This is a species of lizard found only in Vilches Alto, Chile, the area where the Shalom Center is.  We had a great week at the leadership course, with young people from Paraguay and many of the Regions of Chile.

Memorial Mass at Eastern Mennonite University

A Memorial Mass

Where does the wind go after it plays with my hair?

I thought I was late.  The wind cooled me just a little on this hot, muggy day as I jogged up the grassy hill behind the EMU campus to the Discipleship Center.  Since the hill is a long one, I had time to remember how what happened last week was sending me up the hill today.  During the first session of SPI, I spent some time getting to know Aimy, a student from Vietnam.  She explained to me that the war called the “Vietnam War” in the United States is called the “American War” in Vietnam.  Then she shared with me both happy and heart wrenching stories of growing up in a country that withered with violence like the napalm that disintegrated the trees.   Then on the last day of the session, just as we were saying good-bye to head out the door for the weekend, Aimy let fall her own emotional bomb.  She spoke softly, as if tearing the words out of her soul, “my mother died last night.” Then she fell into my arms weeping.  I held her as the whole class gathered around, first shell shocked, and then weeping openly.

            Aimy is a Buddhist, but she attended a Catholic school in Vietnam.  Teresa, a Maryknoll sister who lives in East Timor, offered to ask Father Jacques, a Jesuit priest from one of the French speaking African counties, to say a mass for her mother.  Aimy thought about it and then decided that she would like to have a service at 7 pm on Friday the 14^th of May and the same time her family would be celebrating a Buddhist ceremony in Vietnam, eleven time zones away.  I was invited to the mass along with the rest of the SPI community.

            This would be the first time I have been to a Catholic Mass organized by a Maryknoll sister, officiated by a Jesuit priest, at a Protestant school, said for a Buddhist woman I had never met, in a community of people from many different races, cultures, and faith traditions.  Not only did I think it would be a unique experience, but I also thought that this journal entry would be an excellent way to process what I would observe.

            I did not think it would be appropriate to take notes during the service, so I read through the Ethnographic Observation suggestions handed to us in class before heading up the hill.  I also set out a pen and a notebook on my bed so that I would have them handy as soon as I came back.  I would be participating in the service, but I also imagined carrying a TV camera with me to record the details in my mind.

Where does the smoke go when the incense burns out?

When I got up the hill, I was out of breath.  Father Jacques was standing outside talking to Aimy.  He was dressed in olive green pants and shirt, and she was dressed in white.  The other people who had already arrived were all women: American, Indonesian, and African.  They had prepared refreshments and were still finishing the final details of the set up.  The pentagonal shaped room had chairs set up in semicircular rows facing a makeshift altar.  The large windows allowed for a broad view of the green grass and trees, Harrisonburg, and the Shenandoah Mountains in the background.  The windows also let the sun light in brightening the floor and heating the western side of the room.  There were cloths from different parts of the world decorating the tables and the altar, and I could recognize the ones from Fiji and Burma.  The altar itself was made up of two tables, one larger and one smaller, in a stair step.  On the lower part there was a Buddhist  meditation bowl (I could identify it from a previous activity at SPI, but I don’t know what it is called), another bowl full of sand, and a round, hollow wooden artifact that I would later find out is an instrument played at Buddhist funerals.  On the top part of the altar was a wooden chalice and plate with wafers set on a small, square, white piece of cloth, a small glass of water, a Bible, a book of the Catholic rituals, and a large white candle.  On the floor in front of the altar there was a large vase full of multicolored carnations.

            I went back outside and toward Father Jacques and Aimy.   Just as I walked up, Father Jacques was saying to Aimy, “Culture sometimes gets in the way of what we would really like to do.”  Aimy just nodded in reply.

            As people began to come into the room, no one sat in the front rows.  Finally, Doreen from Kenya and Yanti from Indonesia asked me to sit with them in the front row.  Aimy lit three incense sticks, and as the spicy-sweet smell wafted through out the room, she stuck them in the sand-bowl.  This was the only Buddhist religious act I could identify during the whole ceremony. She then came and sat next to me.  Father Jacques lit the candle and the Mass began.

            After the songs, prayers, and homily, Father Jacques began to consecrate the elements for the Eucharist.  His hands trembled.  Everyone in the room, except for one young white male whom I don’t know, stood with their hands clasped either in front or behind their bodies, even me.  Many people had their heads bowed; several were weeping openly. When it came time to partake of the communion elements, people whom I knew not to be Catholics including Mennonites, Presbyterians, and Syrian Orthodox went forward to receive communion.  Aimy did not even though she had recited the prayers and sung the songs from memory.  Several times, Aimy’s eyes filled  and hands shook, but the tears never rolled on down her cheeks. 

            Father Daniel, the Syrian Orthodox priest, was dressed in his clerical clothing but did not participate in the service. Just as the final blessing was said and the last of the three incense sticks burnt out, Father Daniel began to sing in the back of the room, his chant a postlude as people began to mill around.    The refreshments were served by both women and men and by people from different counties: tea, juice, nuts, dried fruit, and cookies.  Many people stood around, ate, and chatted.  Aimy handed me her camera, and I spent the next ten minutes taking pictures of her with different people from the SPI community.  Several women were the last to leave, putting the chairs away, picking up the altar and decorations, and clearing the refreshments.  When I finished saying good-bye, I ran back down the hill and straight to my room. I began to write with the taste of dried apricots and artichoke tea still in my mouth. 

Where does the sun go when it sets?

Hundreds of questions have come bubbling out of this experience, and I know I will not have the opportunity for all of them to be answered.  I believe that my questions reflect my hunches, intuitions, and reflections.

v  Aimy was dressed in white, the appropriate color for a Buddhist funeral and yet she chose to have a memorial mass with the SPI community and could recite the Catholic prayers and liturgy (sometimes in French and sometimes in English.) What are the stories behind this decision?  What would be the elements of the Buddhist service her family was celebrating in Vietnam?  What kinds of memories from her childhood and of her mother and family came to her during the mass?  Will this mass be remembered by her as a moment of healing not only in her grief but in the traumas of her childhood? 

v  Father Jacques fingers trembled as he consecrated the elements.  I assume he has served mass many times as it is a priestly requirement.  Do his hands always tremble?  Were they trembling now reflecting a specific emotion?  Was he nervous about serving mass to his fellow students at SPI, about offering an open table where non Catholics would be invited to partake of the Eucharist, or about something else?  What did the more traditional Catholics think about this open invitation to a ritual which is considered exclusive for members of their church?

v  Father Daniel, earlier in the week, had expressed his shock and disillusionment when he saw women helping to serve communion in the local Catholic Church in Harrisonburg.  Yet, after this mass where the Maryknoll sister served from the chalice, he seemed to be at ease and supportive.  What was different for him?  Was it the relationships that he has established here?  Is it that he feels that this is a safe space where he doesn’t have to criticize or protect his position but can be open to sharing and learning?

v  In several key moments, Aimy singled me out.  She sat next to me during the service, she held my hand for a moment during the homily, and she asked me to take pictures for her.  Did our previous conversations establish such a foundation that she felt she could depend on it in this time of grief?  Did she see me as something of a surrogate family for her because she had trusted me to hold the stories of her childhood memories?  Were the bonds of trust between the story teller and the story keeper stays to later weathering the storm of loss?  If so, how can taking the risk of telling our personal stories make us more resilient to the traumas we may face later in our lives? 

v  Women played a prominent role in organizing, preparing, and cleaning up.  Did these women feel a kind of solidarity with Aimy in her grief?  If so, what kinds of stories could they tell?  Yanti, a Mennonite pastor from Indonesia, told me she, too, had lost her mother while living in the United States, and she was not able to go to the funeral.  She was very supportive and caring of Aimy.  What other stories are hidden behind the quiet, good-natured service of these women from around the world?  I would have loved to have sat with the women who worked before and after the mass to share their stories, too. 

v  Refreshments.  Food.  Is it for comfort?  Is it to create a welcoming atmosphere that invites conversation?  Would Aimy’s family have had food after the service in Vietnam?  What would they have eaten and how would it have been served?  What are the other traditions connecting food with death from around the world?  I remembered my own experience in Mexico where we used to eat sugar or chocolate skulls with our names written on them, a tradition to celebrate the day of the dead.  What do these traditions mean to us and how do they help us in our grieving processes?

Poste de la Paz y Villa Grimaldi

Praying around the peace pole at the Shalom Center - a moment to renew our commitment to shalom.

And, Elena helping Chilean, American and Paraguay youth process the experience of visiting Villa Grimaldi, a former concentration camp used by the Chilean secret service during the past dictatorship.

Acompañamiento

“Acompañamiento”

As I read Global Ministries vision and mission statement, I identified deeply with the words chosen to describe the core values of our ministry as an organization.  Some of these same words have been chosen to describe the values of the Shalom Center of the Pentecostal Church of Chile.  The word in Spanish “acompañamiento” and with the definition “Mutuality - walking in hope with others in God’s mission,” made me think of Carolina Fernández, my former Sunday School student from Paraguay who is now coordinating a project whereby young people are taught to make and play classical musical instruments (violins, cellos, and flutes) from garbage.  Her life is a living example of “acompañamiento.”  She came spend new year´s eve with me this past week (at our traditional retreat  laying on the look out over the waterfall at the Shalom Center  where we watch the “natural fireworks” of shooting stars and moonrise) and  I asked her to share with me, with Global Ministries, and the readers of my blog, her vision and calling of “acompañamiento.”  This is what she answered.

“At camp we have a favorite dance called the Wee Waltz.  I don´t know where it is from, exactly, but I guess from some European country.  Whenever I think of my calling to walk along side others, I think of this dance that I was taught at the Jack Norment Camp in Paraguay when I was a young child.  I have used the same dance to teach the young musicians in our Landfillharmonic program about “acompañamiento.” 

“At the beginning of the dance, we greet each other face to face.  So also begin our relationships.  We stretch out from our own space and hold hands.  When the music starts, we must adjust our rhythm to that of the other person, and we are aware that we are also coordinating with a whole community dancing around us.  Sometimes we lead our partner, and sometimes we follow.  We struggle to adjust our individual rhythm to that of our partner as well as the whole community.  At one point in the dance, we move into our partner’s space and dance from his or her place, but we are still ourselves and we have shared our own space, too.  We respect each other’s space, but we also connect holding hands.  We are anxious and nervous, trying not to step on each other, miss a beat or forget the pattern.  We laugh feeling a little silly.  But everyone else laughs too.  Everyone makes mistakes and it is ok.  We are vulnerable in our clumsy attempts toward gracefulness, reminding each other to not count “one, two, three” out loud.

“In another part of the dance, we change partners.  We must let go and adjust again, learning to be flexible and the pattern comes more easily.   We change partners with more and more ease, until we return to our original partner and discover we have both learned.  We dance better because we have been with others, and we have each grown in our individuality as well as flexibility.  We celebrate our growing capacity, we stumble less, we are less tense and begin to enjoy the flow of the dance.  

“In “acompañamiento” there is a strong physical and spiritual sensation of being in the presence of another person.  To walk along side is not only an emotional or intellectual exercise.  “Acompañamiento” is the experience of being formed and transformed by dancing with another person, within the circle of a community, to then take the beauty and grace of that dance to all the other spaces and times where we are called to be present.  “Acompañamiento” is the way we let others know they do not dance alone and we are reminded that we, too, receive the gift of the presence of others.

The web unravels

  “At the far end of town where the grickle grass grows and the wind smells slow and sour when it blows, is the land of the lifted Lorax...”  I can write from memory these words that open Dr. Seus´s book The Lorax. I read the story every Friday morning to the children at the School of Environmental Education in Texas for three years, and yet I never tired of the crazy rhymes and the sad story of how the old Oncler, because of his unabated greed, brought destruction to the land of the Truffula trees.  As the story progresses,  the Lorax tries to warn the Oncler, to no avail, of how his production of Thneeds is contaminating the air and the water.  Finally, the last Truffula tree is cut and the whole web of life is unraveled.  Nothing can live in the wasteland left behind. As I see the story of the Oncler repeated over and over again, I wonder if we will heed the warnings before it is too late.

            Just outside of Mexico City is a beautiful reserve called the “Desert of the Lions.”  It is quite a misnomer since it isn’t a desert at all but a forest, and the nearest lion is many miles away in the zoo.  They say that the park was given this name because it was a deserted tract of land donated by the Lion (or León in Spanish) family. On many hikes with my family through this forest, the trees, ferns, mosses, streams, sunlight, and rich earthy smell awakened in me a profound love and respect for God’s creation.  

One morning, as we drove along the winding highway up to the reserve entrance, I  witnessed a strange and mysterious crime.  Many trees were dead along the roadside, some fallen over and some still standing,  their bark gone and their trunks pale in the early light like white flags of surrender.  I was only a girl, but the solemn sadness of that morning is burned into my memory as if with a branding iron.  The forest was dying and nobody knew why.

When we talked to the forest rangers, they told us that the trees of the eastern coasts of Canada and the United States and of the Black Forest in Germany were suffering from the same unknown plague.  The articles in my environmental magazines spoke of  secret  microscopic assassins that roamed stealthily through the forests of the world killing trees without leaving a trace.   It wasn’t until many years later that the environmental detectives were able to decipher the clues leading to the perpetrators of these crimes.  After years of unchecked atmospheric pollution caused by industries, factories, and vehicles, the clouds over the Mexico City valley had become so saturated with chemicals that the trees on the mountain sides were being burned by acid rain baths.  The forests all over the world are dying in a heroic effort to clean the air full of toxins. 

The death of the forests means more than the loss of trees.  Every breath that we have ever breathed has depended on the oxygen processed by billions of leaves around the world.  The food we eat comes from the soil enriched by those same leaves, naturally composted over hundreds of years, and held in place by grasping roots and staunch trunks that protect from the eroding forces of wind and rain.  Thousands of manufactured goods were born from tree seedlings: houses, tools, furniture, pencils, and even the very pages of this book.  The forest habitat is home for creatures known and unknown and for many humans; no one knows how many  insects and plants are yet to be discovered in the different forests around the world.  Humans depend daily on the medicines, food, and fuel for cooking and heating produced by trees.

The loss of the forests is more that just a material, physical, or economic loss.  It represents also a profound spiritual loss.   Throughout time, people have retreated to the forest seeking in the solitude and silentious music of birds, wind, insects, and water the whisper of the God of creation and of their own souls.  Trees have been the subjects and settings for poems, paintings, plays, stories, and sculptures.  In their towering majesty and profound stability, trees somehow bridge for humanity the distance between  heaven and earth.   Trees are the ancients who hold the secret wisdom of the ages in the rings of their hearts and link the history of humanity and the world with present and future.  Trees are the cradles that rock us in our childhood, the projects inspire us in our youth, the canes that support us in our old age, and the coffins that bury us.   The death the forests could very well mean the death of humanity.

Yes, the forests are dying, and their dying is a warning, a horrid portent of what is to come. We have transgressed the principles by which creation was founded and so we have snatched away its potential for carrying out its primary purpose.   The fundamental objective of creation is to praise God, but how can a river polluted with all kinds of toxic substances praise the Creator?  How can the birds sing their praises if  they fall motionless to the earth due to air pollution?  How can the soil give food if it is full of artificial pesticides and fertilizers which rob it of its natural nutrients?  Humanity has opened a chasm that separates creation from its Creator.  We are the ones warned about in Revelation 11:18.  We are the ones who will be judged, for we are “those who destroy the earth.“

“So, ‘catch’ calls the Oncler, and he lets something fall.  It is the very last Truffula seed of them all.”  The Lorax ends with the puzzling word “unless” and a challenge to every reader.  We all have the last of the Truffula seeds in our hands.  “Unless” each of us chooses to plant the seeds and grow back the forest, “unless” we look at the world from a different perspective and change our  priorities, habits, and expectations, “unless” we as individuals and as a society learn to care for our home, the earth, then “nothing is going to get better. Its not.”     

    

  

I sit at the feet of beauty

I sit at the feet of beauty

I sit at the feet of beauty.

Once again in     this place

                                this friend

                                this time

                                this space.

I sit at the feet of beauty

                Water gushing down the gorge,

                thoughts streaming, one rolling

                                after the other, hardly a

                                pause until I check the flow.  For

I sit at the feet of beauty

I still my  mind

Before the mountains

                                the trees

                                the sky

                                the birds.

And listen, opening my soul to

this place

this friend

this time

this space.

January 3, 2013

Elena Huegel

Christmas and New Years at the Shalom Center