Christmas and New Years at the Shalom Center

Interdependence

INTERDEPENDENCE

To get us thinking:

 God’s Touch by Bruce Eppery.   “From the perspective of ecology, systems thinking, and the new physics, the universe is a dynamic community of interconnected energy events in which each unique being arises from the influence of the whole universe.  Amid the complex interplay of pattern and novelty, the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in California influences the weather patterns in Washington, D.C.  Physicist David Bohm asserts that the universe is a ‘holoverse,’ or undivided whole, in which the whole is present and reflected holographically in each part, and the part shapes the character of the whole. [. . .] Love rather than alienation is essential to reality, according to the emerging metaphysical, theological, and scientific world view” (Epperly 109 - 110). 

Decisions that we make every day affect people around the world.  From the clothes we wear to the food we eat, from the cars we drive to the temperature control in our homes, our choices connect us to far away people and places in hundreds of hidden ways.  In the ever expanding reality of globalization,  our lives are intertwined with the lives of others in a complex network stretching around the world and pulling us inescapably together. This planetary order that reaches beyond ethnic, cultural, religious, economic, social, and political boundaries to facilitate the easy production and exchange of marketable goods has created a new arena for social conflicts and environmental destruction.  Many of us have tried, like the proverbial ostrich, to bury our heads in the sand pretending that we are absolutely independent.  We believe that we can live emotionally and economically isolated from God, the rest of humanity, and even the earth were we live. Yet, we all share the same air and water, we all must obtain the same basic elements to survive and to thrive, and we all have the need to be in relationship.  God is constantly reminding us through the beautiful and terrible lessons of nature that we are all  unique parts of a bigger whole.

            It is Christmas time and summer in southern hemisphere.  Every day on the weather report, besides noting the constant climb of the temperature, there are red letter  radiation warnings about the sun’s ultraviolet rays.  We are told to use sunblock, long sleeves, hats, and sunglasses.  There are recommendations that children not play outside in the hours of the day when the sun is directly overhead.  We are warned about cataracts,  skin cancers, and damage to the immune systems of our bodies as the plants shrivel and the sheep die.  We live under the hole in the ozone layer.

Far above the earth, a gaseous band in the atmosphere called the ozone layer protects plants and animals from overdoses of the sun’s powerful ultraviolet rays.   Scientists unexpectedly discovered in 1980s that this layer has thinned dramatically over the south pole and that all of the circumventing countries have suffered the effects of increased radiation.  The production and use of cloroflourocarbons (CFCs), invented in the 1920s by people working for the General Motors company, in air conditioning and refrigeration units, in the making of certain kinds of foam and plastics,  in aerosols,  in different solvents, and for sterilizing was found to be the cause of ozone reduction.   CFCs are extremely stable gases that can remain for more than 100 years in the lower layers of the atmosphere.  Each atom of CFC released can destroy up to 100,000 molecules of ozone.  In the past 20 years or so, there have been decreases of up to 50% registered in the ozone layer above Antarctica.  Perhaps one of the most serious effects of the resulting increases levels of radiation will soon appear in the ocean where many species of plankton, at the base of the marine food chain, have drastically lower levels of reproduction.

An international agreement called the Montreal Protocol, signed in 1989 and renegotiated in 1990 and 1992, calls for the reduction and, eventually, no more production of CFCs.  The countries most seriously affected by the hole in the ozone layer have continued to call on the rest of the world to respond to their plight and slowly the hole seems to be repairing itself.  Chile,  for example, which is one of the countries most seriously affected, does not make any CFCs and represents only a .07% of the world consumption.   Meanwhile, the countries of the northern hemisphere are the greatest producers and consumers of CFCs.   The decisions made by individuals and communities in the north influence the health and well-being of those in the south, and ultimately, because the earth is an interconnected web,  affect their health and well-being.  The decrease in the ozone layer has meant that the whole surface of the earth, north and south, is receiving increased levels of radiation.

Globalization has always existed in nature, whether we were aware of the intricate threads of interdependence or not..  The consequences, however, of economic and political globalization have led to an ever increasing rift between consumers and earth’s resources, between those few who hold the reins and whip of power and those millions who haul on their backs the load of  goods to the world marketplace.   Shalom, as an invitation to participate in the healing of human and earth communities, is also call to recognize our interdependence even as we experience the benefits and negative results of globalization.   Our decisions made as individuals or local communities travel rapidly along the threads of interdependence to heal or to destroy the global web of life.

                        

LandFillharmonic

Shortly after posting this week's blog about my experiences in the Barrio San Francisco and the stream at the Jack Norment Camp in Caacupé, Paraguay, Carolina, one of my former Sunday school students in the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ in Paraguay sent me a video about the program she has been coordinating.  Though she did not live in the Barrio San Francisco, Carolina as a camper at the Jack Norment camp, was particularly interested in my  environmental education activities.  She, too, grieved over the polluted stream and at age thirteen, visited the children of the Barrio, playing games, presenting puppet shows, planting trees.  Even  though I felt that my activities as a Global Ministries Volunteer at the Camp and in the Barrio were ineffective "band-aids" stuck onto the massive, festering environmental wounds, Carolina is evidence that something shifts, something heals when we concentrate on doing what we can do, no matter how insignificant it seems, rather than on the freezing fear that what we finally manage to do will never be enough.

As I share Carolina's video with you, imagine a thread that stretches down through nearly 20 years, from those environmental experiences with my campers at the Jack Norment camp, to the present.  In many ways, nothing has changed.  You will see the garbage.  You will see the poverty. You will see the families and children living on a dump.  And yet, there is music, there is hope, there is new life recycled from the garbage.   I feel like the grandmother of this story: I planted  seeds of justice in the heart of Carolina when she was a teenager; as an adult, she is beginning to harvest peace.

Landfill Harmonic teaser de LandfillHarmonic Like us on Facebook, share this video and help us spread the word about these kids and their Recycled Orchestra. Please go to the link below to support the film and learn more! (do not forget to "like us") www.facebook.com/landfillharmonicmovie

Genuine community

Genuine community

            I wrote this poem when I worked at the nature center at the Jack Norment Camp in Paraguay.  The name of the nature center was “Arapy,” a Guaraní  word meaning “sky – foot.”  (Guaraní is the mother tongue of Paraguay.)  We were committed to building genuine community with all creation, that above and around us in the sky and that on and in the earth below our feet.  At times, it seemed like an impossible task.

            As I sat one day on the edge of the stream that flowed through the camp, this poem came to me with a heart heavy with grief.  I had just finished a five kilometer hike up stream from the camp and made many shocking discoveries along the way.  The first thing I noted as I left the camp were the eroded hillsides.  As I looked back over my shoulder, the camp appeared to be a lonely emerald jewel surrounded by the deforested land.  The soil in Paraguay has a distinctive brick red color, the same color that tainted the stream after every rain.   On my first stop further up the stream,  I found two clandestine tanneries that were dumping their wastes and byproducts including chrome and aluminum directly into the stream.  My nose lead me to the pungent smell of an alcohol distillery where there were enormous vats oozing a horrid smelling black goop.  I found out that it was the waste left over from the sugar cane used in the alcohol production.    Next I arrived at the municipal slaughter yard just in time to watch all the blood and useless parts of several cows being hosed into the stream.  I kept following the stream as it came down through the town of Caacupé and counted the pipes dumping raw sewage and drain water.  Plastics, cans, diapers, batteries, and every kind of garbage imaginable was piled high, left behind by high waters of a storm.  Finally, I came up to a fence.  It was a pig farm with the ramshackle sties in a disorderly arrangement on both sides of the stream. 

            The Jack Norment is on the opposite side of  the stream from the Barrio San Francisco, a very poor outlying area of Caacupé.   I worked with the students from a small school in the Barrio San Francisco,  children discriminated against for living in what was considered to be the “armpit” of the town.   The garbage trucks from Caacupé would unload in the Barrio to build up the dirt road beds with the wastes from other parts of the town. In the hot afternoon summers, I would watch the children playing and laughing in the stream, children with skin sores, runny noses, distended tummies,  and rotting teeth.  They would gaily shout my name when I would come walking down to see them and run to hug and greet me chatting in a mix of Spanish and Guaraní.

            I sat on the edge of the stream and cried for the children of the Barrio San Francisco.  Environmental degradation is one of the most obvious manifestations of injustice and systemic violence in our global community.  As we fight about where to dump all of our toxic wastes shouting “not in my back yard”,  we ignore the children and the streams,  the powerless and voiceless.   We manipulate the environment to discriminate against the poor and to reinforce the destructive powers of segregation, racism, and classism.   The environment has become a weapon in modern warfare; oil intentionally spilled on agricultural lands, defoliants sprayed on forests, and poisons mixed into drinking water sources.  Will the environment also become a primary reason for violent conflicts? Will we be fighting not only for agricultural land to produce our food, but for clean water and air?

            It was with the children and the stream of the Barrio San Francisco that I felt the urgency for a miraculous and profound transformation:  healing not only for the humans of the community but also the environment.    I often felt like my activities with the children of the Barrio San Francisco were just tiny and temporary Band-Aids attempting to patch the deep wounds of injustice.  We planted trees in the school yard and made puppet stories about the stream.  We hiked through the forest at the camp learning about the trees and singing songs about nature.  They taught me the names of the animals and the plants in Guaraní, the language born in that land and that describes its beauty with word images.    I despaired, however, fearing that  the tiny seeds of hope, peace, justice, and stewardship I was sowing would die along with the stream before they had the chance to bear fruit.

            I have gone back to Paraguay about once a year since I have lived in Chile to teach environmental education and conflict transformation workshops.  I will never forget the day that we scooped our nets through the stream and found the first dragonfly larvae!  Over the years, the tanneries have been closed, the alcohol distillery has built a new waste containment system, and there are projects to better handle the garbage and the sewage.  The hillsides are still bare and the stream is not clean.  The children still have runny noses and health problems.  But somehow I must keep believing and hoping  that the seeds of healing are growing against all odds.

            Transformation for the Barrio San Francisco, and for the inhabitants of the world, will come hand in hand the healing of the people, the community,  and the environment.  None can be whole without the healing of the others.  This is message at the heart of Shalom.   

Requiem to a River

Requiem to a River

In life you gave life

            Watering the knees of the trees

            That on your shores bent to drink.

In life you gave life

            To birds that at daybreak danced

            Among the rainbows that you painted from the waterfalls

            Arched with crystal drops.

In life you gave life

            To fish, insects and algae

            Food chains passing along  packed energy

In life you gave life

            Animals and children splashed

blissfully under the hot summer sun.

Year after year, with trickling tunes of satisfaction

You ran through the earth as blood in the veins

Carrying life on your way.

            But now...

In death you deal out death

We erased the trees

And now you get angry, dragging

Houses and vegetation in whirlpools dyed

Red from bleeding soil.

In death you deal out death

And birds in mounds of garbage

Cease their aerial acrobatics

Failing to find food among the gunk.

In death you deal out death

When the corner stone is smashed

The building blocks of life

Come crashing down.

In death you deal out death

The sores on the skin of the children who

Bathe in your waters, fester.

And the fish float belly up,

Suffocated

Oh river, I wish a miracle could resurrect you,

But we traded  your life

In exchange for our death.

Elena Huegel

1994, Paraguay (Originally in Spanish.  Translated November 20, 2003) 

            

Diversity

            My mother always says she is glad that she hears about my adventures as a missionary after I am home safe and sound.  One of those memorable trips took place about nine years ago when I joined two other young women on a long bus ride to the Pantanal, the largest swamp in the world.  Our adventures in southern Brazil remain in my memory as unforgettable lessons in nature’s classroom.  It was through those experiences that I learned the basic, intrinsic, values of diversity in nature and among people as an expression of God’s creativity and imagination.  Diversity, exposed in millions of different plants, insects, animals, and people, is mystery that stretches the limits of our comprehension and a fingerprint that gives evidence to the unfathomable magnitude of the Creator. 

            Diversity demands that we develop a profound respect for life in all of its different manifestations.   To this day, I am not really sure how we ended up riding with 8 other women from 6 different countries on a dilapidated pick up truck that broke down multiple times on an abandoned dirt road going into the swamp.  It took all day, but we finally arrived at a campsite set up by our Brazilian and Danish guides at the edge of one of the tributaries of the Paraguay River.  We laughed over dinner trying to understand the mix of English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Danish, and French, and then, feeling exhausted from the journey, decided to get ready for bed.  Yvette and I headed down to the edge of the water to brush our teeth.  Suddenly, I spotted two green marbles in the water about four feet from where we were standing.  With my mouth foaming with toothpaste, I asked Yvette what she thought those pale lights were.  When she turned on her flashlight, we discovered that the marbles were the eyes of a nine-foot alligator!  We almost choked on our toothpaste as we carefully began stepping backward away from the water’s edge.   The next morning, the guide showed us the carcass of another alligator near where we had been standing.  He explained that the dead alligator had been the companion to the one we had seen in the water, but while they had been away from camp a few weeks before, poachers had killed it.  Suddenly our fear of the solitary alligator turned into a new appreciation for life so easily snatched away.

            Diversity invites us into a new awareness of the world we inhabit and into a sense of awe before the Creator’s magnificent handiwork.  One afternoon in the Pantanal,  the Brazilian guide offered to take us on a long hike through an area of grasslands.  Just as the sun was touching the tips of the tall grasses and painting them yellow, red, and orange, our guide motioned us to be quiet and to follow him quickly.  He headed off the trail,  trotting quickly toward a large, shaggy, dark figure.  When we were just a few yards away, I recognized the animal: it was a giant anteater!  The guide told us it was one of the largest he had ever seen, measuring well over six feet from it’s long snout to the tip of its stringy tail.  The whole scene still fills me with wonder as I remember the sun sinking slowly down into the horizon, the anteater scuffling the ground looking for dinner, the howler monkeys screaming in the distance, the dozens of different bird calls, and the burnt sweet smell of the toasted grass. 

            Appreciating diversity requires humility and patience.  Our Danish guide told us that it wasn’t the anacondas, alligators, poisonous snakes, or jaguars that bothered him about living in the middle of the swamp.  It was the insects.  The insects showed no prejudice; they were completely impartial. They stung and bit us all: Europeans, North Americans,  South Americans, rich, poor, thin, fat, short, tall, pretty, ugly. To the insects we were all the same, and no one could take on airs of superiority, no one could claim to be free of bumps and rashes.  It is amazing how humbling itching can be.    The constant buzzing, whining, flying, crawling in our hair, under our clothes, and even inside our shoes while we were wearing them sorely tried our patience.  There were two choices: to go mad or to accept the fact that the insects ruled the Pantanal.           

Opening ourselves to exploring diversity of life is a risky business.  Our participation in the discovery process can radically change our perspectives and beliefs about ourselves, about others, and about God.  We went fishing in the Pantanal.  We were excited as school boys playing hooky as we made some old-fashioned cane poles, grabbed a container of chicken innards, and set out single file first along the path beside the river and then crossing the waist deep water several times.  When we found a quiet corner, the guide said “this is a good place to fish.”   In a few minutes, I had the first bite.  When the fish landed on the bank squirming and flapping, I recognized its large, razor sharp, white teeth.  Piranhas!   I stuck a stick as thick as my thumb in its mouth, and with one snap of the powerful jaws, it split in two.  The guide calmly told us that where there are still waters, there are also piranhas, and where there are piranhas, there are alligators.  Gulp!  Suddenly the happy and rollicking hike along the river turned frightening and ominous.  In our ignorance, we had followed our guide wading from bank to bank.  We would have to retrace our steps now knowing that we would be sharing the river with piranhas and alligators.  Where before we had been oblivious to the danger or need to trust our guide, now we paid close attention to his indications and carefully followed his lead.

 Nothing had changed in the environment from the time we started on the hike to when we got back to camp and broiled our large catch of fish, yet everything seemed different.   We had been transformed.  Through our new knowledge, we were forced to accept the swamp as a full package, with all of its beauty stretching out before us and with the dangers lurking in the calm waters.  Perhaps this fine line between fear and curiosity,  the unknown and the yet to be discovered, the safe and the dangerous, is the same tension we experience as we explore the earth’s diversity,  enter into new relationships with others, or dare to open our lives to God.

In the Shadowlands

In the Shadowlands

In the waiting womb of nativity

In the dewy grayness before dawn

In the curve of the tunnel which hints of an exit.

In the in between time.

In between despair and hope shared

but not yet fulfilled.

In between fear and courage spreading its wings

but not yet taking flight.

In between sadness and joy bubbling from the depths

but not yet overflowing.

In between suffering and justice opening its hands

but not yet embracing.

In between hate and the seed of love sown

but not yet sprouting.

As shadows point a path to the sun

so faith guides us on the journey.

Shadows incubate the babe to be born.

Shadows solemnly announce the new day.

Shadows excitedly foretell the open air.

Shadows draw us irresistibly towards the light.

Peace is cast in the shadowlands.

By Elena Huegel

October 3, 2001, Revised Sept. 16, 2005