I'm back home in Illinois now. Except for the 12 hours I was home between El Salvador and Canada, I haven't been home for two and a half months. I'm glad to be home, but it's a little bit depressing to be back in the boring suburbs after all the wonderfulness of El Salvador and the Northwoods of Canada. Now I'm getting ready for my next set of adventures...my second year of graduate school and a social ministry internship at my church.
I made the wonderful decision to read (again) a book by Anne Lamott called Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. Anne Lamott is a brilliant writer. She is so brutally honest about her life and her faith, and it is this brutal honesty that really amazes me along with her incredible insights. As I read this book I found myself nodding in agreement, laughing out loud, and even crying once because she captured in exactly the perfect words what I hadn't been able to find the words for. She has lived through some pretty painful and difficult things and yet she isn't afraid to talk about them, how she was feeling during these experiences, and how these experiences affected her faith at the time as well as years down the road. She makes some brilliant analogies about God, Jesus, and being a Christian. Her writing has spoken to me in the past and rereading this book after my trip to El Salvador has led to some new reflections and perhaps a better understanding of what Anne was writing about as well as a better understanding of my experiences in El Salvador. I really hope that this will make sense, I'm not even sure that it makes sense in my own mind, but hopefully Anne Lamott's words will help make sense of the chaos of my brain.
I continue to think about my heart that was broken in El Salvador. Why was my heart broken? Can it be "fixed"? Has it healed at all? Anne Lamott quotes Eugene O'Neill (an American playwright and Nobel Laureate in literature) who said "Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." I do believe it is true that we are born broken, knowing nothing, and understanding even less. So if we are born broken, why do I feel like I became even more broken at times while I was in El Salvador? Perhaps we have to be more broken before we can start to be mended, before we can start to become more whole, to understand and to know more about ourselves, our broken world, and our God. Or maybe it just feels like we are becoming more broken when in fact we are in the mending process.
Perhaps is it like when someone gets a really bad broken bone and the doctors have to force it back into place and then use some screws (rather than glue) to put the bone back together. I can't say from personal experience, but I'm sure it hurts something awful. Or maybe it's like when a bone heals the wrong way and the doctors have to rebreak the bone so that it will heal correctly. Maybe rationally and logically it makes sense to re-break a bone so that it will heal correctly, but at the time the bone is being rebroken it may not seem that way for the patient as the bone is being rebroken (even with pain medication).
But if we are to mend, to become whole, maybe we do have to experience that brokenness, to realize through the pain of raw suffering (our own or that of other people) that we are broken, that we do need to mend and that the grace of God can mend us. It is very much God doing the mending, but in my experience my mending has relied heavily on my fellow humans. It is through my interactions with others and it seemed especially through my interactions with Salvadorans that I have mended some, but the mending didn't come without feeling more broken. Maybe we can call it growing pains.
God created each living creature. We humans are born broken (most of us very broken), but God also created community where we can mend and learn and grow. By no means is community easy- sometimes I can't stand being within 100 yards of another human being- and we certainly have difficulty getting along a lot of the time. But we are deeply interconnected- for good or for bad- and we desperately need each other to mend from our brokenness.
Cleaning a wound can be painful, but it is a very important part of making sure something heals. Whether we are cleaning our own wounds or the wounds of others we can more clearly see how deep the wound is and in some cases cleaning the wound may help one see what caused the wound. When I was in El Salvador learning about the wounds (physical and otherwise) caused by violence I was able to learn about the role I and my country had in causing some of the wounds. And I also learned some ways in which I might help clean those wounds and start the healing process.
A 5 year old boy that I nannied for got a splinter in his finger one day while we were out playing on his deck. He didn't cry until I told him that we should try to take the little piece of wood out and clean it. He didn't want me to even touch his finger and even though I told him it would feel better once we took the splinter out, he got hysterical at the thought of the pain that would come as I was taking it out. I told him again and again that it would just hurt for a few seconds and then it would start to feel better real fast. All he wanted to do was put a band-aid over it and he was convinced that this would make everything better. I think maybe we are all like this little boy in that we are very reluctant to do anything that might cause us more pain. It is very easy to remain ignorant of all the pain and suffering going on in the world all around us. I have been guilty of ignoring injustices that are right outside my front door. Why would you want to submit yourself to learning about violence and suffering and injustice when we can just go watch the latest episode of American Idol or The Bachelor? In El Salvador, however, it was impossible for me to not see the wounds of injustice everywhere. And it was clear that these were wounds could not be healed with a "band-aid". They are far too serious to cover up and just try to forget they are there.
I couldn't do much more to heal the wounds of my Salvadoran friends except to listen to their stories and then to tell the stories to my friends and family back home (and even if I don't feel I did much, I do know that listening and being compassionate are so very important and significant). But I think the Salvadorans did far more to help heal my wounds. My wounds and my brokenness do not come from the atrocities of civil war or from the constant fear of gangs or from the violence of a lack of access to health care and food and water. I struggle to name my wounds, but I feel (as many of you may also) that something is missing. In some way I am not whole. Maybe this "something" is something that cannot be put into words but it is something that I spent quite a bit of time talking about with my fellow travel companions the last week of our time in El Salvador. I think it was only through allowing myself to join in solidarity with the Salvadorans and their wounds that I was able to experience this "something" that in turn helped mend my own wounds.
We noticed there is something that Salvadorans have that we don't. Despite our efforts to determine exactly what this "something" is and why Salvadorans have it and why we don't and how we can take it home with us, we didn't get too far in trying to figure it all out. That "something" made me feel truly alive, full of hope, and genuinely happy. Despite the suffering Salvadorans experience and despite the lack of material goods, they have that "something" that gives them faith, hope, love, and happiness.
Even if I don't understand what this "something" is, it was a true gift that I got to experience it along side my Salvadoran friends. However, Anne Lamott talks about gifts that require assembly and I think that this "something" is one of those gifts that requires some assembly. Or maybe it's like one of those dreaded Christmas gifts that says on the box "some assembly required" but what it really should say is "this will take all day to assemble, you need 20 different tools, and not all the parts are really included." This "something" will require me to do some unpacking and then I'll have to try to figure out what it is, how it works, and what to do with it.
Perhaps this "something" is a deep appreciation of life or maybe it is God's love or God's presence or perhaps it is grace, that grace that helps glue us together, to mend our brokenness (or maybe some combination of all of these things or maybe none of the above). If this "something" is indeed grace, Anne Lamott captures my thoughts exactly on this grace: "I don't understand the mystery of grace- only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. It can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes." As I have struggled to understand and assemble the gift of grace or whatever this "something" is, I do recognize that I am not where I started. I'm not really sure where it's taking me, but I'm trying to receive it gladly and in both big gulps and tiny tastes.
Anne Lamott also wrote "Everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the world, and it's so touching when you get to see something real and human." and "I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed- which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace." In El Salvador things just seemed more real, more raw, more human. Here in my nice suburban home I am surrounded by comfort and nice things and distractions. While my life in my nice suburban home with my nice suburban family and friends certainly isn't bad, but there are things that I just don't see and experience as clearly here as I did in El Salvador. I think it is through seeing things that are real and human that I was able to be mended. It was God's grace that came through God's presence in each person I met in El Salvador. I know that God's grace is everywhere with everyone and I hope that some day I'll be able to feel that grace wherever I am just as strongly as I felt it in El Salvador.
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