To be perfectly honest, I have never been very good at doing Lent. What I mean is, those Lenten promises of giving up chocolate or or swearing or wine...well, I always thought of them more as pinky promises than actual promises, promises made with spit rather than blood (ironic, I know). I did successfully become vegetarian for Lent last year, although I don't know if many vegetarians survive on buffalo flavored meatless chicken nuggets and carrot sticks. In any case, this did not bode well for me in Kenya as I am already more or less vegetarian, so I chose to fast from Facebook and my phone (yea, it doesn't end well).
So, already off to this rocky Lenten start, my Mombasa community went to Diani beach for retreat this past weekend. Diani has sand so white it'll give you a sun burn, with the high tide going all the way up to the wall of the rentals and low tide recessing back to reveal coral and fresh water springs along with black sea cucumbers (turds of the sea as Curt likes to call them), red starfish, sea urchins galore, and other things that wiggle and crawl. Monkeys (tumbiri) jumped from the trees and banged onto the ceiling of our rental while I made breakfast, scurrying around and scavenging whatever they could, paying no heed to our shooing and attempts at scary noises. One particular tumbiri pushed open the door AND the chair wedged against it, jumped on the table, and stole some of our precious bananas before Judy ushered him out. The girls and I made "chapati" and "ice cream" out of sand, serving our delicious treats to one another. The only other retreats I had participated in were silent. This retreat was filled with Phase 10, laughter, beer, and art. How did I not realize how closely prayer and play go together, as if wholeheartedly enjoying this moment and these people is indeed a prayer? Judy gets up every morning at 4 AM to do yoga because it is a way for her body to pray. We pray with our hands as we prepare meals for those we love and deal cards for a game, our mouths as we laugh and enjoy one another, our bodies as we run and walk and play, with every fibre of who and what we are, the known and the unknown.
On Friday night, we all gathered around my little orange MacBook and watched "Of Gods and Men." If you haven't had the privilege of seeing this film, please put it on your list of things to do. It is achingly beautiful. The film follows the lives of a group of French Trappist monks in Algeria during a period of violent strife between two warring factions. I normally have trouble following films in other languages (this one is in Arabic and French), but there is so little conversation and what conversation there is is so minimal and understated. What need not be said remains unsaid. The only music in the film is the chanting of the monks and the church bells. The director allows the faces and the daily lives of the monks to speak: praying, growing vegetables and fruit, tending bees. The premise of the film is that the monks must decide to stay among the people they serve or to return to France. At one point, a priest tells a woman in the village that they may be leaving saying, "We are like birds on a branch; we don't know if we'll leave." The woman replies, "We’re the birds, you’re the branch. If you leave, we lose our footing." This hit me hard, especially considering I was watching it from a place where people ask, "Is it safe for you to be there?" All of the resorts and beaches have been devastated by the travel warning for Mombasa. Thousands have lost their jobs to the point where the men selling keychains on the beach say to us, "Do you want us to have to steal from you or others? You must buy. We need money. You can see no one is here." What does it mean to be looked at as someone's hope?
We explored the idea of hope while on retreat, realizing that hope is something we all struggle with, or more accurately, it is a place of struggle...and a place of joy. Hope is that place where you see reality as it is and what that reality could be one day. It is the place I live in when I teach. Hope is a place of work, a place of sweat and blood and tears. It is a place both rooted in the world and far from it. It is a place of discomfort and the place where you find your deepest comfort because it is the place of truth. It is the few days between Jesus's death and his resurrection. It is the moment before you answer the phone when you are expecting test results from the doctor. Hope is a place of blinding and exhilarating vulnerability.
We as misisoners are often seen as hope: hope for money for the next meal, hope for just a tiny bit of money, hope for a job, even as hope for the church. We are not, cannot, and will not be hope. So where does that leave us then? Victoria Safford says,
"We stand where we will stand, on little plots of ground, where we are maybe “called” to stand (though who knows what that means?) — in our congregations, classrooms, offices, factories, in fields of lettuces and apricots, in hospitals, in prisons (on both sides, at various times, of the gates), in streets, in community groups. And it is sacred ground if we would honor it, if we would bring to it a blessing of sacrifice and risk…
Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see."
Though I have miserably failed my Lenten promise of staying off Facebook and only checking my phone a certain number of times a day, I stand here, beckoning and calling, telling you what I see and asking you what you see.