Counting graces is simple for me to do in Kenya. I recognize the music of daily life here, the dance between all of creation. In fact, one of the biggest challenges when I first arrived was drinking it all in. My brain failed to process all of the new stimuli; it could not sift through what was typical and what was extraordinary because to me, everything was extraordinary. People yelling in Kiswahili/Arabic/Kigiriama/Kiluo/any of the other local languages, the smell of cassava chips with lime and spicy pepper sprinkled on top, the baby chicks scurrying behind their mother across the path, the clinking of coins because the matatu conductor wants you to pay already, roasted corn: this is what glitters. Being grateful for these things is easy.
But when someone yells, “CHING CHANG CHONG!” at me as he hangs out of the window of a matatu, it takes all of my willpower to not fling some nasty words upon him. Do I have the courage to look at it as a moment of grace, an opportunity to grow in gratitude? When one of the teachers at my school beats one of my babies as he lies on the floor, am I willing to be vulnerable enough to see that he is acting out of his own brokenness? When I hear about yet another act of terrorism on the news, will I be brave enough to take a step back from the flurry of news reports and sensationalism…to step back and mourn, to feel the full pain of our hurting world?
Living in Kenya, it is tempting for me to point to the events of Garissa (147 young people were gunned down by Al-Shabaab in April of this year) and say, “Yes, your tragedy is great, but what of ours? Why do you not hear our cries? Mourn for our blood?” But, as Omid Safi says in his beautiful reflection on the Paris attacks (http://onbeing.org/blog/omid-safi-where-does-it-hurt-o-city-of-light/8123), we must allow the tragedy to connect us rather than separate us, to see your suffering as mine and mine as yours. I see this in the fact that France recently decided to pay for the school fees of the 109 Garissa university students who survived the April attacks. Our own suffering, our own pain, can make us highly aware of the pain in others if we turn our gaze outward rather than inward.
I recently saw an interview with a French man and his little boy who is about 4 years old. The interviewer asked the little one if he understands what happened regarding the Paris attacks. The little boy said that some bad people came and hurt lots of people and now they have to move because they have guns. At this point, his dad lovingly and tenderly places his hand on his son’s head and says, “Oh no, don’t worry…We don’t need to move out. France is our home.” The boy tells him, “But they have guns, daddy.” His father says, “It’s ok, they might have guns, but we have flowers.”
It helps to know that I can come home and share this with my roommates, who like Noemi, are able to mourn, cry, and laugh it off with me, who can remind me that we have flowers. And it helps to know that I can come home to all of you, knowing that we can share presence no matter how far apart we are. I have come to realize that these stories are not just stories about you and me, but they are about all of us. They touch on our universal truth. They are the bread of life. These are the things that must be broken and shared because in them is our humanity as well as our divinity. So, this Thanksgiving season, I invite us all to break open and share our stories with one another, knowing that our story is not complete without your story, and his story, and her story. The tragedy, the comedy, the epic: we must have them all. And flowers as well.