, representative of those to whom Jesus first appeared, lift the statue of the risen Christ and lead us down the street.  Next comes a dusty pickup truck, crowded with an entire band in the back. The music starts, joyful, celebratory. He is risen! We are saved! Chains are broken!

I'm beaming as I join in the songs, simple choruses that are easy to pick up on the spot. We parade down the street where all the bars and clubs are, dead at this hour on a Sunday morning, passing underneath pineapples, flowers, and other fruit swinging above us, decorating the street for Easter.  We reach the main intersection in town and swing back up toward the church, early morning shoppers stopping to watch, or join in. After our joyful procession through town, we file back into the church for a more traditional service, but I'm brimming with joy.  Can there be a better way to celebrate Easter than singing all through town my joy that my Lord lives?

Reverence: Ramnicu Valcea, Romania

11 pm Easter Saturday

The lawn around the church is already overflowing with people, but we push towards the door, Cristian assuring me there will still be some room inside.  We crowd in the back, standing together.  The lights are off, it's dark, solemn, we're all waiting in expectation, remembering the death of Christ, and anticipating the moment we celebrate His resurrection.

At midnight, the bells start pealing and a single candle is lit.  The light of the world has conquered the darkness.  The priest lights the candles of the other priests and they begin slowly processing out of the church, waving incense, and stopping to sing "Hristos a înviat din morți"- Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs bestowing life!

I join in the first phrase, since Cristian taught it to me before we came, but my tongue gets lost in the unfamiliar sounds of the next phrases. As the priests get closer, Cristian's mother's caution to be before we left suddenly makes sense. Putting my hair up seemed unnecessary- I'm an adult, I thought- I won't catch my hair on fire with my candle. But now, with everyone pressing in around me, trying to light their candle directly from the priest, I realize it wasn't my own candle I should worry about, but everyone else's. My protestant Christmas Silent Night with candles mental image shatters, as instead we're crammed tight as sardines and lighting candles over one another's heads. I abandon any idea of lighting my candle from the priest- I'll just light it from Cristian instead.

The priests, long robes and beards flowing, leave the church and cross to a platform set up facing the church doors. We all stand on the lawn, candles glowing in the dark, as the priest speaks and Cristian occasionally whispers translations in my ear. Outside there are even more people than were crowded into the church. I'm filled with a sense of reverence and awe. This ceremony seems ancient to me, and I'm sure it is- the Orthodox Church has been around for a millennium.

There's something deeply rewarding about joining in both of these Easter traditions, so different than my own, but both so symbolic of the joy and reverence that the death and resurrection of our Savior should invoke. My faith is bigger than me, than the way I have lived it out, and I feel joined to something larger- the universal Church of all believers. It's another moment where I can almost envision heaven and the beauty of people of every tribe, nation, and tongue coming together to sing praise to the Lamb who is worthy.

A Very Different Thanksgiving- Part 2

The sun was close to setting and I was getting tired.  I wanted to sit down, but something about the black sand of the beach made me more wary of that than I usually am. Suddenly, a large line of people emerged from a gate at the edge of the beach.  As they made their way down to the shore, I noticed two women with large tubs and a group quickly gathering around.  The turtles had arrived.  I hurried over and peeked over the heads of the children crowding close and squealed with the “aww” factor of dozens of tiny baby sea turtles, all clamoring to get out and start their journey to the ocean.

“Step back behind the line”, the volunteers instructed us, shepherding us to a line that had been drawn in the sand. They walked the line in trios, one person taking our 10 quetzales (about $1.30) and giving us a ticket, the next person handing us a little plastic bowl and depositing a diminutive turtle from the tub the last person was holding.

I stared at my turtle in delight.  It was so tiny, so full of life, so anxious to go.  It tried to crawl it’s way up the edge of the bowl, so I covered it with my hand, afraid it would flop out and fall to the sand. Once everyone had gotten a turtle, they counted to 3 and we all released our turtles at once as the sun sank below the horizon.  Their little flippers moving madly, they stumbled their way toward the ocean, 3 strokes forward, pause, 3 strokes forward, pause. They were so tiny that footprints left in the sand were obstacles that had to be carefully maneuvered. We cheered them on, urging them to the sea, to survive, to be quick and wary.

As the waves rolled in, little turtles would disappear from the sand, bobbing out to sea.  Others, the stragglers in the group, wandered haphazardly, heading down the beach before veering back towards the ocean.  Finally, as it grew darker and the grey turtles blended in with the sand, the last of the turtles finally made it out to sea. My heart was full- thankful for this amazing and unusual Thanksgiving experience.

A Very Different Thanksgiving- part 1

It’s Thanksgiving morning, but I’m not cooking a turkey or making a pie.  Instead, I’m headed up the mountain to the next town over- Sololá, the capital of the department (Guatemala’s version of States) that I live in.  We have a meeting with the director of the Department of Education and the supervisors of every school district we are currently working in.

I look around, fascinated, as we walk in.  It’s my first time at the offices, and it’s so far from my imagination of what the department of education would look like back home.  It’s a cement block structure, just as all the schools I’ve visited, and the waiting room we’re in has high ceilings and is cold this morning. The walls are painted, but the cement blocks below are still visible and the lighting is poor.  A stream of people arriving for work greets us as they walk past.  Eventually we’re lead upstairs to a large conference room, an overhead projector already turned on and the power point for the meeting after ours on the screen.  There’s a pretty tile floor pattern and tables set up in a large U.  We talk to the sub-director of the department of education as we wait, as supervisors begin to file in.

This meeting is the culmination of months of effort on the part of one of my coworkers. We’re here to sign a letter of understanding between us and the department of education.  It gives us their backing to work in schools in the districts of this department.  The department director reads the letter aloud, outlining the departments responsibilities and our responsibilities, and then, with all the supervisors we work with looking on, our Director of Programs and the director of the department of education sign and seal a letter for each supervisor as I take photos.  By the end, all the district supervisors in the department have arrived for their end of the year meeting.  We get a photo with all of them.  It’s a historic moment for us, and we’re really excited to have backing at this level of government for the work we do.

Work for the week done for me and my one American coworker, we head back down the mountain for a celebratory breakfast of eggs, black beans, plantains and tortillas, before we leave for our Thanksgiving holiday.

Big Spenders

Usually when my alarm is set before 6:00 I’m not so happy about waking up, but last Tuesday was an exception.  I had an exciting task ahead of me- several coworkers and I were going in to the capital to buy $10,000 worth of books.  Every year we receive over a million dollars worth of books in donations from book consolidators in the States, and then we pass on those donations to schools and libraries we work with, but since those donations come from surplus from publishers, there’s no guarantees to what we get. This year, almost all of our books were at the 3-5^th grade reading levels, so we were in search of some quality early grades books. 

As we walked into the store, Fondo Cultural Economico, the manager came down the stairs to meet us, handshakes and kisses on the cheek were exchanged, and then we were ushered through the store area to a separate room.  Tables had been laid out, books carefully displayed, a careful selection they thought might interest us. We flipped through, quickly discarding books that were too advanced. We asked the price of a book and another employee appeared with a laptop, looking up prices and marking them on a sticky note for every book we were interested in.  Another table magically appeared for us when we wanted to put all the books we were tentatively interested in together.

I found a new favorite, about a little boy with a stubborn pet mastodon and giggled over a wordless picture book of some animals who chase after a fox who stole a hen, only to find out that the fox and hen are actually friends. There were the books I set aside too- Beautifully illustrated poetry that was way to abstract for 6 year olds and moralizing value tales that were too boring to read.  But choosing $10,000 dollars worth of books goes surprisingly quickly when you’re buying for 70 schools and would like best if every school received the same set of books. 

While we were waiting for our order to be packed, the manager invited us to coffee at the bookstore’s adjoining restaurant.  We sipped tea and coffee and talked about book publishing in Mayan languages in their upstairs lounge, and then, urged by the manager to accept his offer of lunch, moved down to the restaurant floor below for cheese stuffed cauliflower and rice. We talked about international book fairs and his plans to expand the bookstore into more of a cultural center, and as the book packing continued, he invited us to try dessert, and we were rewarded by some excellent crepes. There’s a saying here in Guatemala- “full belly, happy heart”.  That was absolutely true at that moment.

We browsed the bookstore as they finished packing out order, and then arranged for delivery and headed back home.  I’m thankful for spending sprees, especially book buying ones, and as we were driving away, I couldn’t help but think I could get used to spending $10,000 at a go if the customer service was always so great.

Split Pea Pie

“I’ll make a pumpkin pie and an apple pie”, I said. How hard could it be, really?  I’d just bought something that was smaller, greener, harder shelled, and more ridged than a pumpkin at the market the week before, and it was remarkably pumpkin like inside.

Sundays are market days, and the streets were overflowing with vendors. I walked down a crowded lane, fruit displays, papaya, pineapple, granadillas, strawberries, and some fruits I couldn’t even identify forming haphazard towers.  I restacked an orange I’d knocked to the ground as I brushed past and headed past vegetables: tomatoes, red peppers, onions, eggplants and broccoli. I wasn’t noticing any pumpkin-like squash. I headed into the covered market, made a detour to one of the stalls in the back that sells candles and then zig-zagged through past kitchen goods, dried peppers, cheap clothes, fresh fish and more vegetables.  Still no sign of pumpkins.

Outside, and close to giving up, I finally spotted something that looked like a cross between a butternut squash and a watermelon. It just might do the trick. “What color is it inside?” I asked the lady selling it. “Black”, she answered off-handedly. “Black?!”  I asked, surprise in my voice, as my mind mentally cataloged every vegetable dish I’ve ever been served at Guatemalan restaurants and failing to bring a single black squash to mind. But, she continued to insist that it was black, and when I told her I was looking for one that was orange inside and asked if she had any, she pulled another odd shaped winter squash from under some lettuce and presented it to me.  It looked pretty much like the other. “It might be black, it might be orange,” she shrugged, then nicked the outside skin, revealing some pale orange flesh underneath.

I took my pumpkin substitute home and tried to hack it open with my kitchen knife.  When it finally split, I looked at it in consternation.  Blackish green goop and dark greyish green flesh were what the inner layer looked like, only the very outside of the squash was orange at all.  But, I had a pie to make, so I cut it into pieces and stuck it on the stove to boil. 

As I scooped the softened flesh from the shell to make puree I almost stopped the experiment then.  The green vastly overwhelmed the orange and this was going to be the strangest “pumpkin” pie ever.  But, I had just spent an hour buying it, hacking it apart, and boilng it til it was soft enough, and it smelled and tasted pumpkiny enough so I threw it into the blender, and continued my recipe anyway.

Several hours later, my no bake, pea-soup “pumpkin” pie was chilled and ready to go.  And green notwithstanding, I’m thankful that a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg go a long way towards transforming a mystery squash into a very tasty and almost convincing “pumpkin” pie.

Who is my neighbor?

Image used under Open Government License from Wikimedia

Now, hundreds in Paris are mourning the loss of a loved one. Now, thousands of Syrians flee from terror in their homeland. And while profiles on facebook supportively turn white, red, and blue in solidarity with our neighbors in France, thirty-one US governors symbolically slam the door on these other neighbors from Syria in need.

And my heart breaks. It breaks for those in France. It breaks for refugees who faced horrors we can't even imagine, only to be told they aren't welcome. It breaks because of the fear that wants to keep out those with nowhere else to go. And it breaks that some who call themselves followers of Christ seem to so completely forget his words.

“Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said to him, “What is written in the Law? . . ,” And he answered, “You shall love. . . your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.” But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Fear speaks loudly. But love can speak louder. And sometimes a story can break down walls.

They welcomed me into their living room, this family who'd arrived as refugees years ago.  "Have you eaten yet?", the mother asked. "No, but I will eat when I get home".  "No, no. Look, we have food left from dinner.  Do you eat chicken? Let me heat it up for you."  Passionately, she told me about her dreams for her two daughters, her love evident in every word. She lit up as she told me how wonderful it felt to see her daughter learn to read. She told me how she narrated stories to her children in her first language so they would grow up multilingual, even though the language she most wanted them to become fluent in was the one of the country they were now living in. 

This was a story of love, of family, a story any mother can relate to.

Jesus replied, “A man . . . fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was. . .

Their mother went on to tell me how she wanted her children to know where they came from and be proud of who they are. "Your identity is made up of foundation posts- your culture, your personality, your language and your religion" She continued, faith radiating from her as she spoke, of her Muslim beliefs, the way her heart responds in faith, and how she hopes to pass her beliefs on to her children.

Now this story, like that of the Good Samaritan, takes a turn that isn't quite as easy to relate to. The Jews, listening to Jesus' story, would have been suspicious when the Samaritan arrived on the scene. After all, their faith was not to be trusted.  And too often, we can have the same uncomfortable, suspicious knee jerk reaction to the Muslim faith. 

. . . and when [the Samaritan] saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

But just as the Samaritan proved to be a neighbor, this lovely woman and her family I met showed this same ability to be neighbors, to show compassion, to love. The boundaries of religion do not mark who is or isn't our neighbor.

We cannot beat hate with more hate. Only love conquers hate.

This is the America I want to be part of:

"Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome. . ." 

(excerpt from The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus)

(Writing a blog post seemed an insufficient response to a crisis of these proportions, so I hopped over to Ann Voskamp's blog A Holy Experience and followed one of her suggestions. If you'd like to know a way you can respond, she has a list of practical suggestions and trustworthy organizations you can contribute to here)