indisguisable shade of twilight

30th anniversy of Archbishop Romero's martyrdom

2010-03-22T14:54:00.005-05:00

The Last Sermon (March 1980)
Archbishop Oscar Romero

Let no one be offended because we use the divine words read at our mass to shed light on the social, political and economic situation of our people. Not to do so would be unchristian. Christ desires to unite himself with humanity, so that the light he brings from God might become life for nations and individuals.
I know many are shocked by this preaching and want to accuse us of forsaking the gospel for politics. But I reject this accusation. I am trying to bring to life the message of the Second Vatican Council and the meetings at Medellin and Puebla. The documents from these meetings should not just be studied theoretically.

They should be brought to life and translated into the real struggle to preach the gospel as it should be for our people. Each week I go about the country listening to the cries of the people, their pain from so much crime, and the ignominy of so much violence. Each week I ask the Lord to give me the right words to console, to denounce, to call for repentance. And even though I may be a voice crying in the desert, I know that the church is making the effort to fulfill its mission....

Every country lives its own "exodus"; today El Salvador is living its own exodus. Today we are passing to our liberation through a desert strewn with bodies and where anguish and pain are devastating us. Many suffer the temptation of those who walked with Moses and wanted to turn back and did not work together. It is the same old story. God, however, wants to save the people by making a new history....

History will not fail; God sustains it. That is why I say that insofar as historical projects attempt to reflect the eternal plan of God, to that extent they reflect the kingdom of God. This attempt is the work of the church. Because of this, the church, the people of God in history, is not attached to any one social system, to any political organization, to any party. The church does not identify herself with any of those forces because she is the eternal pilgrim of history and is indicating at every historical moment what reflects the kingdom of God and what does not reflect the kingdom of God. She is the servant of the Kingdom of God.

The great task of Christians must be to absorb the spirit of God's kingdom and, with souls filled with the kingdom of God, to work on the projects of history. It's fine to be organized in popular groups; it's all right to form political parties; it's all right to take part in the government. It's fine as long as you are a christian who carries the reflection of the kingdom of God and tries to establish it where you are working, and as long as you are not being used to further worldly ambitions. This is the great duty of the people of today. My dear Christians, I have always told you, and I will repeat, that the true liberators of our people must come from us Christians, from the people of God. Any historical plan that's not based on what we spoke of in the first point-the dignity of the human being, the love of God, the kingdom of Christ among people-will be a fleeting project. Your project, however, will grow in stability the more it reflects the eternal design of God. It will be a solution of the common good of the people every time, if it meets the needs of the people.... Now I invite you to look at things through the eyes of the church, which is trying to be the kingdom of God on earth and so often must illuminate the realities of our national situation.

We have lived through a tremendously tragic week. I could not give you the facts before, but a week ago last Saturday, on 15 March, one of the largest and most distressing military operations was carried out in the countryside. The villages affected were La Laguna, Plan de Ocotes and El Rosario. The operation brought tragedy: a lot of ranches were burned, there was looting, and-inevitably-people were killed. In La Laguna, the attackers killed a married couple, Ernesto Navas and Audelia Mejia de Navas, their little children, Martin and Hilda, thirteen and seven years old, and eleven more peasants.

Other deaths have been reported, but we do not know the names of the dead. In Plan de Ocotes, two children and four peasants were killed, including two women. In El Rosario, three more peasants were killed. That was last Saturday.

Last Sunday, the following were assassinated in Arcatao by four members of ORDEN: peasants Marcelino Serrano, Vincente Ayala, twenty-four years old, and his son, Freddy. That same day, Fernando Hernandez Navarro, a peasant, was assassinated in Galera de Jutiapa, when he fled from the military.

Last Monday, 17 March, was a tremendously violent day. Bombs exploded in the capital as well as in the interior of the country. The damage was very substantial at the headquarters of the Ministry of Agriculture. The campus of the national university was under armed siege from dawn until 7 P.M. Throughout the day, constant bursts of machine-gun fire were heard in the university area. The archbishop's office intervened to protect people who found themselves caught inside.

On the Hacienda Colima, eighteen persons died, at least fifteen of whom were peasants. The administrator and the grocer of the ranch also died. The armed forces confirmed that there was a confrontation. A film of the events appeared on TV, and many analyzed interesting aspects of the situation.

At least fifty people died in serious incidents that day: in the capital, seven persons died in events at the Colonia Santa Lucia; on the outskirts of Tecnillantas, five people died; and in the area of the rubbish dump, after the evacuation of the site by the military, were found the bodies of four workers who had been captured in that action.

Sixteen peasants died in the village of Montepeque, thirty-eight kilometers along the road to Suchitoto. That same day, two students at the University of Central America were captured in Tecnillantas: Mario Nelson and Miguel Alberto Rodriguez Velado, who were brothers. The first one, after four days of illegal detention, was handed over to the courts. Not so his brother, who was wounded and is still held in illegal detention. Legal Aid is intervening on his behalf.

Amnesty International issued a press release in which it described the repression of the peasants, especially in the area of Chalatenango. The week's events confirm this report in spite of the fact the government denies it. As I entered the church, I was given a cable that says, "Amnesty International confirmed today [that was yesterday] that in El Salvador human rights are violated to extremes that have not been seen in other countries." That is what Patricio Fuentes (spokesman for the urgent action section for Central America in Swedish Amnesty International) said at a press conference in Managua, Nicaragua.

Fuentes confirmed that, during two weeks of investigations he carried out in El Salvador, he was able to establish that there had been eighty-three political assassinations between 10 and 14 March. He pointed out that Amnesty International recently condemned the government of El Salvador, alleging that it was responsible for six hundred political assassinations. The Salvadorean government defended itself against the charges, arguing that Amnesty International based its condemnation on unproved assumptions.

Fuentes said that Amnesty had established that in El Salvador human rights are violated to a worse degree than the repression in Chile after the coupe d'etat. The Salvadorean government also said that the six hundred dead were the result of armed confrontations between army troops and guerrillas. Fuentes said that during his stay u l El Salvador, he could see that the victims had been tortured before their deaths and mutilated afterward.

The spokesman of Amnesty International said that the victims' bodies characteristically appeared with the thumbs tied behind their backs. Corrosive liquids had been applied to the corpses to prevent identification of the victims by their relatives and to prevent international condemnation, the spokesman added. Nevertheless, the bodies were exhumed and the dead have been identified. Fuentes said that the repression carried out by the Salvadorean army was aimed at breaking the popular organizations through the assassination of their leaders in both town and country.

According to the spokesman of Amnesty International, at least three thousand five hundred peasants have fled from their homes to the capital to escape persecution. "We have complete lists in London and Sweden of young children and women who have been assassinated for being organized," Fuentes stated....

I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, "Thou shalt not kill." No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.

The church preaches your liberation just as we have studied it in just as we have studied it in the holy Bible today. It is a liberation that has, above all else, respect for the dignity of the person, hope for humanity's common good, and the transcendence that looks before all to God and only from God derives its hope and its strength.

Fred's Son

2009-09-06T20:09:00.006-05:00

My friend Fred has spent more than half of his life in prison and was on death row for seven years, and is currently serving a life sentence at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. We met two years ago when I was going to Riverbend weekly and have corresponded ever since. I've previously blogged about my classes there. Anyway, I just received a letter from him that I want to share. As a friend of Fred's, my heart aches. Please keep Fred in your prayers.

". . . I am sorry for the delay but things have not been pleasant for me. There is a force greater than I and the energy from that force keeps me going. My oldest son was murdered. While visiting his aunt who lives next door to his grandmother, the unthinkable happened. An older guy - 56 years old, was visiting his aunt as well. This guy visited quite often. His aunt and the guy sats around the house and drink alcohol as a hobby. My son and this guy got into a verbal confrontation. Outdoors right in front of the house. My son decided to walk away and went back inside. The guy decides to leave. He goes home and return at the door with a knock. My son's aunt answers the door and the guy announced, "I come back to kill him." He is referring to my son. He walks over to the sofa where my son is sitting. He pulls out a 38 revolver and points it at my 19 year old first born. My son gets up off the sofa and slowly backs away. My son repeatedly ask the guy, "so man you're gonna kill me??" Before he could utter it again, the guy pulls the trigger and shoots him in the chest killing him as the bullet goes through his lungs. The guy sats down on a stool near the door and sats the gun down on a coffee table. He tells his aunt, uncle who was also present in the home that, "I came to do what I planned to do. He's dead and won't be coming back. You all can do whatever you want with me." No one made a move and my son's uncle preceded to continue drinking. The guy is currently being held on murder charges in the state of Mississippi... I am deeply sad, hurting and feel helpless... Kate my friend, you stay strong and I am here for you. When you feel like the world is against you remember that God is always with you."

Sipriz

2009-08-08T18:46:00.013-05:00

In Port-au-Prince during the summer of 2008, I sat down next to a man and his daughter for a meal. When white people encounter one another in Haiti, the first question is, “so what brings you to Haiti?” His name was Geert Van Der Kolk, a Dutch novelist, living in Washington, DC. He was in Port-au-Prince after a visit to the south to Les Cayes and the small island off the coast, Il a vache. I, having spent two previous summers in Les Cayes, and having done research on Il a vache (the tiny island where I met Dr. Chris), my interest was spiked. I assumed he was interested in humanitarian work, Pwoje Espwa, or church twining, and therefore he and I would know the same people. I was wrong.

Geert had plans of moving to Il a vache to build a sail boat entirely by hand (with the locals help) with only a hammer and a machete, made from local wood, palm trees and bamboo, in the tradition of Haitian fishermen. He intended then to sail this boat to Florida in a reenactment of sorts of the thousands and thousands of journeys of “Haitian boat people” who risk their lives to illegally migrate to the US where there is food, clean water, jobs, and health care for them and their children. This would become the topic of his next book. I remember thinking, “Wow, Haiti really does attract all kinds.” But then Geert continued, and shared that in 1999 he had been sailing with his family in the Bahamas and there was a call of distress and he was involved in trying to rescue Haitians from a capsize. Twenty Haitians died. An all too common story.

I shared my thoughts about the United States “Wet Feet Dry Feet” policy and realized in our conversation that Geert’s sailing dream was not one only of healing to honor this experience ten years ago, nor was it mere adventure, - - but one of social criticism and love of the Haitian people. I never saw Geert again after that dinner.

About a month ago, my friend Dan called me from New York. He had recently returned home after three years working in Haiti. Dan and I met in 2006. We have had hours upon hours of conversation, as well as numerous shared adventures in 2007 when I was conducting my thesis research; (I consider a boat ride home to Cayes from Il a vache to be one of those adventures.) He tells stories like no one I know. So Dan called to tell me that I needed to stop by my undergrad Alma Mater American University here in DC to see Geert’s boat. The guy really did it! And unbeknownst to me, Dan knew Geert and had been going out to Il a vache to hang out with him and the boat builders. Dan witnessed the boat from start to finish.

This afternoon I visited the boat “Sipriz” - - Haitian Kreyol for “surprise” - - as well as the beautiful exhibit at the Katzen Art Center at American University. The boat is outside on the lawn, exposed to all diplomats and policy makers who drive through Ward Circle from their million dollar homes to the halls where the destinies of Haitians are decided. I walked around the boat, touched it, and stood in awe that something so fragile could survive so much. Inside the exhibit, the beautiful bird on the sail was displayed on the wall as if it were one of those large Monet canvasses at the MET. As I watched the video a woman asked me if I knew anything about Haiti, and if it was really as poor as she heard it was. She asked me questions like “do the children pee and bathe in the same water?” We talked for a bit and I told her I had met Geert once, and that I had been to Il a vache, and I told her she should try to visit Haiti.

Haiti really attracts all kinds.

The Voyage of the Sipriz from Geert van der Kolk on Vimeo.

The Sipriz Expedition from Geert van der Kolk on Vimeo.

Don't Stop Till You Get Enough

2009-06-25T21:47:00.011-05:00

We carry with each of us, in our hearts, memories of Michael Jackson that have nothing to do with a woman setting doves free at his court hearings, or Michael saving an ape, or made for TV movies about what his parents did to him as a child. Rather, we have our memories about experiencing his work. Here are mine. . .
I remember putting on the 3d glasses with my Dad to watch the Michael Jackson stuff. And Mary Waldorf competitively ice skating to Thriller, while all done up as a ware wolf on skates. Oh oh, --- and in about 1983, my Dad, in our living room, in New York, perfecting his new dance, “the sun walk”- - - get it? It was funny. Ah yes, in high school at Nicole’s house. ABC, 123, dancing on her kitchen counter with her little brother DJ, Mo, and probably Julie. Then Mr. and Mrs. Ehrich returned from a wedding reception and joined in. They didn’t treat us like we were doing anything wrong. They celebrated our happiness and danced with us. That moment was one of freedom. Again, in high school, we Student Council officers used to do the announcements every morning. I made a tape of the beginnings of different songs to play one at a time in order to capture the attention of the student body in the mornings. Before BJ read an announcement, that he wrote, about how many points he scored at the basketball game the night before, he pushed play and 30 seconds of a Dave Matthews Band song was sent over the PA system. Oh, but BJ didn’t push stop before talking about his basket ball skills. So, after the pledge and half way through is announcement, Billie Jean came on, - - in full force. This made the announcements more popular than ever before. For the entire week, students came up to us, “I LOVE THAT YOU PLAYED BILLIE JEAN!” We Student Council Officers were totally popular for like, a day. But we still skipped dances we organized and then lied and said things like “we were visiting colleges” rather than “we were with our boyfriends or drinking by the river!” So there it is. I will carry you with me, Michael Jackson. I also love to dance, so don't you worry Michael, I will carry on your legacy. No worries.
When you think of your moments with Michael Jackson songs, what is it that comes to mind?

There once was a kitty who lived in a shoe...

2009-05-26T20:06:00.005-05:00

I had big plans to lure Elijah to my Wellingtons and take a photo of him inside. Alas, his big tiger instincts botched my plans.

BAIT

HOOK

DESTROY!

just sharing. that's all.

2009-04-12T08:52:00.004-05:00

Well I finally sent off most of the wedding gifts, - - those for Iram and Megan are still pending. For a while there, my living room was like a pancake maker and serving bowl heaven. Emily Post says one has a year to provide wedding gifts. When I finally got my head above water, mid-March came and went and left my universe with five new babies in only two weeks. Ahh, to be thirty.

I would like to have the luxury of writing this post in the vain of self-deprecation, noting the humiliation of singledom and then wrapping things up with a twist revealing how truly wonderful it is to be partner-less, independent and self-assured. But I can’t. Shannon and Ryan had Madison a couple of weeks ago. And now, Ryan’s Mom is suddenly deathly ill. This, coupled with the general state of affairs in our country and this world, I just can’t stop thinking about how desperately we need to love and share.

We should share our dinner tables and our homes, our belongings and our strife, our love and our churches. The world is not getting friendlier, so we have no choice but to love and share.

sharpening our lenten knives

2009-03-22T19:31:00.004-05:00

I own only one sharp knife. It is small. Tuesday night I was told of its formal name: “a paring knife” and I was also notified that such a knife would by no means be sufficient for a “normal person’s kitchen”. My disinterest in all things culinary is nothing new. I’ve baked no-bake cookies and made 10 Minute Rice in three minutes. One boyfriend joyfully noshed on raw cauliflower after an earnest attempt to serve him baked eggplant for dinner, and another asked in his annoying Afro-British accent, “Have others tried to domesticate you, and they’ve failed?” - - Making me sound less like a woman who prefers to have food prepared for her and more like a feral beast. Somehow though, I have survived in the United States sans the ability to cook, and also without a television or an alarm clock, for what it is worth.

The controversy surrounding my paring knife and the frustration it caused Ben really got me thinking about the things people do in their own lives that cause me such distress when I am in their space. You know, those things that just amaze me that somehow they too manage to survive. Things like the oh-so-common Hansel and Gretel sort of trail of shoes and dirty clothes through the apartment that so many boys seem to be fine with. Or how my friends in the burbs choose to drive their two tons of steel every time they need something from the CVS around the corner. Or the fact that people say they don’t have enough time to exercise or write notes. How do these people survive, I wonder?

I guess they must have a nice knife collection.

food for thought

2009-02-25T19:06:00.005-06:00

But emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. and being found in human form. - Philippians 2:7

During Lent, for Christian sub-communities - - specifically converts (pre-baptismal catechumens), new christians (neophytes), and penitent apostates (atoning sinners)- - and the community as a whole there exists a season of abstinence, discipline, self-restraint, and contemplation. Therein lays flesh filled optimism, turning toward the resurrection of Christ. Lent, therefore, provides the church with a unique opportunity to be active contrarians to the norms and ways of our sick, scarce culture; it is a time to live over and against the selfish and unequal mainstream values of modernity.

One way in which this can be activated is through fasting, as recommended by Paul in Acts 14:23. Fasting activates a bodily attempt to “die” of self in order to live for Christ. This self-denial resides in union with Christ’s sacrifice not only of his life, or in his resistance of temptation in the desert, but in his humiliating experience as a smelling, pained, tortured body, hanging on the cross.

St. Leo the Great said that Lent was a time to prepare for salvation. Those awaiting baptism, the church-going, and those returning to the church can engage in a communal fast as preparation for salvation, and a “rebaptism” in Easter. Lent presents spiritual struggles, and fasting is a tool to assist in working through those struggles. It is also an act of social justice. When I consume less, I leave more for others to consume. When I take in less food and water, there are gleanings for the needy as commanded by scripture.

In the same vain that hunger strikes are a means of non-violent resistance to oppressive conditions, fasting speaks truth to power. In pre-Christian Ireland, hunger strikes were used to publicly bring attention to injustice. During the early 20th century, hunger strikes were used by Gandhi in India against the British. Suffragists, Caesar Chavez, and Guantanamo detainees have fasted in opposition to inequality in gender, labor, and justice, denying ones body of bread, speaks over and against the system and the worldly emptiness that pervade society, hoping for a new bread of life in Christ.

The story of Elijah reveals the power fasting has in connecting with God. Elijah goes into the desert to hide after great violence. He asks God to end his life, takes nothing in, and then gives his life over to God entirely. Soon food is delivered, and not by the Sala Thai delivery guy: BUT BY AN ANGEL! Then comes revelation and courage. Elijah may return to Israel. Fasting may help us all return to Israel. Caution however, after Moses fasted, he received the Ten Commandments. With self-denial comes wisdom, followed by responsibility in a world of irreversibility.

for it is important that awake people be awake

2009-01-31T12:47:00.001-06:00

A Ritual To Read To Each Other
By, William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

a crisp peace

2009-01-26T20:21:00.003-06:00

On the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama, the ghost-like presence of my need to write lingered in my space. For three days I partied until 4:00 am; there was a Bush effigy, visiting with Ohio 2004 folks, early morning meals and a large concert on the mall. DC had briefly morphed from a culture of professionals tackling structural unpleasantries to well, just a big party. But on Martin Luther King Day, the eve of the inauguration, in the air circulated quietness. An absence of anxiety. A blatant peace. It seemed as if the laborious commitments that led this movement to this moment had gone on Sabbath. It was lovely.

"beyond danger, is opportunity"

2009-01-11T20:49:00.000-06:00

Watch CBS Videos Online

new years day

2009-01-01T17:09:00.009-06:00

While reading a book about the Historical Jesus and the Cult of Mary, something quietly appeared to me, something that I had never realized or probed before. According to Luke chapter 2, each man owed Augustus taxes and in response, Joseph fled and left Nazareth for Bethlehem. My defiant grandfather apparently didn’t pay taxes for years. When he died, my father received a bill from the IRS, (gulp). In a day and age where a woman making $60,000 a year is taxed at 25% by a country selling arms to Israel and invading sovereign nations, Joseph’s plan sounds good to me! Where shall we go? Bethlehem? Port-au-Prince? Philly? Shall we take the Acela train there? Anyway, when I die, I certainly hope someone will read the barbarically highlighted portions of my books for it will remain as only one of my two legacies.

While reading this marvelous account of the myth of Mary, I listened to Nina Simone in the background as she sang about the tragedy of love, and the devastation and responsibility of being born black. On Saturday, the Obamas move into the Hay-Adams (on my street!) for two weeks proceeding the inauguration. The beautiful Hay-Adams (where I have had tea in the parlor and drinks on the roof). Who would’ve thought the off-spring of willing and also forced African diaspora could reside at the Hay-Adams, the Blair House, or even, the White House.

My blog was originally intended to be a place to tell some of my “crazy stories” that my friends insist I write a book of (ehhmmm, Jeremy). The blog, however, has morphed, unfortunately and most recently, into a true blog: an online journal. The tragic sensibilities of my Irish heritage and the story of the year have taken this blog hostage, but in 2009, I am determined to reverting it into a place for social commentary and the sharing of old stories.

the way he was

2008-12-20T18:30:00.005-06:00

I am thinking about keeping this in my foyer with Rev. Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" in constant play. An eternal flame for the old Barry.

2008: Months of Lessons Learned

2008-12-12T13:38:00.008-06:00

January: A rapid detox from Ethics class can be achieved with immediate lunch with the guys.

February: Sometimes you can feel very small while standing by the ocean, or anywhere in Dubai.

March: If a guy you are interested tells you that he knows all the words to Les Miserables, take it as a red flashing light.

April: A Masters Thesis is an invitation, not a bookend.

May: Never presume you are locked out when a door shuts unexpectedly; but if you drive over the river to get your key, enjoy the sunset on the bridge.

June: Haitians live by the hand of grace, at the mercy of a few individuals and a system with only gleans of redemption and hope.

July: Hoosiers love basketball. And for street signs? Not so much.

August: There’s nothing that can’t be cared for while sitting in an Adirondack chair on the porch.

September: Like life, the cholla cactus may at first appear to be one animal, but it is really another.

October: Even while dressed in Notre Dame gear, it is ok to start cheering for UW half way through the game: loyalty always surfaces.

November: The wealthiest county in the US, Fairfax County, can still be capable of great things - - such as being responsible for the first use of the words “President-Elect Obama!”

December: Unlike intestinal parasites, the gesture of hospitality can make you a victim of the host’s pathology, but in loving friendship all things can be conqured.

thoughts on 30 things, or two

2008-12-08T19:48:00.009-06:00

My friend Lynnette and I were born during the same week in 1978. She messed with Texas while I threw off the equilibrium of the Keystone State. Savvier than myself, Lynnette recently made a list of 30 things she intends to do during her 31st year; one commitment is to take a photograph a day. I, a day late and a dollar short, decided to think about 30 things I would like to do during my 31st year.

Number one: I aspire to ask more questions.
As open and extroverted as I tend to be, I could use some improvement in the area of inquisition. Academia is driven by questions, and I thrive in that environment. But when it comes to my personal relationships, I think I tend to tell people how it is or ignore how it is rather than going ahead and asking how it is. Maybe that is a means of protecting myself. So, ok Lynnette, I will show your thirty things with one thing: As a thirty year old woman, I aspire to push myself to ask questions everyday.

Another thing I was thinking about, is the notion of accepting where people are, outside of any relation to me, really and truly. When my Dad turned 50 in 1992 he told me, “I no longer give a shit.” I am pretty sure that with getting older certainly life is getting easier. Of course, more problems seem to appear, and there are certainly moments of utter devastation, but I have to say, life is a lot easier than when I was, like, 22. But, still, betrayal is an animal without definition. And the world is full of peoples' pain.

According to Dr. Bart Ehrman, there are three sorts of premises in Christianity: 1) God is all-powerful; 2) God is a loving God; 3) There is suffering. In friendships and relationships, I think only one of these tenants reigns true: 1) Neither party is all-powerful; 2) Both parties are capable of behaving in unloving ways; 3) And well, yes, suffering plagues us all.

But what if we had a rapprochement, and what if we assumed - - about one another - - that even when unloving acts are committed that there is an intention to be ultimately loving. How would that help to inform responses to our own suffering? Would suffering built upon suffering cease? Would yielding one another a grace of real forgiveness - - even for that which is unconscious and unconfessable or inexcusable- - help with our own happiness? Is that what it means to no longer “give a shit”? Unconditional forgiveness? Is it better to just disappear rather than acknowledging – you’ve gotten too close to me – I’ve told you too much – you’ve hurt me here’s your bag in a punitive manner; here’s a formal email about the weather; here’s me disappearing. See, I have disappeared.

I’d like to think that any option is ok.

After all, people need to take care of themselves.

The world is broken and we must cope in order to live.

But I can’t think that way.

I just think it is much better to stay in the messiness. The only way out is through, and as I travel on my own path of suffering, my inclination is to stay in the mess with others.

But then again, I think my inclination is probably wrong.

Sometimes it’s ok to let people go away.

Sometimes that’s easier. Well, it is always easier.

My 30 years have at least taught me one thing.

30

2008-11-23T18:51:00.007-06:00

In many cultures, I have already turned 30. And for the past year or so, I have gotten used to (although preemptive) referring to myself as “a thirty year old.” I remember after 2004 when my friend Bolla flashed a badge to me from her work in Ohio on the Presidential Campaign. She said casually to me as an Ohio Kerry alum- “here’s my street cred.” I think turning 30 this Tuesday is a bit of street cred for me. Maybe I should print myself a badge. And put it around my neck.

I think that I have I’ve survived a lot. So I am proud of turning 30. On the other hand, I do feel a death of a certain life. By no means do I expect my 30’s to be tired or without travel. Ethiopia and El Salvador are next on my list, and as spiritual pilgrimages. I do not expect to have less sex or become more conservative politically, I simply imagine that in this next age, I shall be better. I want to be kinder, and more empathetic. I want to wear lipstick regularly, and go by my nicknames more frequently. I want to find a good PhD program, and pour my heart into my research. I want to commit to a life partner whom I admire beyond words. I want to visit my parents more, because I miss them. And I want to love Luke in ways that I never imagined.

This is all I want.

Because I am so lucky, I have so very little to want.

virginia is for lovers (of barack)

2008-11-05T22:25:00.004-06:00

On the evening of Election Day, Barack Obama spoke in front of half a million people in Chicago, while others all over the world huddled around radios or were watching on TV. At 4:30 pm in a cold garage in Fairfax County, Virginia I spoke to the final group of canvassers, many of whom had been out in the rain all day, all of GOTV weekend, or all election season.

The group was diverse. An elderly white woman stood next to a young black woman. The gay middle-aged man shared his umbrella with the pregnant immigrant. They were all neighbors in the precincts in which they were about to talk to voters for the final time in this election. I looked at these eighteen volunteers and thought about what they needed to hear. They eagerly looked at me for direction. Throughout my life, I have been part of the democratic process at various levels in different places. On Tuesday, with very little sleep, and while dressed in a strange Norwegian sweater donated to me by one of the canvassers, I rededicated myself to the bread & butter of the political process, and of this campaign: the effectiveness of neighbors talking to neighbors.

I told them that the 21 months of voter registration, identification, persuasion, financial donations, stress, and dedication in the field - would all be for naught if Getting Out The Vote failed. And the only way - the ONLY way - GOTV will not fail in Virginia, would be if we cranked it up and turned it out in Fairfax County. The next two and a half hours of their lives came down to the answer of one question: would there be a President McCain or a President Obama? Therefore, I told them, it was time to do one thing and one thing only, to get bodies to the polls. I told them not to come back to see me with any information until 7:00pm, and that I only wanted a number of people who had definitively delivered a vote for Obama. I said I don’t want you coming back here to tell me about how many yard signs or dogs a house has even though you couldn’t find away to get a hold of the people living inside. I want you to be married to your turf for the next two and a half hours because this is your last chance. This is not about ANYTHING other getting voters to immediately go and vote for Barack. The people on your list are your responsibility. And mark my word, we will lose Virginia if we do not turn out Fairfax County at a historical margin. If we win Virginia we don’t need places like Florida and Ohio. So, it’s all you. Keep your head in the game. You don’t get to redo these 2.5 hours tomorrow.

Before I knew it, it was 9:30 pm and I was at a fancy cocktail party at The Willard in downtown DC. The TV said we were losing Virginia, and I knew that Fairfax had not reported yet. When Virginia went blue for the first time in 44 years, I received calls and texts from a couple of those canvassers exclaiming things such as, “wow! You were right about Virginia! I am so glad I was out there this weekend!”

In my mind, the most invigorating thing about politics and of this campaign in particular, is that all the experts and operatives in that room at The Willard would be nothing without the labor of people like those whom I spoke to in the cold garage.

With hope,
Kate

my little green

2008-10-12T16:58:00.007-05:00

Happy 6th Birthday to Luke on Wednesday.

inshalla

2008-10-11T18:09:00.008-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I called my friend Uzma for the first time in many months. While Uzma is someone I greatly admire and feel quite close to we do not speak frequently. She and I were catching up about all the things women talk about in these sorts of conversations. (And she always makes time for me when I call.) Uzma is going to be a Mom, so we talked about that. Having finished her Masters in Public Health at Johns Hopkins, she has a new job in North Carolina, so we also discussed that. During this conversation, I realized she was at the same time running errands for her husband, Nadim. First she went to the drug store to get him a prescription for heartburn. Then she went through the Arby’s drive-thru. Then to another place to retrieve a specific type of freedom fries. Nadim, a heart surgeon, was at home watching the Redskins with a friend.

Realizing it was about 7 pm on the east coast I asked Uzma, “Are ya’all breaking fast now or something?”

“Yes! And I am running all over the place to get Nadim what he wants!”

“Happy Ramadan, I guess?”

“Ha ha ha- thanks,” she said.

Today, I watched an A&E special on Queen Noor (Lisa Hallaby) of Jordan. And I remembered Uzma driving through the drive-thrus. And I also recalled Sarah from Austin in Bangladesh telling me of her arranged marriage and the early struggles with it as the commitment she and her husband made grew stronger - endured the test of time and ultimately celebrated an irreplaceable bond.

I envy these women.

In a day and age where my favorite Presidential candidate Barack Obama marches around asserting that he is “not a Muslim” I sometimes wish there was place for me in the Muslim culture. Islam means “surrender,” and at risk of sounding pathetic, I must say, as a single woman, I would love nothing more than to give, surrender, and love with all of my being, in choice and devotion like my Muslim friends do in their marriages.

I missed my friend Iram’s wedding in August, but she was gorgeous and I am sharing a photo.

9/11/2008: The 20th anniversary of massacre at St. John Bosco

2008-09-10T11:47:00.006-05:00

During the Duvalier regime and the turmoil after, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a renegade priest, delivering homily after homily calling for the economic and political liberation of the Haitian people. Consequently, on September 11, 1988 his little church in La Saline, Port-au-Prince was burned during a massacre killing thirteen parishioners, injuring at least seventy-seven others.

Amy Wilentz’s book The Rainy Season gives an authoritative and eye-witness account of this attack. Reading the section on St. Jean Bosco requires a strong stomach; she was there during the massacre. First, the thugs shot through the wall protecting the church, while church children hurled rocks back over it, in defense. Aristide continued mass, but told people to leave if they wished. The assailants shot the lock off the gate and stormed the front of the church, shooting people and causing mayhem and screaming. Victims were being held down and stabbed to death. Machetes were used to slash the tops of heads off congregants. A pregnant woman was stabbed in the stomach. Aristide fled through the sacristy, and was soon to face down another assassination attempt. (He has survived many in his life.) As a grand finale, gasoline was poured all over the grounds of the church and it burned.

Haitian army officers stood by and watched all of this. Not one person from the police station across the street stepped in. The fix was in. According to all accounts, each thug was paid seven dollars and a bottle of three-dollar rum by the government for the attacks. Thirteen people were killed, and seventy-seven were injured. The local Catholic Bishops did not even comment on the massacre for two full weeks

For my first pilgrimage to St. Jean Bosco, my tour guide and friend was Bobby Duval, a longtime friend of Aristide’s. Bobby, held for years as a political prisoner and was released upon Jean Claude Duvalier’s departure in 1986, was intimately involved in Aristide’s work at the time of the 1988 massacre. Like many others, Bobby has lost several friends in the name of liberation theology, in the name of fighting systemic poverty and oppression.

After a visit and walk around Cité Soleil, I reminded Bobby of my desire to visit the church in La Saline. He told our driver to take us. The driver turned to him with a viscerally ill look on his face, and asked two questions in Kreyol. Bobby looked out the window with a face of grief, and said, “She wants to see it. Let’s just go.”

Bobby’s celebrity as a leader and hero for the poor allowed an easy entrance through the gate. Upon exiting the vehicle, I thought the grounds looked like an overgrown grave yard, and I was surprised by how small everything was. I suppose that is how it is sometimes, when we visit places where big things have happened. We keep them sort of frozen in our minds in the time and condition they once were at their time of historical importance.

The armed guard had a million questions for me. “You know about this place? Why do you want to come to this place? Do you know about Father Aristide?” It has probably been a while since a white American woman set foot within those walls. Needless to say, as a student researching and passionate about liberation theology and Haiti, this visit was a very powerful experience. Bobby quietly guided me along the grounds of the church. There is no roof, and the walls are covered with bullet holes, and graffiti of phrases such as “Titid Returnay,” and “Pep Ayisyen se Titid." My research of the place allowed me to point to places and ask – “This is the rectory, isn’t it?” Or to suggest, “Let’s around the back to see the courtyard.”

The remains of St. Jean Bosco serve as a monument for justice and peace. Standing on the decrepit altar, I looked around and thought of the martyrs. The parishioners came to church that day acutely aware of the danger. Many wore white to honor the new (and government ignored) Constitution that was being ignored by the violent government, and residual Duvalier thugs. The people in white were the first to be shot. The brave parishioners peacefully prayed and sang hymns, standing in resistance to the violence of political oppression. It is difficult to imagine what they must have felt as they heard the gunshots beginning to sound outside.

Around the time of the St. Bosco massacre, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, in light of the fall of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall, liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Jon Sobrino were called up on to speak for to the relevance and role of liberation theology. Jon Sobrino chose to focus on the martyrdom that was still occurring, such as the martyrdom of at St. Jean Bosco. He wrote of taking the crucified down from the cross. In a book about the Salvadoran Jesuits he wrote: “The price to be paid for all this has been very high, but inevitable. Today when we hear so much about evangelizing cultures, we should remember a deeper form of evangelization, so that society itself becomes the good news.” In this “changed world” when NAFTA was being celebrated in the United States, masked Zapatistas stormed Chiapas and declared that free trade was a death certificate for the poor in Mexico. Liberation theology still had a call and a role all through Latin America, perhaps the need was the greatest in the poorest country of all countries in the western hemisphere - Haiti.

Aristide was ultimately blamed for causing political trouble like the September 11 massacre, and later expelled from the Salesian Order. He mixed theology with politics. As if there is a difference. Aristide wrote, “The Vatican sides not with an entire people defending these values at risk of life and limb, but with the men of the old regime trained to bury them.”

a narrative i can't seem to tell. right now.

2008-09-09T21:13:00.006-05:00

In the past several weeks, I have made so many notes of things I desire to write on:

- Senator Kennedy’s words at the DNC convention, “And this is the cause of my life -- new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American -- north, south, east, west, young, old -- will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege. We can meet these challenges with Barack Obama. Yes, we can, and finally, yes, we will. Barack Obama will close the book on the old politics of race and gender and group against group and straight against gay.”
- The journey, comforts, and dismay of my summer.
- The displacement of a million people in Haiti because of storms and flooding.

But I am weak and uninspired, and incapable of writing. I would rather be numb. I watch TV now. Passionate note-taking no longer leads to actual writing. Stress does not translated into motivated creations. The constant cerebral stimulation and scholarly shallowness have been replaced with a shallow Capote-style cocktail party conversation with the same people, and a holding pattern 18 hours a day inside an apartment on 16^th Street.

The most live things in my sphere of physical life are the presence of the white house at the end of this street, and playing tennis, nearly a week ago. My first in a year. Neither of which have a sustainable or survivable presence in this storm of limbo.

I want nothing more than to write, and think, and cite, and feel, and love, and encounter the textures of this life, most intimately. However, those textures became all-too close in Haiti, and after, I had to retreat, and recover. I am going home to California for a couple of weeks.

“What are you writing?” I made a mistake and asked.
“I am writing the best I can. Just as you do. But it’s so terribly difficult.”
“You shouldn’t write if you can’t write. What do you have to cry about it for? Go Home. Get a job. Hang yourself. Only don’t talk about it. You could never write.”
-Ernest Hemmingway, A Movable Feast

michelle wins the dance-off

2008-09-08T22:21:00.004-05:00

i have not been inspired enough to blog. but i am inspired to dance, and vote.

rip congresswoman tubbs jones

2008-08-20T18:50:00.008-05:00

Stephanie Tubbs Jones, before a joint Congress, January 2005:

"I, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a representative from Ohio, and Ms. Boxer, a Senator from California, object to the counting of the electoral votes of the State of Ohio on the ground that they were not, under all of the known circumstances, regularly given. I, thank God, that I have a Senator joining me in this objection. I appreciate Senator Boxer's willingness to listen to the plight of hundreds and even thousands of Ohio voters that for a variety of reasons were denied the right to vote.

Unfortunately objecting to the electoral votes from Ohio is the only immediate avenue to bring these issues to light. While some have called our cause foolish I can assure you that my parents, Mary and Andrew Tubbs did not raise any fools and as a lawyer, former judge and prosecutor, I am duty bound to follow the law and apply the law to the facts as I find them. It is on behalf of those millions of Americans who believe in and value our democratic process and the right to vote that I put forth this objection today. If they are willing stand at the polls for countless hours in the rain as many did in Ohio, then I can surely stand up for them here in the halls of Congress.

This objection does not have at its root the hope or even the hint of overturning or challenging the victory of the President; but it is a necessary, timely and appropriate opportunity to review and remedy the most precious process in our democracy. I raise this objection neither to put the nation in the turmoil of a proposed overturned election nor to provide cannon fodder or partisan demagoguery for my fellow Republican Members of Congress. I raise this objection because I am convinced that we as a body must conduct a formal and legitimate debate about election irregularities. I raise this objection to debate the process and protect the integrity of the true will of the people. Again, I thank Senator Boxer for joining me in this objection to the counting of Ohio's electoral votes due to the considerable number of voting irregularities that transpired in my home state. There are serious allegations in two lawsuits pending in Ohio that debate the constitutionality of the denial of provisional ballots to voters (The Sandusky County Democratic Party v. J. Kenneth Blackwell) and Ohio's vote recount (Yost v. David Cobb, et al.). These legitimate questions brought forward by the lawsuits, which go to the core of our voting and Democratic process, should be resolved before Ohio's electoral votes are certified.

Moreover, as you are aware, advancing legislative initiatives is more challenging when you are in the minority party in Congress. However, this challenge is multiplied when you are in the minority in the House of Representatives because of House rules, compared to Senate rules. Voting irregularities were an issue after the 2000 presidential election, when Democratic House initiatives relating to election reform were not considered. Therefore, in order to prevent our voices from being kept silent, it is imperative that we object to the counting of Ohio's electoral votes and debate the issue of Ohio's voting improprieties. There are just over 1 million registered voters in Cuyahoga County - which of course includes the Greater Cleveland area and the 11th Congressional District which I represent. Registration increased approximately 10 percent.

The beauty of the 2004 election was that more people were fully prepared to exercise their right to vote - however on Election Day hundreds and even thousands of individuals went to the voting polls and were denied the opportunity to have their vote count. In my own county where citizen volunteers put forth a Herculean effort to register, educate, mobilize and protect the vote there were people who experienced irregularities. Poor and minority communities had disproportionately long waits - 4 to 5 hours waits were widespread. Election Protection Coalition testified that more than half of the complaints about long lines they received, came from Columbus and Cleveland where a huge proportion of the states Democratic voters live. One entire polling place in Cuyahoga County (Greater Cleveland) had to shut down at 9:25 a.m. on Election Day because there were no working machines. Cuyahoga County had an overall provisional ballot rejection rate of 32 percent. Rejection rates for provisional ballots in African American precincts/wards in Cleveland, Ohio averaged 37 percent and ranged as high as 51 percent.

Thousands of partisan challengers - concentrated in Cuyahoga County's minority and Democratic communities - effectively served to intimidate voters and confuse poll workers. There were both inconsistent and illegal requests for photo identification. There were problems with absentee ballots including incorrect information provided to voters by the Secretary of State and, consequently, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections telling voters they could not vote in their precinct effectively disenfranchising hundreds and more likely thousands of voters. This objection points out the inadequacy of a great election system which permits 50 Secretary's of State to administer a federal election and impose so many different state laws regulating the election.

In Ohio, the Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell who served as Co-Chair of the Bush re-election campaign, issued a bizarre series of directives in the days preceding the 2004 Presidential election that created tremendous confusion among voters in Cuyahoga County and across the state of Ohio. For example; on September 7, 2004, Secretary Blackwell issued a directive to local boards of elections mandating rejection of voter registration forms based on their paperweight 80lb text weight. Mr. Blackwell's issuance of this directive which he ultimately reversed by September 28, 2004 - resulted in serious confusion and chaos among the counties and voters. My objection points to the need to implement across this nation standards that apply to all states. We need to enact legislation that will: Allow all voters to vote early - so that obligations of employment and family will not interfere with the ability to cast a vote. Establish a national holiday - Election Day to bring attention to the importance of the vote. Require those who work in the voting booth to be fairly compensated, adequately educated and sufficiently supported such that the job importance will be elevated. That will provide equipment - whether it is the traditional punch card or the more modern electronic machines that are properly calibrated, fully tested for accuracy and provide a paper trial to ensure a verifiable audit of every vote.

What happened in Ohio may well have been repeated in counties across this country. Yet that is no excuse for us to push the irregularities behind us and go on with the business of the day. These incidents are a call for us to clean up, clear up and implement policies and procedures that will protect each citizen's precious right to vote. If in fact we see it is our obligation to secure democracy around the world to monitor and oversee free and fair elections in other countries surely we must ensure, protect and guarantee the right to vote right here at home."

but gravity always wins

2008-07-31T11:03:00.010-05:00

∙ her green plastic watering can ∙ for her fake chinese rubber plant ∙ in the fake plastic earth ∙ that she bought from a rubber man ∙ in a town full of rubber plants ∙ to get rid of itself ∙ it wears her out, it wears her out ∙ she lives with a broken man ∙ a cracked polystyrene man ∙ who just crumbles and burns ∙ he used to do surgery ∙ for girls in the eighties ∙ but gravity always wins ∙ and it wears him out, it wears him out ∙ it wears him out, it wears him out ∙ she looks like the real thing ∙ she tastes like the real thing ∙ my fake plastic love ∙ but i can't help the feeling ∙ i could blow through the ceiling ∙ if i just turn and run ∙ and it wears me out, it wears me out ∙ it wears me out, it wears me out ∙ and if i could be who you wanted ∙ if i could be who you wanted ∙ all the time, all the time ∙

metamelomai

2008-07-26T15:29:00.015-05:00

Last summer over a Prestige at the beach, my pal Alex who works for the United Nations spoke of his family back home in Ethiopia. We got to talking about the most famous singer from

Ethiopia

,Gigi Shibabaw. He rambled on about how many concerts Gigi had coming up because of “the millennium.” After all, in

Ethiopia

it was only 1999. Now, my friend Angela lives in

Ethiopia

, where the millennium was just recently celebrated.

It is eight years ago in Ethiopia.

By the authority vested in me thanks to my participation in divinity school, I will now make the bold assertion (like the kind the Dean graciously warned about, and charged us with, at graduation): the eight year gap comes from use of the Julian calendar versus the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. Angela occasionally excuses the technological difficulties in our communications by saying things like, “Sorry, it is only the year 2000 here.”

It got me thinking. What if we could travel back to eight years ago, like Angela? All of us. Even George Bush. And Britney Spears.

Ahhh, an age-old question: “What would I do differently?” You know- I am naturally wary of people who say things like, “no regrets.” I kinda feel like things work out the way they should; but on the other hand, having regrets means learning, gaining information, and a willingness to take responsibility. In my life, in the situations in which profound beauty have come from great suffering, I still think, - - wow, I could have handled that a little bit better,- - or, - - I could have made some better choices during this or that, even though I accept that it is all over now. Over. Forever.

In the year 2000 I was nearly twenty-two years old, and it was my senior year of college. I don’t think that I would choose to go back, even to fix things with the information I have now. The thought of it exhausts me. I look forward to saying things like “back when I was in my twenties.”

So maybe this means I can say that I have “no regrets.” But I don’t think so.

kill your television, or that annoying couple on the eharmony commercial

2008-07-25T19:10:00.012-05:00

I’ve been watching an enormous amount of TV lately. What at first was a treat has since been a reminder of why I don’t own a television, (despite my angst of baseball-season-separation and lack of opportunity to conquer the Daily Double). For me, turning on the TV exposes my most sacred peace to the chronic illnesses of consumerism, anxiety, fear, and reality TV shows (that I somehow can watch numerous episodes of). But please don’t reduce my aversion to TV to an assumed, snobbish, distaste for that which lies outside of the intellectual, because through the internet and grocery check-out magazines, I too indulge the absurdities of pop culture. All-in-all, I guess I understand my distaste for TV to be founded on the same reasons I don’t like Las Vegas: too much stimuli and not enough space or time to sort it out. My basal ganglia can only handle so much.

During the past couple of days, on the couch coping with illness, it has just been me and the TV, while my books and pens lie neglected on the floor, lonely, and unused- - all of us wondering when - - if ever - - energy and focus will allow utility again. These days of re-exposure to TV have evoked a new reason for my dislike (and now distrust) of TV – there are families, and couples, and committed people all over TV. Everywhere, a culture where people couple-off and reproduce, and society encourages and rewards them for it. For this togetherness is not a communal one. I am not witnessing community where it ‘takes a village’ – rather, I am told (and learning) that it takes a husband, and a Mom, and there are usually heavily deciduous dogs running on freshly cleaned, white tiled floors.

Oh God, every time I see that commercial about the cell phone Family Plan Free Minutes and the spilled milk, I first wonder why I can’t seem to understand what the milk connection is and then I just want to cry my eyes out because I feel so lost. Oh, and on “Trading Spouses” today- I had endure witnessing two families as they experienced the longing for the temporarily traded spouse, but I kept on watching, almost dreaming that someone was missing me. Is this what it is sometimes like for kids of divorced parents? Is this how my gay friends feel in this heteronormative society? Or is just me, and somehow, I have step-by-step and year-by-year violated the governance of American society? I have noticed that the weather reports cause a similar sensation for me. Like the storms in the northeast yesterday - - I kept watching and it made me think about growing up in New York, and having a family, and listening to the scary rain on the roof at night after I moved to my room in the refurbished attic of our little house.

But I also discovered a new good thing about TV today. The Country Music channel. While tuned in there, I feel understood. There, exist others who feel alienated, too. They’re always on the outside looking in, too. Although, that Jesus Take the Wheel song freaks me out a little bit. I am not so sure I want Jesus driving my car.

a great multitude as one

2008-07-24T13:47:00.009-05:00

Before watching Obama’s speech on TV this afternoon, I was breezing through a book called The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins. In addition to a thorough account of ideas on Christian universality in the African church and global south, Jenkins exposes the notion of Christianity as westerndom for the myth that it is, - at first, by discussing how a Palestinian centered world was recartographied - if you will – into a Roman centered world. Then, Jenkins reminds readers that the holiest of practices of Christianity were established in modern-day Tunsia and practiced three hundred years before Christianity was legalized in Europe; and of course, according to Acts, it was an Ethiopian who first converted to Christianity. Still today in

Ethiopia

where a Solomonic tradition of thousands of years stands against the oppression of forms of imperialism, a tradition of mysticism and hope prevails in the face of the crushing forces of death.

We are all Palestinian. We are all African.

So today, an American with an African father went to Europe and asked for a help in healing the strife of both the highlighted and forgotten parts of the world. He said, “Now the world will watch and remember what we do here - what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time? Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words "never again" in Darfur? Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don't look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people? People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time.”

We are all Berliners.

Obama called for conversation and trust, peace and cooperation. “The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow,” he said, after highlighting the World War II airlifts of food to Germany. I couldn’t help but think of what a miraculous thing it has been for me to watch and listen to upper-middle class Americans on mission trips in Haiti. Something forever changes when they briefly suffer with their Haitian brothers and sisters, witnessing their crushing hunger and sadness. It feels like watching a miracle also, to see a slender, brown-skinned, man represent America, me, and my family extending an open hand across Atlantic ocean after eight years of cowboys offering only the absolutes of silence, torture, and death. I will pray for sustainable miracles, and hope that President Obama remembers he is a Palestinian-African-Berliner.

i know it is not john wayne

2008-07-15T08:33:00.001-05:00

blog posts suspended

2008-07-01T23:09:00.006-05:00

Per my employment contract with Obama for America and the Indiana Campaign for Change, I am suspending my blog for a while.

Until later.

Barack the vote.

exodus

2008-06-18T23:23:00.003-05:00

I resigned from my position in Haiti, and returned to DC. I plan on spending the next week literally on the couch, recovering from what has happened to me, then I will make plans for what I will do, - about that, I am not particularly worried. Maybe I will work for Obama, if he will take me.

I absolutely can not publicly write about the events that led me to leave abruptly in the middle of the night, but know that I am ok. The essence of the story is that I will not negotiate with terrorists who live in a tribal mentality of fear, violence, and so on. But the story is much more complex than that. I will tell you - my friends, individually, about what has gone on, but I can not be eloquent when I am still so shaken up.

Now more than ever, I have a solidarity with the Haitian people, who live with violence breathing down their necks, appearing in their bedrooms, positioning itself through the government. And this last experience, has changed my life.

One of the last things I saw, before I left, was a tiny girl, just learning to walk, a patient- dancing for the waiting patients with an elderly man who was unable to really walk. Both he and the little girl were laughing. I will never forget that moment.

Please watch this video of Maria Shriver. I certainly know who my brothers are, and I might need them the most, now.

clothes

2008-06-15T10:47:00.005-05:00

If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. - Thoreau

and on the third day

2008-06-12T19:17:00.013-05:00

Tomorrow will be my third full day on the job.

Paulo Freire’s Method of Conscientization is about developing critical awareness of groups of people in poor communities, and it has been used by community literacy programs, health workers, and educators through out Latin America, India, and Africa. One principle in the Method of Conscientization is that group leaders must not ask questions with built-in answers, and must be prepared for totally unexpected answers and ideas to questions.

If my question as a group leader is “how to we provide care and compassion (a suffering with) with cleanliness, the answers I witness and receive minute by minute from the nurses, doctors, and staff at Vizitasyon continue to surprise me. Somethings are a bit confusing, I will admit, - - like when the grounds keeper seems to have many complaints about the parts of his job which involve, well, grounds keeping. He would prefer to fill protein bags, and hand off his broom. But then there are the nurses who bathed and shaved an incredibly destitute man - - gravely destitute - - who some of us picked up on the way back from the village. His testicles were literally the size of watermelons, and he has probably not washed in many, many months. The doctors determined that his heart is good for surgery. Treating Camile with dignity was an unexpected answer in this place, in this mountainous island in the sea, full of beauty, and death. And then there was Joselle. She is my age. She was our last patient to leave last night. I had a moment to ask about her. She had a spontaneous miscarriage at home. The nurses told me of her sadness. I saw her father walk her out, through the front door, holding her IV. I knew that my father would do the same exact thing for me.

If you were to ask me what the average day as administrator is like, thus far, I suppose I would hand you a list including: awake at 4 am to those who have traveled through the night for the 8 am opening of the klinik; plan community child deworming mobile unit in order to spend allocated money; run the generator so to fill the cistern with water; do the pay roll; hold sick babies in front of proud mothers; struggle with kreyol; tell local priest that he does not in fact run Vizitasyon- with delicacy; hunt down some Baygone for ants in office; discuss the Gift of Water project with Karen; drink finely prepared granadia juice; ask, ‘well what are they doing in Cange about X, Y, or Z?' Watch the sunset; take a bucket shower; think about the people who were sent home with medicines that require taking with food, knowing they have no food, - and day dream about our nutrition and food program available through our (God-willing) imminent PEPFAR grant and subsequent grants. - And last but not least - - let “the grounds keeper” know that he may not in fact hand his broom to children because “timoune pa travey ici! Ou comprand!?”

Below are a few photos. A photo from the back of where I live and work. A photo of the first building. The medical director Dr. JF (as I call him), and my boss Theresa, from the States who introduced me here, and held meetings, etc. And a photo of the quiet once the day is through.

“We already experience resurrection here and now, in the midst of life, when we rise up against death in life, now, against the oppressions and the hurts to which life here is subjected. In love, resurrection is not merely expected; it is already experienced. For love makes us come alive. And love never gives anyone or anything up for lost. It sees a future in which God will restore everything, and put everything to rights, and gather everything into [God’s] kingdom.” – Jurgen Moltman

with wide eyes and a hopeless stare

2008-06-07T11:26:00.006-05:00

Patrick came into the tiled room where I was sitting, and exclaimed, “I just read the news and Barack Obama is not taking any lobbyist money for the general election! He might really be a changing force. He might be the real deal!!” Turning my eyes from the small shoeless child carrying the big plastic chairs on his head up the hill, I managed to Patrick, “I certainly hope so.”

There is a relief in returning to Haiti, although I wish the flight to Haiti from Miami was a longer one; maybe then, I could justify the vast gulf in quality of life. When it took two days to get to Dhaka, that same gulf seemed better explained. My few journeys to Haiti are eerily similar to each other. On the way to National Airport, again I had a Ghanan taxi driver. And again, my initial land-travel in Haiti allowed the first force I encountered to be a huge UN tank, this time the tank was making a u-turn in the middle of a shanty community, for several minutes. I have noticed a few welcomed changes: the airport had air conditioning; I did not have to risk getting a ride with a stranger in the high kidnapping zone because I was traveling with Theresa; rather than taking the small plane to Les Cayes, I was able to rest in Port-au-Prince for the afternoon.

I have spent several hours talking, walking, and “shopping” with Marie-Denise a single, thirty-two-year-old, woman who is obviously much wiser and more cautious than me. You know - - it is just so flattering when conversations with new Haitian friends begin with something like, “Your eyes good. Bleu.” Ahh, the flattery. “Ou travey Delmas?”
“Secretary. But now I am not working.”
She wants to be a Canadian.
I told her that I want to see the Citadel in the north because I am so interested in Henri Christophe. (Now just imagine someone telling you something like, “I SO admire, George Washington.”)
“Ou renmen Barack Obama?”
“We!! Ay, mwen pa renmen Hillary Clinton.”
“Kisa?”
“Hillary Clinton vele plus bagay. Automobiles, maisons, gourdes. Barack gan petite maison.”
“Dakore. You say she wants many things. But how can a nationality Kenyan run for President in Etase Unie?”
“Papa Kenyan. Mama American. Barack American.”

Until Tuesday, I will stay at a church-twinning guesthouse in PAP. As you can see from the photo of my room, we have electricity for about half of each day! And, the room is screened on the top, so I don't require a net. Americans stay here on their way to or from their twin parishes all over Haiti. This will be my home-away-from-home when I come to PAP one or two weekends a month to take care of business, purchase medicines, and so on. The house and fantastic gift shop is run by Sr. Mary, a graduate of Catholic University and a former academic at the University of Buffalo she came to Haiti for the first time three years ago, and for reasons just as illogical as my own. I am unclear about the whole story yet, but she said that in the 1970’s she was in Peru with Gustavo Gutierrez and was connected to the Latin American liberation theologians. Of course I am looking forward to hearing about all of that.

Theresa flew up to Port-au-Paix Friday morning to visit a parish. She invited me to come along because the arrangements for my business here in Port-au-Prince have been postponed, however I have decided to stay here and rest. I am tempted to American friends in PAP who run the Red Cross and other things here, or I may just relax for a few days.

The time passes slowly in Haiti. It can be torturous. It can be freedom.

On Thursday, I met Patrick in one of those happenstance situations in which travelers encounter one another and the world; - his flight back to Cuba was canceled. He grew up in Anchorage, went to UCLA, and now is a fourth year med student at UCSF, currently on a leave of absence. Growing antsy in Cuba, Port-au-Prince became an exciting option. Friday night he returned to San Francisco to visit his girlfriend, and then he is off to India where he will take a month long class with Jamkhed. For the next year, he will use a grant to study anti-malarials as partial HIV/AIDS treatments for pregnant women in Uganda.

Friday morning we walked to Mother Theresa’s place here in Port-au-Prince. On Thursday Patrick was in Cite Soleil at a clinic. His first three patients were the sickest people he had ever seen: 1) diagnosed with full-blown AIDS (sores all over his body), 2) gangrene from a cut washed with dirty water, (the man was brought to the clinic in a wheel barrow), 3) a woman literally dying of the hunger that all three of them experience. When he told the Sisters at Mother Theresa’s that he was able to help in some medical capacity, he was told, “No no no no!” Why the Missionaries of Charity choose chaos over the embrace of a responsible level of medical care for the sick and dying is beyond me. If Patrick showed up at Partners in Health he would also be refused, but that is because at PIH, they believe in a preferential option for the poor. Missionaries of Charity find some kind of beauty in the idea of the poor always being with us. As one doctor wrote of their shop in Calcutta, many years ago, “I could not judge the power of their spiritual approach, but I was disturbed to learn that the formula includes no strong analgesics.”

There is nothing quite like watching a one year old sick child sit straight up in her crib, hold on to a spoon, and feed herself like a robot with wide eyes and a hopeless stare. No crying, no looking at the bowl. Just feeding. I fed two sick babies with one small bowl of porage. Their arms were so skinny, and their back bones and spines where sticking out. I made friends with Fedney, no idea how old he is, but his smile was beautiful. He sat on my lap most of the morning while little girls did my hair and a boy in a dress stared with distress at me from afar, under the grapevine that canopies their playground.

I thought of Dr. Chris yesterday, and the poverty on Il a Vasche where we met, and I thought of how much I admire and respect him. I also thought of all the other Haitian doctors who are determined to provide a high quality of care to their own country. I look forward to the water, and the mountains, and the village, and my work.

Someone mailed a card. Sister Mary misplaced it. Thank you, though, to whomever it was that sent it. The private mail system via this address is pretty reliable. I will be in Port au Prince one to two weekends a month, so I can retrieve it them. Rather than frequent mass emails, I will be blogging as often as I can, so feel free to save this link and check it for my Haiti updates. I am also excited to host you when you visit Haiti!!!

Justice lies at the threshold and begs; the guest within, in the house of the pans, is Injustice, the evil one. They invite her with laughter into their palace, and for Injustice they pour the full flagon of mead. – from Stories of God, by Rilke

This was the moment

2008-06-03T22:34:00.009-05:00

Tonight, Senator Ted Kennedy watched Barack Obama's speech from his hospital bed, as a 76 year old man and a day after major surgery. He watched it on the eve of the forty year anniversary of the devastating assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King a black man has taken the plunge to serve as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency. He already beat the Clintons, and he will beat John McCain in November. His speech tonight was superb, and his explanation of the massiveness of this hope for change was compelling. Forty years from today, people like Luke Treanor will ask me, "Where where you when Barack Obama ran for and won the presidency?" And I will say, "I was in Divinity School at Vanderbilt in the south, and when he won, I was running a hospital in Haiti." ("And before my PhD, I worked in his administration!")

Ok, so here were my favorite parts:

Michelle Obama gave her husband "a pound" with her fist, on stage, and then a kiss.
Barack Obama embodied Christianity: He praised and confronted, - - Hillary Clinton and John McCain respectively.
Obama acknowledged a "known" for those of us in international poverty and health studies: Americans are generous.
He never talks about his death threats, although the absence of his children and the presence of federal police officers prove the presence of such threats.

Barack Obama is going to be the first black president of the United States. On MSNBC Chris Matthews read some words from Bishop Desmond Tutu. I would like to share some other words from Desmond Tutu: "I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights."

the national anthem

2008-05-30T19:02:00.004-05:00

In Bangladesh, whenever the group was asked to share a song, we would sing "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey, and because of this, many Bangladeshis believed it to be the USA's national anthem. I hope you will enjoy my first ever movie/slideshow. There is also a little of our favorite Bon Jovi song at the end.

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

~ Marge Piercy ~

a list-making, chain-smoker

2008-05-28T17:45:00.001-05:00

my covenant with you, as i head to haiti

2008-05-25T14:31:00.012-05:00

A long time ago, Senator Kennedy made a covenant with the world: he promised to arduously dedicate his life to righting wrongs, replacing injustice with justice, and fighting-on for the voiceless; and this was all despite the dangers, with a lot of suffering along the way. - - Most notably, both of his brothers had been assassinated for some of their humanitarian and egalitarian positions on subjects such as war, race, and poverty. The news of the Senator's health condition is troubling for me as an American living in dreary times but also as a person who has had the privilege of meeting Senator Kennedy several times, as I am close with members of his immediate family as well as others in the "Kennedy clan." For them, I remain devastated. For our country, I am even more convinced of the necessity of the Obama Administration. Also, I will always remember how Senator Kennedy personally helped double the USAID food allotment for an orphanage in Haiti I am connected to. He went above and beyond for children in Haiti, and even sent the head of USAID -Latin America to the orphanage to meet with the director.

Reflecting on the life (personal and professional) commitments of Senator Kennedy, I am led to become more decisive about my own covenants with the world, god, and myself. What is my covenant? What will it be?

In about ten days, I will fly to Haiti to begin my job as a hospital administrator. As you are aware, the conditions of life in Haiti are inexcusable. I am going back to Haiti because I ordinarily carry with me an insurmountable burden from not being there. There are also plenty of material, spiritual, pedagogical, intellectual, and sociological "reasons" for this next phase. Haiti, although a close neighbor, retains the mystery of the unknown, and that can be scary. The instability of the country and its lack of resources cause great concern for those who love me, who know about my sporadic health problems, and who are aware that my risk-taking occasionally gets me into trouble.

While I continue to sort out my covenant with the world, I would like to make a covenant with you: I am going to do my best to take care of myself. Haiti is my new home; Haitians are my new neighbors; and a small hospital with a BIG vision is my new life, - - but none of this happens apart from your spiritual solidarity, or without the assurance that I have so many beautiful, and giving people to return to. I love you in the deep, deep, places in my heart. In quiet moments by the ocean, when I am alone with my thoughts from the day, of the world, and with tears, I will think of you, and of your love, for it brings me so much strength. When I am doing something like driving through a river in the back of a truck full of melons wondering how this instance of this is going to turn out, it is you who I will think of, and of the moments in which you each uniquely showed me that you loved me. Because of you, I am the luckiest woman alive.

I am going to have a great life in Haiti. Sometimes we essentialize the poor. We end up talking about the pain, and the struggles, the illness, and the strife with disregard for the other aspects of what it means to be human. I am going to live with people who give and love of themselves in the ways you do; and they will care for me too. Haitians are just as dynamic, committed, deep, giving, loving, suffering, cheering, dancing, laughing, crying, yearning, apathetic, bored, and questioning as any other group of persons I have ever encountered. For Americans - the accident of birth has caused us to live on a piece of land during a short period of time in which its inhabitants have more-or-less enjoyed extreme prosperity, and a powerful government. How this happened to us - - we will never know. But for me, I pray for the "best of both worlds." Please visit me. I promise to take very, very good care of you when you do.

Onward with affection and longing,
Kate

One of my favorite Rilke sonnets, translated from the German:

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Be forever dead in Eurydice - - more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be-- and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

and at the National Zoo the sign says "no feeding the animals"

2008-05-24T14:25:00.006-05:00

Comment Card
Harris Teeter, 16th and Kalorama
Dear General Manager:

When I moved to DC in 1997 I did not even know where 16^th and Kalorama was. Today while in town to visit a friend in the apartment building next door to your new store, I was excited to go in and spend around $7.50 on a package of strawberries, $8.00 on a wedge of brie, and $3.00 for a bottle of sparkling water to wash everything down. However my sentiments quickly changed upon walking up to the door of your store. On it is a sign: “No panhandlers or Loiters. Customers, please do not contribute to panhandlers on premises.”

I was so offended by this sign that I almost turned around and walked away. But then I quickly remembered that the only other full, non-specialty grocery store in the area is what is known as- - or at least used to be known as - - “the Socialist Safeway” over on Columbia Road. The nickname comes from the long lines and lack of food inside.

Your sign is obnoxious first and foremost because it presumes a harm done by, or reason for suspicion caused by, the poor in this neighborhood in Washington, DC. How DARE a corporation that OPENLY charges over 500% for a loaf of bread claim that the poor man, woman, or child standing out front of the store is a danger or problem! Corporations like Harris Teeter are the problem. You came into this neighborhood to cash in on and perpetuate what is clearly irresponsible gentrification. I should be suspicious of you, not those in the neighborhood harmed by you.

Secondly, it offends me that you would tell ME what to do with MY OWN money. If I wish to contribute to a beggar, that is my business, not yours.

Finally, I suggest that you remove the current sign and replace it with one inviting beggars inside for a discussion about how Harris Teeter can assist members of this community who continue to struggle. I also suggest that you provide free meals to the poor three times a day. If you would like to speak with me further about these ideas, I am available until June 5^th and have included my phone number at the top of this card.

With serious concern,

Kate Burke

it was grand

2008-05-11T17:57:00.010-05:00

"You are a Schola Prophetarum, a School of the Prophets." - the pronouncement in 1875 to the faculty and students of the Biblical Department of Vanderbilt University by Holland Nimmons McTyeire (1824-1889) Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church South; first president of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust

This weekend, I graduated from the school of the prophets. (No pressure or anything.)
Friends, please see all of my photos from a glorious weekend by clicking below. I particularly enjoy the dinner and party photos toward the end. If you double-click on a photo, you will be able to scroll through them as larger images with captions.

click here: Kate's Vanderbilt Photos

medical records for haiti

2008-05-04T20:50:00.008-05:00

Partners in Health worked to create Open MRS, an open-source, medical record database designed specifically for the two-thirds world. This program was developed keeping in mind a preferential option for the poor for medical record keeping and medical care, but furthermore, in order to assist in providing accountability for the sake of receiving PEPFAR grants and so on; most clinics and hospitals in Africa are using Open MRS, keeping several million people in the system. So far in Haiti, Partners in Health uses it, and so does Hospital Albert Schweitzer. Being that the Gates Foundation expects its grant recipients to be run like little businesses: data matters, and Open MRS has helped to provide this sort of accountability.

In Haiti, prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS demands efficient information management, so at my hospital near Miragoane, we are using Open MRS. Today I worked with the President of our Board, Dr. Tom, to discuss ways of making it most efficacious, based upon what we need to track. I suggested that we add a field for how people arrive to the hospital. Basically, - fast donkey or slow donkey? Knowing that paper is a problem in Haiti, I told Dr. Tom that Open MRS is a necessity because we are going to be treating and saving more lives than exist in Haiti pieces of paper. He reminded me that this record keeping is something we must keep in the back of our minds, not in the forefront. When a child is dying of beri-beri in front of me because of a vitamin B deficiency, I need not be yelling at the doctors about getting on their lap tops to log this in. Charting the CD4 counts on women in our HIV / AIDS program will always be secondary to providing care.

Theresa Patterson, my boss, has been very excited about tonight because on "60 Minutes" her friend- - and the founder of Partners in Health, Paul Farmer, was featured for his work in Haiti.

my trip to bangladesh with project pyramid

2008-05-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

Before the grace of you, go I.

2008-04-25T18:43:00.009-05:00

As I race to the finish of my two year Masters program, I have not been very good about blogging, but will hopefully get back to it soon, as there are several stories causing a stir in my mind! In the meantime, I would like to share a song I seem to turn to a lot during times of change, and when the things that are beginning don't seem to have a chance to grow, and the things ending don't really want to die.

Amen. I can haz.

2008-04-13T23:54:00.001-05:00

Ministry

2008-04-07T19:56:00.011-05:00

Today, I believe that I ministered for the first time, and not by example or deed, or any of those creative ways in which we hold tribute to living in the way of God’s kingdom, but in real conversation as a woman with a past to a woman with a past. I didn’t realize that I had ministered this afternoon, until several hours later while washing my dishes, and it just came over me. I remembered the joy I felt in my afternoon ministry; the comfort I felt in being there, and most of all, the normalcy of it to me - - it flooded my body, and I left the soapy sponge, in the crusty pasta sauce, in the bowl, in the sink, so I could sit down and think for a few minutes about the encounter.

Despite all the discussion about the topic at Divinity School, my brain is continually skeptical of forgiveness. My heart, - - a big fan of grace. But mercy, -- that’s what gives me a lump in my throat. My friend Sam who lives at Riverbend Maximum Security Institute is sort of like a grandfather figure to me, and he says that I must always remember mercy. He says God is only about mercy. “If he can remember mercy, why can’t I,” I often wonder.

Today I sat with a woman who is pursuing her PhD, and we talked about our lives, and the story of our twenties. I asked what she had done before her graduate school work. Laughing, at first she said she was a prostitute. I made a joke about her clientel. Then she paused and she said, “No, actually, in all seriousness, I was a drug dealer and I went to jail. And my boyfriend who I told you about, I met him in a halfway house.” In the shadow of Vanderbilt’s Kirkland Hall, I thought she was pulling my leg. But I quickly thought about my own life. A montage of my past came through my vision: the struggles, the goodbyes, the violence, the wilderness of my existence. I remembered that I am as much a victim and a sinner, as everybody else, and I realized that this woman was telling me the truth. She was a drug dealer before she was an academic. She was a liar before she was seeking the truth in these halls. So we talked, and talked, and talked, about our lives. There were no tears. There were no ah-ha moments. And when we were done, we got up with our lattes, and walked in the sunshine, back to our school work. And when I washed my dishes, I realized that I finally understood what ministry was about. Mercy.

14th and You

2008-04-04T10:33:00.012-05:00

Forty years ago today, the prophet Martin Luther King, Jr. was martyred.

Like other cities, Washington, DC broke out in riots. In my opinion, DC has never recovered from these riots. I am not only speaking of the store fronts, and the buildings in-and-of-themselves, I mean that in many places the physical ruins of the riots continue to symbolize the brokenness of race relations and the punishment of poverty prevailing in our country.

Today, white residents in Washington, DC continue to fail our black brothers and sisters with irresponsible gentrification- having left the post-riot neighborhoods in decay for thirty years- and then buying cheap, moving in, driving up property costs, pushing folks out, and taking over the neighborhoods with places like Whole Foods where an apple costs two dollars.

Don't get me wrong, I think the intentionality of living in diverse and walkable communities is fantastic. And of course I want my city to flourish, and to be safe. I love having food and cocktails at some cornerstone places like Busboys and Poets, and Saint-Ex, - I just think we must exercise caution and awareness when throwing our hats into the inequity game of home-ownership. This of course means different things in each situation, but participating in gentrification comes with responsibility. Being white, we are the minority in DC, - -and as George Clinton said, "We didn't get our forty acres and a mule but we did get you, Chocolate City."

a response to the mortgage crisis

2008-04-01T16:39:00.009-05:00

"Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need." - Acts 4:32-35 (NRSV)

final season for Bush

2008-03-31T08:00:00.002-05:00

toward the illuminative way

2008-03-30T11:16:00.021-05:00

During my 20’s the instances when I have thought, ‘what am I doing here?’ Or, ‘I do not belong in this situation,’ have certainly outweighed in number the times I have thought, ‘this is exactly where I am supposed to be.’ At dinner with my new boss and community on Friday night, I had a profound sense of blessed assurance ~ this is my story, this is my song.

In June, I am moving to

Haiti

to serve as a hospital administrator for a beautiful new facility situated between the ocean and the mountains, providing care to the sick. In

Haiti

, there is one doctor for every 13,000 people, so the need is tremendous. This opportunity is a leap for me personally and professionally. It will also serve as a great challenge in “conversation morum”- the ongoing conversation of mind, heart, and life. The early monastics believed that there are four renunciations one must encounter to begin a new life, and I might remember them in this endeavor: 1) renounce your former way of life; 2) renounce the thoughts and desires of that way of life; 3) grace will invite us to renounce our self-made thoughts of God; 4) we are then allowed to renounce our self-made thoughts of self.

My boss has been one of the “players” in Haiti for the past 30 years, along with Dr. Paul Farmer, and the rest. Her deep commitment to the Haitian people transcends the difficulties of getting things done in

Haiti

. Her faith boils over not with words, but with deeds, truly believing that she is called to serve with a preferential option for the poor. She has shown me that I too may live a unique and meaningful life in solidarity with the Haitians who have been harmed at the hand of my own country, over, and over, and over again. The dinner on Friday included others who have dedicated their hearts and resources to Haiti. There is a humility among them that was sincere, and they all love and respect my boss.

I heard things like how during the coup in 1991 my boss (in her late 50’s at the time), stared down the Haitian Army with guns pointed at her, while she secretly delivered money to priests for the hungry parishioners. There was something about going to an island to see Aristide while he was held up in a church. And another story about a tight situation driving through a river and two waterfalls. My boss was very quiet during this, only piping up to correct some of the details, “and we had to chop up that cocoanut tree to get it out of the way.” I told my boss that I would like to write her biography. “No," she said, "I have always said that the book should be about the churches and the work that…” I interrupted, “Well, what if you are not writing the book?” There was a roar of support for my idea from the table.

I will move to Haiti by June 15th, for a year or two, before applying to other graduate programs back in the states. But who knows what will happen next!? I will keep my friends posted as more details about my departure are finalized! I expect visitors!

the mortgage crisis

2008-03-29T20:31:00.005-05:00

The Our Father prayer has been spiritualized and privatized in modernity. The truth of the matter is that Jesus was speaking directly to the very immediate concerns of the poor and oppressed. The debts are financial. The bread is the tangible food necessary for life. Take a look at the Gospel of Luke - it is an economic project asserting an abyss between poor and rich; proclaiming Jesus' solidarity with the poor (and the judgment of the rich); and the importance of sharing. Jesus makes programmatic announcements and healings in an attempt to reverse the process of dehumanization caused by poverty and power structures. Jesus as the fulfillment of the Judaic law repeats Torah law with the following commands: Reduce debts. Lend without expecting reciprocation. Invite the poor into your hospitality. Provide services and goods to the poor.

There is so much to celebrate about Christianity! It embraces the best of the classical ethicists, the richness of the Hebraic tradition, and a fine balance between the contemplative and the active. And one thing is undeniable - Christianity is first and foremost about a concern for poverty. The poor challenge us at all times, and when we wake up in a world where poverty exists, we fail God and we fail one another.

In my opinion, poverty is the result of a systematic behavior of allegiances toward and participation in certain economic and political ideologies that ultimately provide material wealth to those able to operate with structurally supported self-interest, while oppressing the world's masses who live on less than two dollars a day; poverty comes from putting our will before the will of God. Private property is part of this problem. What would the world look like if property were a public good? After all property has many life-giving functions. Economist Karl Polanyi has noted that land is used for lots of things – like stability, habitation, physical safety, and he said that living without land is like "being born without hands and feet." Private property prohibits inclusive human survivability, and this is directly against God's will for life. According to the market, the private nature of property is seen as "natural," but the harms done by private property are anything but natural according to Christianity.

hillary and obama

2008-03-26T21:41:00.001-05:00

where sin has increased grace abounds (romans 5:20)

2008-03-26T16:32:00.009-05:00

Pentecostalism, HIV/AIDS, and the burden of South African women is what my friend Katy researches. Today she lectured on a wide range of issues surrounding the devastating HIV/AIDS problem in sub-Saharan Africa in specific relation to the Church’s failure to care enough (although statistically they care more than non-Christians), turn away from traditional strategies, and zap stigma. As a Christian Ethicist, Katy offers a three pronged approach for the moral response to HIV/AIDS: A Posture of worldliness (ending the bifurcation between the spiritual and the physical); Reading and responding to the situation at hand (the emptying of the church-self to serve as opposed to blindly following moral code); Reframing guilt and innocence (i.e. Christ became guilty out of love). Theologically, Katy’s research can certainly inform my own interest in the anthropology of

Haiti

’s suffering.

Bonhoeffer has been on my brain a lot lately, and one of his quotes was shared in today's lecture: "I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith . . . and that is how one becomes a human and a Christian.”

According to Bonhoeffer and divine command theory, God’s yes is bigger than God’s no, and Christians must have full engagement and a posture of worldliness. The numbers say that a third of the world is Christian, and 1.7 million of the 2.5 new HIV/AIDS cases in 2007 are in sub-Saharan Africa. So if Bonhoeffer’s theology were to be adopted by American Christians alone, how long would it take for HIV/AIDS to disappear from Africa, and from the world as a whole?

resurrection

2008-03-24T18:20:00.014-05:00

Even though the world has failed, the healing capacity of the human experience has no limits. I can never know your pain, but I can tell you about mine. Together, we may live in communion, and change the failures of the world.

Today, in a lecture on the ethics of sex (within the context of the norm of the black church's no-talk policy), my professor discussed “sexual consent” and his own experience as a rape survivor. He read some of his new book that addresses this topic. Needless to say, I was profoundly surprised by his choice to speak so openly about something so painful and rarely discussed. He said that he has had a lot of time and therapy to get to the other side of this, to take power from it, name it, and talk with people about it. After class, I went to his office to thank him for the lecture. I said, “That room is full of rape survivors. You just know it.” We will never be able to measure the impact of Victor’s lecture today. He inspired future church leaders to speak about the sexual problems going on sometimes right in the choir chambers of the church. He also gave permission to all of us, to take back our lives; lives that have been slowly stolen from us at the hands of sexual violence, shame, and silence. There is a life after the silence.

Eight years ago, I was followed into a public restroom in Washington, DC, and my head was slammed against a mirror several times, and I was raped. People nearby could hear my frantic laughter as it was happening. I was left alone with my attacker, and then taken by him to a second location where he continued to rape me. Thank goodness, the only thing that I can remember from the second location was waking up and screaming when my head was being bashed again. The following day was probably the weirdest day of my life. During the weeks of panic attacks, issued blame, and months of anxiety, I worked closely with a therapist, as I tried to reclaim my life, and get better. My parents and friends helped me too. It was an imperfect journey, ignited by the social sin of rape, and guided by the human instinct for survival. By being honest and committing to do this work, ultimately my life was saved. Obviously this is the very abbreviated version of what happened to me, and of how it profoundly affected my life and my personhood. But at the end of the day, the details are not the story.

There is one book that I found to be tremendously helpful, and I think everyone should read it, rape survivor or not: After Silence, Rape and My Journey Back, by Nancy Venable Raine.

Before Raine published the book, close friends said things to her like, ''Let's face it, no one wants to hear about such terrible things.'' And, ''I just can't imagine how you can write about something so . . . so very personal.'' And, ''Shall we get off rape to something . . . agreeable?'' Shame presupposes wrongdoing. The things we do not talk about are the things we have done wrong, right? A DUI? A divorce? An F in a class. She writes: ''The sense that I was responsible for the rape supported a more important belief, one that I could not give up, although it had been severely damaged. It was the belief that I could control what happened to me, that my actions had a bearing on the outcome of my life.''

The vast topic of rape is something I occasionally talk to friends about. I never know what they have been through. Without it becoming my identity, I hope that my openness about this can somehow help others who have suffered with the aftermath of a rape, - -people who understand that it is the terror of the violence and the power and the robbing of one’s personhood that is the story of rape, or repeat rapes. It is about being told: "you are not human." Eight years later, I remember dealing with the anxiety, panic, depression, helplessness, and confusion, - - but I usually think of the people who do not have access to help, or who never got help in time. I on the other hand, have been given a new life.

We all need to be part of an open conversation about this social demon, in order to save the lives of those suffering in silence. Inspired by Victor’s lecture, today I am reaching out to you.

you done made clawed z. eagle and me proud

2008-03-21T14:03:00.010-05:00

It was quite an experience to watch an NCAA March Madness game featuring the powerhouse of the University of Tennessee and hear the commentator say, "The American University is situated on Embassy Row in our nation's capital, Washington, DC." Had I entered some kind of alternate universe? With five minutes remaining, the game had been tied a few times, and AU was making UT work for their one point lead (49-50). While I still blame American University for poisoning me with their arsenic, and have never felt that my school pride extended far beyond the results of the multi-million dollar endowment dedicated exclusively to flowers on campus, - - today I was certainly cheering!

I actually live in Tennessee, a place where fans paint themselves orange and use all kinds of crazy language like "dominate over" and "suck it." Even my sweet and soon-to-be ordained Divinity School friends Khette and Lillian, have already been ordained by the religion of UT and are the most loyal Vols fans I know. They have even been known to create fear in hearts with their subtle (i.e. orange striped socks) and not so subtle (i.e. "I BLEED ORANGE" t-shirts) displays of allegiance to their team. As you can imagine, this is quite a contrast to my relationship with my undergraduate experience. Perhaps AU might have had a little more luck in the end, if last night I had slept in my black Ann Taylor suit and US Congress ID badge: the uniform of my undergraduate University.

During the final two minutes of the game, when AU apparently forgot how to play basketball, the announcer said, "This will look a lot different in the newspaper tomorrow than it felt watching the game. American University has tenacity about them, don’t they?!" Maybe the tenacity comes from that fact that they are required to sit in class. The Patriot League: scholars, athletes, future leaders. . .

my favorite type of conversation

2008-03-20T00:15:00.009-05:00

This is great. Important. Right on. This proves that church life and theology are fantastic ways to confront societal issues such as poverty and race. Linda Thomas teaches at Vandy.

Click here and then click on "Listen Now"

Then read Cone's book, God of the Oppressed.

to be a witness and an actor

2008-03-18T13:06:00.008-05:00

"I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories of survival, and freedom, and hope became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about memories that all people might study and cherish and with which we could start to rebuild." - Barack Obama, today

Today at Starbucks, my friend spoke of how liberation theology became embodied for her at the recent ordination of our colleague Darius. She said, "sometimes liberation theology is just so structured and I just can't feel the person in it." While listening to Obama, today and nearly everyday - a human face is exposed in the black church experience. Black, white, female, male,gay, straight - may we all seek to confront the ethnic imperialism of the white, Protestant, heteronormative experience.

twas better to die 'neath an irish sky

2008-03-16T15:59:00.016-05:00

Like any good Irish lass, I have been known to have a Guinness (or five), and hop on small stages at places like Nanny O’Briens to sing along to joyful ballads about famine, theft, and well, . . . drinking five or more Guinnesses. Like any good Irish lass, I have read the poetry of my ancestors who mastered a language that was forced upon them. I have a stomach made for bland starches, and the skin for staying inside. I will probably have bagpipes at my wedding, exclusively for the purpose of making people with red faces and white hair weep. My DNA-given skill of implementing the silent treatment is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, I look good in green, and I find miniature, magical men with beards to be cute. But for me, being Irish has really always been about something more.

At an early age, my parents taught me that with being Irish comes the responsibility of living a life that honors the story of my ancestors. They taught me that what is most exciting and obligatory about my being Irish is my blood-given right to stand in solidarity with those who have been killed and oppressed by systematic political and military powers. My parents taught me, at a very young age, that being Irish was about the Foggy Dew. St. Patrick's Day is a good reminder for me, about what it means to be Irish.

“The Foggy Dew,” An old Irish Ballad about the Easter uprising of 1916:

As down the glen one Easter morn to a city fair rode I

There Armed lines of marching men in squadrons passed me by
No pipe did hum nor battle drum did sound its loud tattoo
But the Angelus Bell o'er the Liffey's swell rang out through the foggy dew

Right proudly high over Dublin Town they hung out the flag of war
'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud-El-Bar
And from the plains of Royal Meath strong men came hurrying through
While Britannia's Huns, with their long range guns sailed in through the foggy dew

'Twas England bade our wild geese go, that "small nations might be free";
Their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves or the fringe of the great North Sea.
Oh, had they died by Pearse's side or fought with Cathal Brugha*
Their graves we'd keep where the Fenians sleep, 'neath the shroud of the foggy dew.

Oh the night fell black, and the rifles' crack made perfidious Albion reel
In the leaden rain, seven tongues of flame did shine o'er the lines of steel
By each shining blade a prayer was said, that to Ireland her sons be true
But when morning broke, still the war flag shook out its folds in the foggy dew

Oh the bravest fell, and the Requiem bell rang mournfully and clear
For those who died that Eastertide in the spring time of the year
And the world did gaze, in deep amaze, at those fearless men, but few,
Who bore the fight that freedom's light might shine through the foggy dew

As back through the glen I rode again and my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men whom I never shall see more
But to and fro in my dreams I go and I kneel and pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead, when you fell in the foggy dew.

it's hard to let go, isn't it?

2008-03-15T13:27:00.006-05:00

5th Anniversary of Rachel Corrie's Death

2008-03-12T08:38:00.014-05:00

Over the past 40 years, Caterpillar bulldozers (due to a lucrative contract with

Israel

) have been used to demolish 18,000 Palestinian homes in Gaza and the West Bank. 5,000 of these homes have been demolished since 2000. Caterpillar continues to sell armor plated D9 bulldozers directly to the Israeli Defense Force, despite awareness that they are used to commit war crimes, and human rights abuses, - - killing and maiming innocent civilians in their homes. For twenty years, human rights groups have condemned Caterpillar. The wall between Palestine and Israel which prevents Palestinians from access to water, other resources, and jobs is also being built by Caterpillar machinery. On March 16, 2003, American activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by a D9 bulldozer while she stood as a human shield protecting children. Caterpillar has accused her middle class parents in Washington State, of being "terrorists." Recently the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian (USA) Church have both called for divestment from Caterpillar. Yesterday, Caterpillar announced an expected expansion of profits up to 30% in the next two years. Business is good for Caterpillar, Inc.

~
After a lovely visit with my friend Brian in Portland, I drove north, back to Seattle, and I saw the sign for Olympia. Impulsively, I decided to trust that perhaps it was time to make my pilgrimage of healing. I did not know what would come of it, but I trusted, and decided to follow the sign. It had been six years since I set foot in Palestine, and that day in April 2006 in Olympia, Washington, - - I sensed that I was crossing another check-point.

Pulling off the road into quaint Olympia, I drove downtown, parked, and went into a coffee shop. On the walls were photos of Palestinians screaming and crying. I thought, “maybe this is where Rachel Corrie worked as a barista.” I asked the manager. He said, that she worked down the street at a different coffee shop. I purchased the first of many lattes for the day, and made my way on foot. This was one of those days where with every step, the powers of God are not hidden. It was a rare day when I felt the complete presence of a guiding force, when I knew that I was simply along for the ride.

I went into another coffee shop, and another coffee shop, and another coffee shop. In a journalistic manner, I talked with a florist who had just made deliveries to the Corries on the anniversary of Rachel’s death. She cried, and told me that the community still suffers tremendous pain in light of Rachel’s murder. The man at the used book store told me about her (lack of) study habits. The overcast sky ceased from resembling the typical spring cover of the northwest, and began to serve as a veil of mourning. The lump in my throat repeated- “it could have been you” - as I know that I too have made creative use of my little blue passport to speak for visceral compassion, to stand in solidarity. She and I were the same age; we both worked in the West Bank with Palestinian children; we both watched home demolitions, and saw the outrageous insanity of children running away from bulldozers. But so what? Did I “over identify” with Rachel’s martyrdom? Why would I pray and write about Rachel Corrie when thousands and thousands of Palestinian civilians have been wiped out by Israel’s genocide? Did I see myself in them, as much as I saw myself in Rachel? If we are all God’s children, why was I hung up on the white girl from the US?

Continuing on the pilgrimage, it was suggested that I visit Evergreen College, her alma mater. I spoke with her favorite professor. I bought a sweatshirt in the book store. I stumbled upon a little memorial in the corner of a conference room on the 6^th floor of a small building. The room was full of Japanese students, studying English. I made my way past them and to the couch adjacent to a table full of Rachel’s things. I sat near this silent spring. I knew that my hours and hours in Olympia were only to reach the silence of this place, and to sit in my loneliness. Picking up her journal, I read some of her last entries. In memorial, others had written letters to her in the back of the diary, so I proceeded to as well.

I thanked her for attaching meaning to her death. The ultimate success, I think, is to conquer the living of life so well that even in one’s death there retains meaning, hope, and political agitation.

Driving back up the highway to Seattle, I felt a freedom on behalf of Rachel, - - as one of her surrogates in the world of those living toward a future of justice.

I sent this email a year ago; today the story remains the same except now Rachel would be 29. No justice, no peace.

March 16, 2007

Dear Faculty, Staff, and Classmates:

This morning, as I drove by the Caterpillar Financial headquarters on West End Avenue, I couldn't help but think of the Caterpillar bulldozer used by the Israeli government exactly four years ago today to kill Rachel Corrie. Rachel, a native of Olympia, Washington attended Evergreen College and worked at a coffee shop. She died while attempting to protect three children of a doctor during a routine Israeli home demolition in Palestine, on March 16, 2003.

With his group Rebuilding Alliance, my friend from Palestine, Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom has rebuilt the home Rachel sacrificed her life in order to protect. On the anniversary of Rachel's death, I encourage you to support the work of Rabbi Jeremy and Rebuilding Alliance:

http://www.rebuildingalliance.org/

Rachel Corrie would be 28 years old next month.

With hope, Kate Burke, MTS '08

sacred canopy

2008-03-03T09:57:00.003-06:00

There's been something very clean for me to speak about how things are in Haiti or Palestine. In this place, things are this way. There, things are like this or that. In Haiti, children eat dirt cookies. In Palestine children have no plumbing.

In Bangladesh, it is bamboo being labored over and hauled around - - not sugar cane. In Bangladesh, children are not running from bulldozers, rather, they suffer a no-win battle with the rainy season. In Bangladesh I now know that poverty is not specified and particular. Extreme poverty looks almost the same everywhere. And it is heartbreaking. That sweet smell of pollution and human waste crosses political boundaries. The rickshaw, however, is special. Today, while traveling two hours away to interview micro-loan borrowers in villages, I watched hundreds of them on the streets. I likened them to sacred canopies, life-giving and vibrant with color, perhaps serving as shields.

dr. yunus says poverty belongs in a museum

2008-03-03T09:51:00.003-06:00

It was my first week of Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, and the professor responded to my comment in a facetious manner - - "Wait, do you actually want to use this stuff?" As an academic with one foot in the ivory tower and another on the ground, I have struggled to make use of what I learn and order out of what I have experienced. Yesterday, with two months remaining in my Masters program, Dr. Muhammad Yunus sat next to me and spoke of the dangers of the university ranging from the hegemonic relationship between student and teacher to the unending elitism associated with higher education. He said, "Universities don't know much about people." Continuing, Dr. Yunus said what I have waited to hear all along, "the answers are known by those on the ground." I live in Nashville, Tennessee and attend Vanderbilt for graduate school, - just like Dr. Yunus once did.
I can only hope to find my own way to utilize what I have learned in order to empower those on the ground who have the answers but lack an access to the opportunity to change circumstances.

the unnecessary death of carine desir

2008-02-27T07:11:00.009-06:00

Last week, a 44 year old woman died on an American Airlines jumbo jet from Haiti to New York. Apparently, Carine Desir was having difficult time breathing. She asked for oxygen but was denied. Two oxygen tanks were later attempted to be administered, but were found to be empty. Doctors on board became involved and a defibrillator was administered, just before Carine Desir died. American Airlines is now engaging in plenty of CYOA.

I have flown on a hand-full of American Airlines flights between Haiti and the United States. The bathrooms on those planes were falling apart; there was little or no security; and often people were standing up during take-off. The case of Carine Desir is the result of either intentional negligence, or a severe lack of diligence due to distractions and diverted attention. Members of the diplomatic community in Haiti have been writing to American Airlines for several years, expressing their concerns about their use of junky planes, and lack of professionalism toward Haitians, and Haitian-Americans.

A brief survey on the relationship between Haiti and the US yields plenty of support for the claim that the use of sub-par machines with empty oxygen tanks for the Haiti flights is in fact an example of the to the lack value placed on Haitian lives by the American corporate and government powers. There is a long history of disregard and abuse of Haiti and the Haitians at the hands of US policies, and firm behaviors. The recent US overthrow of President Aristide occurred after he doubled the minimum wage to $2.00 a day, harming corporate interests in Haiti. This was just after Bush blocked a major IDB loan to Haiti which was to provide for things like clean drinking water to children. But the anthropology of the relationship between the US and Haiti goes way back to the fifteenth century. The relationship has never been a conversation with two equal partners.

With respect to the case of Carine Desir, a more compelling inquiry surrounds asking what might have been distracting for the flight crew on the flight that would cause a thorough check of the oxygen to fall to the wayside. How is it possible that before a flight, the crew might have been busy attending to things other than the check list of cleaning bathrooms and checking oxygen tanks?

This answer is less historical, and more about a mutual lack of cultural understanding between American Airlines and Haitians.

Aside from the very few in the upper class, very few Haitians fly and if they do they do not frequently fly more more than once or twice in a life time. Sitting in the airport in Port-au-Prince, there is a "night-before-Christmas" excitement in the air. Haitians are dressed to the nines, proudly carrying their passports and visas around. The security process for getting on the plane is nothing like what the TSA has administered here. There is always a lot of confusion in the boarding process. Perhaps a bag will be left unattended or left behind and an announcement goes on, but then they just let the bag on anyway, because they know it probably belongs to some Grandmoun who is finally going to Miami to visit her family after waiting years and years for a visa and has no idea what is going.

I once sat with two Grandmothers on a flight back to Port-au-Prince. Because they can not write or read, I filled out their visa forms for them. When the hawkish attendant came by to fill out their visas, certain that they are illiterate, the women proudly asserted that they were able to do it on their own. The attendant grabbed the visas from their hands and marched off.

There is a lot of suspicion about how the plane works, and one of the Grandmothers sitting beside me was obviously quite afraid. The attendants made one of their usual announcements in French (not the language of Haitians, only the elite know French), - - “ok, everybody, this is going to get very loud, and then we will be going up in the sky. It is important that you stay seated during this. Please stay sitting down.” So, during this flight, the attendant predicted correctly: the plane was loud, we were up in the sky, and then bam: one of the nearby small, luggage compartment doors popped open. The Grandmother began pointing to it and screaming as if she had seen the face of Lucifer himself. Wailing and rocking, over and over, “Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!”

Also, children in Haiti often draw airplanes and helicopters in their artwork. There is a fascination by the notion of flight.

I am not making broad claims about Voudon, technology or science in relation to the average Haitian. Rather, I believe that a particular level of care is necessary in this sphere and the burden lies on the service provider, American Airlines. Because I believe that the attendants would like oxygen for themselves if necessary, I suspect that the problem in the case of Carine Desir is one of expended resources. If the attendants are busy filling in gaps with a metal box full of folks, half of whom have never flown before, and come from a world that is more African than Floridian, I can see how some of the material essentials could become neglected. Perhaps that is why these planes have fallen into the shape they are in, as well.

American Airlines should make immediate changes to the physical quality of the planes, as well as numbers of attendants on board. Furthermore, the cultural sensitivity of the crew on these Haiti-US routes must be addressed.

if laughing is loving

2008-02-23T21:13:00.008-06:00

A friend recently forwarded this email to me; an email that I sent out last June. Rereading it, I think it can be applied to my life in general, not just that particular trip. As I prepare to visit Bangladesh for the first time, I wonder what will confront my senses and ignite my passions, but I don't think anything has ever ignited my passions the way my friendships have.

- - -
To All~

I have the privilege of traveling in Haiti until August 21. Access to email will be sporadic, but please email me. I will be visiting new towns, and old friends from last summer, while I gather information for my Masters thesis. Haiti brings to my life unequivocal inspiration along with deep spiritual and intellectual angst. In Haiti, there are no distractions from the need, or the joy, of the moment.

When scary things happen in Haiti, --things that I can't control-- I will think of you, and your laughter, and the very funny moments I've shared with you. If laughing is loving, then I am the luckiest woman in the world to love and to be loved with such severity. Vibrant photos promised upon my return to Nashville.

Before the grace of you, go I.

Love, Kate

who has a seat at your table?

2008-02-21T21:33:00.011-06:00

My interest in raising children is on par with my interest in owning a dog, and anyone who knows me knows that I am not a dog person. (But that’s not where I am going with this blogpost.)

That being said, there is something that I envy that is very innate in the struggle of raising children, and what it all produces. Every time I go to Susan and Andy’s it becomes more and more difficult because I envy the love they have in their family. I envy it so much, it nearly brings me to tears, questioning my own human capacity to be capable of the day-to-day work required for raising children. They have two kids. Henry is five and Cal is two; I have been their weekly babysitter since I moved to Nashville. I am far from being a great babysitter, but they accept me anyway, even when I serve their kids garlic bread for dinner. They are members of the vast family that I have acquired on my life journey; it is a journey in which I have relied upon the loving and giving hearts of strangers who have evolved into forever friends.

Like Kathleen and her children. They have continued to provide for me, a sacred space for love, honesty, and understanding, and all without justification or trial. While the essential timing and unbelievably sincere and sacred efforts stand alone, the Harrington clan is not alone in having been welcoming to me. I have a long list of people to whom I should write heart-felt letters to about the grace, forgiveness, devotion and hospitality shown to me during my adult life everywhere from Jerusalem to Montana. If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, it is unlikely that I would sit around with my best friends or the people I see often. I would probably want to visit people like my friend Marcia in San Francisco, who offered me hospitality during a time of suffering and loneliness.

Patience and hospitality are the earthly things capable to create the welcoming conditions for the kingdom. If I have learned anything from divinity school, I have learned that hospitality is the heart of Christianity. As a liberation theologian, that specifies hospitality for the materially poor, - first and foremost. And parenthood seems to be baptism by fire about hospitality. The lines of mine and yours become less delineated. The thing, I believe, that separates parental love from eros (erotic love), agape (community love), or philos (fraternity), - is the willingness to engage is a particular type of kenosis if you will - - the willingness to empty yourself and die for your child. There is almost a joy in the thought of it.

St. Augustine might say that if we start acting hospitable, we will become hospitable. Choices can become our habits and our habits can become our nature.

Today, let us live with a spirit of hospitality.

ask cashier for details

2008-02-13T15:12:00.009-06:00

Two months after I moved to Tennessee, Angela came to Nashville and the two of us went on a road trip heading south. About forty miles outside of Nashville, Angela and I stopped to get some gas. As we approached the Flying J, Angela pointed out a sign prominently placed above the door: "The terrorist threat for today is yellow. Ask cashier for details." Like a good American, I do what I am told, because I love freedom.

After all, I moved from Washington, DC our nation’s capital, and I will never forget watching the Pentagon burn for two weeks after 9/11. If they are monitoring the terrorist threat many years later in Tennessee – something must be up.

While paying with American currency for the package of Swedish fish and the bottle of French spring water, I said, "So, I am interested in getting the details. The sign outside said that I should ask you for details about the terrorist threat. Is everything ok?"

The cashier seemed caught off guard and replied, "I don't know."

I asked, “Is that sign posted for the benefit of truck drivers en route? Like, is it a heads-up?"

The truck driver in a few people in line behind me piped up. "That sign is for us all," (que National Anthem), “that sign is for anyone who walks into the Flying J."

“Ok, well I guess that’s why I am asking for the details. It says to ask for details,” I said.

"It helps us stay aware," the truck driver said, nodding with an aura of pride "it helps you stay aware."

Angela joined the line to purchase her Elvis mug, and post cards. Upon hearing the scuffle, she approached me with a nervous giggle and asked that I join her in the back of the line, curious as to what in the world I was getting myself into, I told her, "I was just asking for the details!"

Approaching the front of the line again a few minutes later, I turned to the cashier and asked, "So, how often does the sign get changed?"

Like an honest patriot she leaned over the counter as if to share a secret, "To tell you the truth, I have been here three months, and that sign- it ain't changed once."

I pressed on, "Do you think if Iran or North Korea are about to nuke us, the details - - whatever they are - - will change and the color level will also be changed to maybe orange? Or red?”

Irritated, and before wishing me farewell, the cashier pivoted toward me in a very soldier like manner and said, “Look, all I know, is--- yellow, is good. It's always been yellow here.”

there is no time i feel more alive than when my heart is breaking

2008-02-10T22:49:00.001-06:00

happy valentine's day week. for you, a gem from the ever so eternal post secrets:

two longings

2008-02-06T20:18:00.000-06:00

Today, I found a hand-written note inside a used book that I recently purchased. I can’t stop thinking about it:

Monday. Packing.

Dear Michael,Wow. I’ve never known a real pilgrim-missionary-journeyman before. You are doing something amazing. Something I could not do right now in my life. I am incredibly proud of you, do you know that?

Yet, I wish I were going – mainly because I will miss you SO much. I can’t imagine how I’ll survive without communicating with you for days and days. I know I’ll think of a thousand things to tell you. You whom I tell everything to – whether you are listening or not.

I wonder what God has in store for you on this pilgrimage. Why have you been chosen to go? What is your lesson? How will it change your life? It does not matter much to me I guess, as long as I am still included in that changed life. Feels like a new era in our story together somehow. Life with you is always an adventure – incredible, and fascinating.

So have fun. Enjoy the adventure that you are undertaking. Remember to journal a lot – for both of us. I know we’ll be connected in spirit as we always are. I know you will be fine and I will be fine and the kids will be fine and your Mom will survive somehow. We have lots more adventures ahead of us. I will be waiting patiently for your safe return so we can continue on together.

Thanks for being such a beautiful, caring, and complex man of service to the world. The people of Haiti will be forever enriched by your presence. I guess it is the least I can do – to share you for a few months. I piece together the paradox – to make peace with the paradox, to find a balance in some larger sense, so that a life can feel whole. I love you forever, Peg

no less than

2008-02-04T19:51:00.000-06:00

I spend a great deal of my free time critiquing Christianity. (Don't worry - this post is not about the hundreds of things that I think about the thousands of things I have come across pertaining to the vast subject of "Christianity." I might save those conversations for the poor soul sitting beside me on my upcoming 17 hour plane flight to Dubai.) But really, it is no secret that I find enjoyment in studying, deconstructing, and teaching aspects of the theology, history, and practice of Christianity. It is also no secret that I am not much of a Christian apologist. But there is one thing I stand by to no avail: Jesus lived with an apocalyptic sense of urgency and he lead a political movement in which he inspired people personally, so much, that 2,000 years later Jesus, (and of course that which has been attributed to him by architects of the church), is remembered daily by billions of people while other messianic movements and magical people from that very place and that time are not.

There is a reason why some people stick.

When people are oppressed, and disengaged from the causes of the circumstances of their lives as the people of Israel were at the time of Jesus, there's only room for certain things to stick. Not every Joe Schmoe is going to inspire a revolution, or a movement, or a belief that the kingdom of God will reward those suffering at the hand of Rome. And today, it seems difficult for a movement of empowerment to resonate with those who are economically oppressed, or with those who feel that their voices, VOTES, and lives have been ignored and harmed at the hands of politicians who love war, are eons away from the economic conditions of most Americans.

Barack Obama has stuck.

This is not by chance, and no matter what happens from here on out in this election, the wave of change associated with the hope and faith represented by and placed in Barack Obama, are not soon to go away.

Here is a video that really stuck with America, and the international community. When the video came out in March, it became a "who done it" story because so, so, so many people understood and agreed with the message. And even if those very people are not voting this cycle, their sentiment was voiced in this video, - no less than the sentiment Jesus voiced for a group of people in the Galilee, and no less than the voice Barack Obama has taken on for so many of us. Thanks, Phil.

a vision for the future, not a sense of personal entitlement to it

2008-01-27T00:32:00.000-06:00

Barack Obama won the South Carolina Primary by an astounding 28 points last night, and he gave a phenomenal speech. I have posted the second half of the speech at the bottom of this post. 28 points. As predicted, the Clintons are acting like South Carolina did not even happen. Despite their campaign's heated efforts in South Carolina, they have deemed that the voices of South Carolina not to matter. Among many efforts, Clinton had staffers there for a very long time working 18 hour days, (I know how this goes), and Hillary Clinton did not have the dignity to get on stage in South Carolina in order to say "thank you" to their faces, and to the faces of her campaign's volunteers. This hurt my heart, even as a big Obama supporter. It was just another cruel reminder of the Clintons' arrogance, attitude of entitlement, and lack of class.

Last night's vote was not just a counter-response to the weeks of negativity from the Clinton campaign; rather, last night was about giving life to a vision. Caroline Kennedy wrote about this vision in the New York Times, and I hope you will take time to read it.

In this election the Republicans have been put on notice that Clinton is beatable, and the American public does not look lightly upon unethical attacks on Obama. Furthermore, Democrats have noted that the party requires a candidate that will not alienate voters like me, and the African-Americans the party turns to and remembers once every four years. Despite how the Clintons will spin it, South Carolina is not a special case. If Obama is the national candidate for the Dems, turn out WILL be high. Let's vote for someone who is truthful about being against the war. Let's vote for someone who is still in conversation with the poor and working classes. Let's vote for someone with a vision for the future, not just a sense of entitlement to it. Let's take some risks, let's challenge ourselves to be better than what it is that we are told to believe about ourselves. Let's make this happen.

- - -

A President Like My Father

By CAROLINE KENNEDY

Published: January 27, 2008
New York Times OPEd

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama. It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.

Most of us would prefer to base our voting decision on policy differences. However, the candidates’ goals are similar. They have all laid out detailed plans on everything from strengthening our middle class to investing in early childhood education. So qualities of leadership, character and judgment play a larger role than usual.

Senator Obama has demonstrated these qualities throughout his more than two decades of public service, not just in the United States Senate but in Illinois, where he helped turn around struggling communities, taught constitutional law and was an elected state official for eight years. And Senator Obama is showing the same qualities today. He has built a movement that is changing the face of politics in this country, and he has demonstrated a special gift for inspiring young people — known for a willingness to volunteer, but an aversion to politics — to become engaged in the political process.

I have spent the past five years working in the New York City public schools and have three teenage children of my own. There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.

Senator Obama is running a dignified and honest campaign. He has spoken eloquently about the role of faith in his life, and opened a window into his character in two compelling books. And when it comes to judgment, Barack Obama made the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning.

I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

---
And from Barack Obama's victory speech in South Carolina last night:

We are up against the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election. We know that this is exactly what’s wrong with our politics; this is why people don’t believe what their leaders say anymore; this is why they tune out. And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again.

And what we’ve seen in these last weeks is that we’re also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign, but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. It’s the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon. A politics that tells us that we have to think, act, and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us. The assumption that young people are apathetic. The assumption that Republicans won’t cross over. The assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor, and that the poor don’t vote. The assumption that African-Americans can’t support the white candidate; whites can’t support the African-American candidate; blacks and Latinos can’t come together.

But we are here tonight to say that this is not the America we believe in. I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina. I saw crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children. I saw shuttered mills and homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from all walks of life, and men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. I saw what America is, and I believe in what this country can be.

That is the country I see. That is the country you see. But now it is up to us to help the entire nation embrace this vision. Because in the end, we are not just up against the ingrained and destructive habits of Washington, we are also struggling against our own doubts, our own fears, and our own cynicism. The change we seek has always required great struggle and sacrifice. And so this is a battle in our own hearts and minds about what kind of country we want and how hard we’re willing to work for it.

So let me remind you tonight that change will not be easy. That change will take time. There will be setbacks, and false starts, and sometimes we will make mistakes. But as hard as it may seem, we cannot lose hope. Because there are people all across this country who are counting us; who can’t afford another four years without health care or good schools or decent wages because our leaders couldn’t come together and get it done.

Theirs are the stories and voices we carry on from South Carolina.

The mother who can’t get Medicaid to cover all the needs of her sick child - she needs us to pass a health care plan that cuts costs and makes health care available and affordable for every single American.

The teacher who works another shift at Dunkin Donuts after school just to make ends meet - she needs us to reform our education system so that she gets better pay, and more support, and her students get the resources they need to achieve their dreams.

The Maytag worker who is now competing with his own teenager for a $7-an-hour job at Wal-Mart because the factory he gave his life to shut its doors - he needs us to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship our jobs overseas and start putting them in the pockets of working Americans who deserve it. And struggling homeowners. And seniors who should retire with dignity and respect.

The woman who told me that she hasn’t been able to breathe since the day her nephew left for Iraq, or the soldier who doesn’t know his child because he’s on his third or fourth tour of duty - they need us to come together and put an end to a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.

The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It’s not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white.

It’s about the past versus the future.

It’s about whether we settle for the same divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics today, or whether we reach for a politics of common sense, and innovation - a shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.

There are those who will continue to tell us we cannot do this. That we cannot have what we long for. That we are peddling false hopes.

But here’s what I know. I know that when people say we can’t overcome all the big money and influence in Washington, I think of the elderly woman who sent me a contribution the other day - an envelope that had a money order for $3.01 along with a verse of scripture tucked inside. So don’t tell us change isn’t possible.

When I hear the cynical talk that blacks and whites and Latinos can’t join together and work together, I’m reminded of the Latino brothers and sisters I organized with, and stood with, and fought with side by side for jobs and justice on the streets of Chicago. So don’t tell us change can’t happen.

When I hear that we’ll never overcome the racial divide in our politics, I think about that Republican woman who used to work for Strom Thurmond, who’s now devoted to educating inner-city children and who went out onto the streets of South Carolina and knocked on doors for this campaign. Don’t tell me we can’t change.

Yes we can change.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can seize our future.

And as we leave this state with a new wind at our backs, and take this journey across the country we love with the message we’ve carried from the plains of Iowa to the hills of New Hampshire; from the Nevada desert to the South Carolina coast; the same message we had when we were up and when we were down - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope; and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people in three simple words:

Yes. We. Can.

Question: What language do they speak in Haiti?

2008-01-22T21:00:00.000-06:00

Answer: Haitian Creole (Kreyol) is spoken in Haiti.

One minute answer. . . ready. . . set. . . go:

Creole languages have a substrate language, with an adstrate lexifier overlay. So, for Haitian Creole, the substrate is African and the lexifying language is French which provides the roots and some of the articles which are then blended with the word or put after the word which is a trait of African languages. In Creole languages, the substrate is rarely identified specifically because the language originated among slaves who were purposely in mixed groups from all over Africa. This was a “secret” language used to communicate apart from the slave masters.

Some people want to call Creoles “pidgin French.” This is not the case. A pidgin language does not have native speakers, whereas Creoles do. It is believed that Creole was created by the children of slaves. Not having a “native tongue,” they blended the African languages they heard with the French from the masters. Creoles are morphologically developed languages. Pidgins are more like the equivalent of “glass drink me,” which could mean: “I will drink out of the glass.” Or, it is more like a variation of / dialect of a given lexifying language. Jamaican English is considered a Creole, but it could be debatable that it is a pidgin.

Creoles are not merely variations of or a dummying down of the lexifier language. They are a mixed fusion of language with a specific history rooted in a slave economy. All language is fluid. Spanish is not called pidgin Latin. Nor is it called a Creole. Yet modern day Castilian Spanish is also about 30% Arabic. To flip this thinking, a scholar at MIT has deemed Creole languages to actually be romance languages.

Let’s look at the ever-changing story of English. In England there was Gaelic, and then in the 6^th or 7th century the Anglos and the Saxons showed up. By the 8^th century there was old English, and a lot has changed since then. English is a Germanic language with its closest relative being Dutch. Yet, it could be called a romance language because so many of the language’s more sophisticated words are rooted in the Latin signifiers - - “entirely,” “collaborate,” “innovate.”

Is English known as “pidgin Latin”? No. Do people ask “is English a real language”? No. Do people ask, “Why do English speakers spell the words funny?” No. This is where the history of the language comes into play. French speakers find the written Creole to be a “phonetic spelling” of the French. This is incorrect, because of the complexity of Haitian Creole. But, it is also an incorrect and insensitive thing to say based on the history of Haiti revolting from the oppressor of the French.

The island of Hispaniola was the richest and most lush place on earth. In the seventeenth century, the French controlled the western third portion of the island while the Spanish controlled the eastern two-thirds. It was a slave economy. In the late seventeen hundreds 500,000 slaves revolted on the 40,000 French masters. The first president of Haiti was an ex-slave. The Haitian Revolution is responsible for a series of events in western history, including the Louisiana Purchase. Haiti is the first black republic. The Haitians have been punished by the US, French, Canada, and the western world ever since. For a closer and more elaborate history of Haiti, the Haitian people, and the US occupation of/influence in, I strongly suggest a fantastic book by Dr. Paul Farmer called The Uses of Haiti.

“Bonjou msye dam. Ki sa m kab fe pou nou?”
(Good morning sir and madam. What can I do for you?)

“M bezwen yon kostim. Madmwazel la vle we wob abiye yo. Montre nou bel bagay, paske nou vle abiye byenn bwode.”
(I need a suit. The lady wants to see the formal dresses. Show us nice things because we want to dress up.)

To hear more Haitian Creole, check out this video of Belo, a popular singer in Haiti. I saw him in concert in 2006, and I am a huge fan!

live the call of your own dexter avenue

2008-01-11T13:14:00.000-06:00

Coretta Scott King and her husband, a leader and martyr of the Civil Rights movement, - were heroes among heroes. She was a mother and an activist. She was a dignified widow who continued her husband Martin’s work. She had faith that could move mountains. Through my political work, and Washingtonian social relationships I have had the pleasure of meeting numerous historical figures, celebrities, and writers - but meeting Mrs. King was one encounter that I will always remember.

My sophomore and junior years in college, I was very involved with a student lecture series on campus at American University called The Kennedy Political Union (KPU). As Director of Logistics, it was my responsibility to “make sure the trains run on time.” Before each event, I would often spend a week coordinating all of the on and off campus entities pertinent in making a lecture happen. During my time with KPU, we hosted a wide range of historical and political icons including His Holiness the Dali Lama and Charleton Heston.

It was October of 1998 when Mrs. King was our guest speaker. In preparation, her handler - a very protective assistant - was quite particular about how things would need to be on the day of her speech. The arrangement we agreed upon with her assistant was as follows: On the day of the speech, she (and her assistant) would have cocktails at President Ladner's house before heading over to campus. Upon her arrival, we would greet hold a small meet and greet for KPU members with Mrs. King. Then, the officers would escort the President, his wife, Mrs. King, (and her handler of course), by elevator, down to the stage. Mrs. King would speak for however long and then return for a private reception with the members of the Kennedy Political Union. It was essential in the handler’s orders that Mrs. King not encounter any one other than KPU staff before and after the speech. This may have been a security measure.

For an hour or so before this, I arranged that the elevator essentially go into “lock” mode so no random American University folks could possibly get on board and interrupt our journey with Mrs. King down to the floor of the gymnasium where she would walk to the stage for speaking. As back up, I placed a student with a walkie-talkie on every single floor with the explicit instructions "do not let anyone on to the elevator.” When it was time, I sent the message to them all via walkie-talkie that Mrs. King, the Ladners, and the Officers have gotten into the elevator. Things were going smoothly. We rode in silence. Then the elevator stopped on floor seven. "Why is the elevator stopped, what is happening?” It is holds for a few seconds. The doors open and a sweaty, stinky, gross guy on rollerblades wearing a bizarre hat gets right on!!

I was tempted to say “hey- stop - you can’t get on,” but I didn’t want to appear ungracious in front of a woman who had allowed the most gracious act possible – the sacrifice of her husband, and the father of her children. Derrida says the only true gift is the gift of one’s life. I stood in an elevator with a woman who had given a sacred gift for our country, and prevailed not in silence but with a voice. Appearing to be absolutely unaware of the serious-looking and dignified Mrs. King in a bright red suit, along with the President of the University and his wife dressed to the nines--- this guy rollerblades right into the elevator and journeys with us all the way to the gym floor.

It was difficult for me to hold back the laughter. With in a few seconds that seemed to pass like hours- the doors opened and Mrs. King exited – arm in arm with her handler, who gave the stare of death to the poor kid on the gym floor with the walkie-talkie.

After a most inspiring speech to nearly two thousand people, I visited with Mrs. King at the private reception upstairs. With a big lump in my throat, I approached her, and I felt such humility. She was sitting down, resting in a chair. I walked over and thanked her for her work, and for the inspiring speech. With her left hand she squeezed my left hand. I looked down at her wedding ring, and thought about her husband. She continued to hold my hand for longer than I expected and she said, "Soon, you will be doing this too. You will be doing the work my husband and I dedicated our lives to.”

That moment and those words are so accessible and fresh in my memory. Yet, it was almost a decade ago. Reflecting, I think about how I have most certainly failed in the covenant I made on that day. But I also think of the old adage that says - if you are not backsliding then your standards are just not high enough.

I took this photo in 2006 on a mini-pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama. The Kings lived in this house from 1954 to 1960 while Rev. King was ministering at Dexter Avenue. He initially took the position at Dexter Avenue thinking it would be a quiet place to work and finish up his PhD dissertation, but the black domestic workers and cooks were organizing. They were waiting for him. And he arrived.

the punishment of ayiti

2007-12-31T14:56:00.000-06:00

Begin watching at minute 9:50 for Randall Robinson's discussion with Charlie Rose, on the continual occupation of Haiti and the United States' sympathy for the rich, and punishment of the poor.

i've only just begun

2007-12-29T11:46:00.003-06:00

As a child, I was never scared by gory movies or by thoughts of monsters under my bed. This surprises me in retrospect because my parents never paid much attention to what I was watching on TV. In fact, now that I think about it, they encouraged me to watch things that were too sophisticated for my level of maturity. Perhaps they did this with hopes that I would develop a vocabulary and sensibility able to overcome typical childhood fears, thus, their child might require less parenting. Maybe I bored them, and they wanted more things to talk with me about. With my parents’ stamp of approval, I recall watching things like Mississippi Burning, the Golden Girls, and episodes from the Victory at Sea series all before the age of 11. This culminated into an all out private demise when on January 1, 1989, I watched The Karen Carpenter Story, a made for TV movie.

Karen Carpenter would haunt me for years.

Karen Carpenter was the famous female drummer from the group “The Carpenters.” Richard Carpenter, her controlling older brother, was the other half of the duo. (Ultimately, I place blame for Karen’s death on Richard’s quaalude addiction and his jealousy about Karen’s marriage.) The movie opened with a scene I will never forget. Karen has collapsed at home, and she is being wheeled in a hospital bed through a very bright hallway. The ghost of “alive and well Karen” - - the Karen before the fame - - is roller skating alongside the hospital bed, with pigtails in, singing. She occasionally looks at the camera and smiles a creepy smile that as an 11 year old, I never wanted to receive from a stranger.

This woman systematically starved herself to death to defy her family and her fame. I had never been exposed to something to scary. I became equally obsessed about and afraid of, Karen Carpenter. Thank God there was no internet at the time, but nonetheless I managed to find photos of her at the public library. “Ok Dad, I will be up in the children’s section.” Yea right. I was in the biography and music sections flagging books for photocopying. Her narrow, pale face contrasting the long dark hair: scared the shit out of me, but I also couldn’t get enough. I recall finding The Carpenters’ tapes, “Close to You” and “A Kind of Hush” in my Grandmother’s basement. I asked to borrow them. I brought them home with me. I played them, very quietly in my bedroom, with my ear next to the speaker, startled by just about any other noise. I can still hear the build up of the whistle in “Close to You.” It was terrifying. The next day I left those tapes on the school bus. Those tapes needed to be someone else’s problem.

This kind of thing went on for a long time.

It really was debilitating, to think about Karen Carpenter all the time. I don’t know if my parents were keyed-in, but my girlfriends knew about my obsessive/fearful relationship with Karen Carpenter. A year or two later, when I started to let go a bit of this issue, I recall being at a sleep-over at Lindsay Waterman’s house. All of my best girlfriends were there in the basement, laughing and having fun. I was trying to open a door that was jammed, to get into another part of the basement. Seizing the opportunity to get my goose, Mary Waldorf, my best friend started screaming, “Ahh!! Katie! The door won’t open because Karen Carpenter is holding on to the other side!!!” As I flew off the door and leaped on to my sleeping bag for comfort, I reciprocated screaming blood-curdling screams!

I instituted some cognitive therapy for myself and things became easier. I just didn’t seek out the information about Karen Carpenter anymore. I stopped looking for things to see and learn about her.

I starved myself of her.

Since then, once in a blue moon, someone will make a reference to her in a movie, or I will see something about her on TV. I usually do ok.

Usually. . .

Earlier this month, after many weeks of graduate school stress, I went out to celebrate the end of the semester with my friend and classmate, Jewly. She is a journalist and has also worked in the music industry for many years. Her own album, Darlin Understand will be released on January 29. Over pino grigio and vegetarian shepherd’s pie, with a bluesy voice gargling in the background, Jewly and I covered all the things women talk about over dinner: relationships, work, and the future. While talking about her debut album, she shared a funny story about the history of her drum set. Things started to get fuzzy for me. I looked at her thin and delicate facial features. I heard the words “drum set” over in my head and I kinda just went blank. Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear. Her head was thrown back in laughter a little bit, here and there. But the soft whistle of “Close to You” was winding up in my brain. Grasping what was going on here, I interrupted her story and I quickly asked, “So you play the drums? You’re, you are a female drummer?” She noticed that I was upset, and replied with a cautious, “yeeess?”

I said sort of in a defeated but accusatory manner, “Oh. So. You probably like Karen Carpenter, huh? You know, she was a female drummer too?” Not allowing time for a response, I continued in a riled up mode like John Cusack in High Fidelity. “Well Jewly, she scared the shit out of me! She scared the shit out of me. And that made-for-TV movie, The Karen Carpenter Story? That comes in as a close second to the worst thing about my childhood.” Jewly looked confused. She laughed nervously. Realizing what sort of an outburst I had just had, I excused myself to the bathroom. It was an all out relapse. And I realized that Jewly being a new friend, could very well have chosen to bail on her creepy new friend Kate, upon my return from the bathroom. But she was still at the table. I apologized and told her the story. I even told her about leaving the tapes on the bus. It helped to talk about it.

anastasis

2007-12-13T18:57:00.000-06:00

(skip to minute 4:00)

where is baby jesus?

2007-12-09T12:39:00.000-06:00

We must not seek the child Jesus
in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs.
We must seek him among the undernourished children
who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat,
among the poor newsboys
who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways.
Archbishop Oscar Romero, December 24, 1979

don't let this happen to you

2007-12-08T09:50:00.002-06:00

my letter to michael moore

2007-12-06T22:45:00.000-06:00

Dear Michael Moore:

According to your recent movie Sicko, you gifted $12,000 to an individual managing an anti-Michael Moore website. Before you read this letter, please make note that my Bank of America account accepts automatic transfers through the convenience of just a few clicks on the internet.

Like other modern-day prophets stuck between a rock and a hard place, you probably thought that you were being witty (or at least ironic) in your latest movie. Putting a bunch of Americans on a boat en route to Guantanamo Bay in search of uber efficient health care is an example of your poignant use of wit and irony. You probably thought that placing high-ranking US military officials testifying that health care at Guantanamo is superb, in tension with the inability of Americans to obtain adequate and affordable health care in places like Michigan- was witty and ironic. Mr. Moore, I regret to inform you that you were neither witty nor ironic but rather merely irresponsible and obnoxious. Sicko denies the hell in which Guantanamo detainees have lived and not only the “Al Qada suspects” for the past six years under the Bush regime but also that of the Haitians wrongfully imprisoned there during the Clinton Administration. Despite your possible intentions of wit and irony, your intentional denial of the torture, humiliation, and strife those (often wrongfully kidnapped) prisoners have undergone during the past six years is actively dehumanizing.

I appreciate the first half of your film because you provide an accessible and veracious arrangement of pericopes which depict the personal stories of Americans struggling against the US health care system. I appreciate that you pointed out the lunacy that the work of mailing a letter across town is more of a federalized act and is therefore of higher priority to our government than the work of saving the lives of children running high fevers. I appreciate your knack for revealing the interconnectedness of so many things such as the necessity of a living wage, the disaster in Iraq, the inequities of race and gender - with health care accessibility.

It is just so disappointing that you didn’t bother to do that in your portrayal of medicine in Cuba because it would’ve made your point much more palatable, accurate, and fierce.

You cowardly let the United States off the hook with respect to what our country has done to the Cuban quality of life via our government’s canceling of aid/sanctions/embargo echoing the damage the fall of the Iron Curtain has caused them. For the past twenty years or so, the quality of life in Cuba has rapidly deteriorated. Cuba is a country with a collective memory of slavery. You also deny this in your depiction of life there, and that silence is a sin. Your film suggests that if it is easy and cheap to get an inhaler in Cuba, than life must be good there. * Ok, I will go ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt, and say that you might be trying to make the point here that despite how disparagingly difficult it is to obtain the means for the day in Cuba,- medical care remains a priority. Fine.

But, the true gem you missed for support of your argument about Cuba is the tale of Cuban doctors and the free medical school program there. Cuba provides free medical school. All doctors trained in Cuba are then required to spend two years in a developing country working with the poor. Cuba has more doctors working world-wide than the United Nations’ World Health Organization. A Haitian friend of mine participated in this program and returned to run a clinic in Haiti in a small, rural town were folks used to just go to the grave, not to the doctor. There, within two weeks of his arrival he personally had 27 HIV/AIDS patients under his direct care. The Cuban doctors in Haiti and elsewhere are not spreading “communist political propaganda,” (but in the memory & honor of the strife of the people of Cuba), rather, they serve the least of these of these, across the world.

Why didn’t you talk about this, or any other redeeming aspect of the Cuban medical system? Why did you find it necessary to ignore every aspect of life in Cuba or at Guantanamo, outside of access to an inhaler?

As an aspiring anthropologist it will be my job to tell the story of a thing. Adam Smith believed that if you dealt with a thing for long enough and explored it long enough you could reveal all of its history. You’re not very good at that sort of endeavor, so I think you should stop calling your films “documentaries” and consider a genre more akin to the swift boat movement.

I also accept checks to my mailbox at Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School.

With warm regards.

nashville in harmony

2007-12-05T00:04:00.000-06:00

My friend Susan has a bumper sticker on her car that says "I'm straight. I'm married. I support gay rights." She is a member of Nashville in Harmony. Nashville in Harmony is a choir addressing GLBT-ITT issues in the community, (www.nashvilleinharmony.org).

Tonight I attended their concert at Blair, at Vanderbilt. I sat with my friend Kara from school. When they sang the Charlie Brown Christmas song I told Kara that I was about to cry! I recall watching it with Gracie, years ago. And just then a mobile Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree traveled across the front of the stage, and my nostalgia was comforted by laughter.

My roots are a mix of New York, Washington-DC, and California, and despite my bizarre experiences of travel in Montana and abroad, moving to Nashville was a surprise to me for numerous reasons. I was primarily, (and continue to be), shocked by the silenced voices of so many, here. People who are from here seem to notice this but accept this better than I do. One silenced voice is that of the gay community, - a very suppressed voice in the south.

Nashville in Harmony is a place for these voices. And the voices are amazing!! Nashville in Harmony shows that there are many ways to use one's voice.

Here is one of the songs they sang tonight:

sam under the tree

2007-12-03T21:47:00.000-06:00

During a small group discussion in class tonight, Fred was talking about the values of our class and how in some ways our class experience embraces the principals of Bob Moses in community organizing theory and praxis during the civil rights movement, specifically a lifting up of the importance of personal connections. While I am both convinced of and moved by the intimate exchanges and encounters in class, I challenged Fred’s claim. I told the group that I have an imagination about what their lives are like on a daily basis. I said that I listen to and think on the information about their lives that they graciously share with me, but really I can’t know what it is like to live at Riverbend. I mentioned what I wrote in my post yesterday about comfort, and also of how my faith is weaker than theirs for a variety of reasons, one reason being that I am allowed to comfort myself with all sorts of things in order to survive the day. Sam (a calm and centered man around my father’s age, with whom I have been in regular conversation since August), piped right up, saying with a very excited look on his face, “you mean like take a bath?” This really caught me off guard. He knew right away what he wanted to do for comfort.

Sitting with Sam after class, I asked him if he wanted to take a bath when he gets out of prison. He said, “I am going to. It is going to be one of the first things I do.” I asked Sam what else he would like to do. He calmly said to me: It’s the little things that you don’t realize you can do until you aren’t able to do them any longer. Like sitting on the porch after dark. I’m gonna do that too. Or walking down to the store to buy a pint of ice cream. Any flavor. Here we get ice cream about once ever couple of months, and it’s just a tiny scoop thing of vanilla. Before they moved me out here to Riverbend, I went ten years without seeing a tree. Here, they have two trees. People must have thought I was crazy, but when I got here, I walked right up to that tree and I just stared at it. And I touched it. I hadn’t been able to see a tree is so long, and sitting under trees was something I used to do a lot. I’m going to do that again too, when I leave here.

I told Sam about the time when I was in Haiti and I was really sick, all I could think of were baby carrots. I told him that I was lying under my mosquito net feeling stuck, hungry, and sick just dreaming about baby carrots. I told him that I had numerous fantasies about eating the carrots. I had running visualizations about going to buy the carrots and about how I would eat them, and about how I would surprise myself by remembering later that I had left over carrots in the fridge. Sam said that’s like his life.

I want to treat Sam as if the change has already happened, so to impact his visions and hope in a positive way. As I drink my glass of wine, in my comfy pajamas, surrounded by books about all the things I love, I’ve decided to start thinking of Sam as that guy over there, under the tree, with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in his hand, hearing the faint sound of running bath water.

prayer request

2007-12-02T21:04:00.000-06:00

This morning at Hobson Methodist Church in East Nashville, the pastor reminded us of how very difficult it is to pray for others when we don't know anything about them, and when we don't feel we have anything in common with their pain.

I ask that you remember yourself at your loneliest. The moment when you knew that no one was in your corner. I know it is painful, but remember that saddest time when you put yourself to bed thinking, "I've got nothing and no one."

Now imagine that moment, and imagine being in prison. It's not what Paris Hilton went through.

Every Monday evening, I visit the Riverbend Maximum Security Institute, where Tennessee's most dangerous, (personally, I would say most harmed by market scarcity and a former slave society), convicted criminals are housed and executed. I've been taking a class there since August and intend on auditing future classes. Most of these guys have killed people. Some have been in for 30+ years and will never see the free world. Others have been in for a long time, but hope to get out in three to five years. A few of them still have at least twenty years to go.

From my friends living on the "inside" I have learned about two things: 1) reconciliation, and 2) patience. Paul Tillich said, "Waiting is its own special destiny. Every time is a time of waiting, waiting for the breaking in of eternity. All time, both history and personal life is expectation."

This semester I have agonized - - feeling that I have very little to offer these guys. But in moments of reflection, I know that I can in fact pray intensely on their behalf, and now I ask that you pray for them too during this month. Ask your churches to pray for the imprisoned. Do it at the dinner table. Pray for their comfort. You know, Christmas time can be the loneliest of all times even while being surrounded by Aunts and Uncles in tacky sweaters and eating cookies. Christmas time is when suicide rates peak. It is when our non-Christian friends feel a peculiar sense of cultural and socio-alienation or disconnect. It is when we long for that which we have given up. It is when we drink too much red wine. It is when we think about how things should be.

Please pray for the comfort and justice of the imprisoned during this time. When class ends and I walk in one direction and these guys walk in the other, I am reminded of all the silly things I am allowed to comfort myself with simply because I live in the free world. My friends need the prayers of those who are also broken and suffering: that's you and me.

so then you will know who you are

2007-11-30T14:29:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, Cal Turner, Jr. (a big time financial donor to Vanderbilt and Project Pyramid) spoke to a class that I am in. As the CEO of Dollar General for 40 years, Cal Turner engaged a business model that allowed him to cater to the needs of the working and lower classes while involving thousands of employees in the management and profits of the company and still he managed to out shine people like Jack Welch in shareholder profits. He was very wise, funny, and smart about the business of mixing God’s work with the business world. For me, this was the most striking thing that he said:

“You must find where you feel the least adequate but where there is the most need, because it is in that place where the opportunity for the most impact lies. What is your greatest challenge? Are you willing to accept the freedom of accepting your greatest challenge? If your work has an underlying mission to it, your work can help you understand who you are. So then, when the (whatever you call it in the halls of Divinity school) hits the fan, you will know who you are.”

vivaldi in the afternoon

2007-11-29T12:10:00.000-06:00

In the summer of 2006, my friend Andy and I were teaching English to a group of male Haitian adults in downtown Les Cayes. My impression was that they knew English well enough to produce something such as a thank you note but not well enough to have a successful job interview. The men who came to this class traveled across town, after working for 12 hours that day. Some of the men were agriculturists, others were artists, and some were masons. I am unaware of their ages, but I would guess a range from about twenty-five to forty-five years old.

Having access to reliable electricity, we decided to engage the students in a writing exercise involving music. We played a couple of movements from the Vivaldi baroque masterpiece “Winter,” from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” We asked my students to listen and let their thoughts go where they may while writing in a sort of free-style manner about whatever it is they were feeling or remembering during the listening experience.

I engaged in the exercise too. I sat with my eyes closed. I dreamed about a rabbit running through the hills of upstate New York, chasing a smaller animal. I saw bright greens and blues. The sun was shining. Then the rabbit took a nap under a tree. The gentle breeze blew the weeds in the grass. My thoughts were very peaceful and serene.

The final part of this exercise was to share our writing with the group. Coming out of my day dreams about bunnies and fields, I was not prepared for what my students had dreamed of. Gregory the artist, spoke first. With tears in his eyes he began describing a woman with a child in her womb. He went on to describe her brutal murder by the machete of a ton ton macoute. Still covered in dust and concrete from the day's work, one of the masons said that the song reminded him of being a small child in Camp Perrin, running away from the ton ton macoute, as he tried to hide his little brother in the bushes. A third student shared a similar tale, while detailing the haunting dark glasses and Baron Samedi like outfit of Papa Doc.

I was unequipped to offer my condolences for what happened at the hands of an American supported (understatement) Cold War dictatorship from 1953 to 1986. I didn’t even want to think about what my home country was responsible for since 1986,(or the hundreds of years of sins before 1953, for that matter). I also didn’t know how to express my sadness for having stirred their hearts by playing Vivaldi. It was as if these painful and terrorizing memories remained right under their surface. Perhaps they wanted to educate me about the modern day collective memory of the Haitian people. The role music had in this made me long to ask them questions about the drumming in vodoun ceremonies, but in an attempt toward humility, I refrained.

This story depicts the individual embodiment of unjust social forces such as poverty and violence. The lived experience for Haitians under the dictatorship of the Duvaliers has manifested a terror settled in the depth of their being which is also easily accessible under the surface of a silenced people. In his book Pathologies of Power, Paul Farmer details how in this silence lies the pent-up anger born of innumerable small indignities and of great irremediable ones. Whether heard or not, there exists millions of experiences of sorrow within the greater structural sins of the story of Haiti.

Derrida said, “there is no life beyond the text.” But history can be done better when knowledge is used with personal narrative. The narratives of my students can not be found in the worldly accessible history of Haiti, (with the exception of some pro-Aristide literature which is actively and unfairly silenced and discredited by Haiti's close neighbor, the United States). This is part of the collective memory of a people. As a first step toward reconciliation and justice, their story deserves to be heard.

crystallized in their present form

2007-11-26T22:55:00.000-06:00

By definition of faith in eternal life, Christians are called to live in the future. St. Augustine asserted that there really is no “now.” Psalm 90 reveals that God views creation without a lens of time. In Hebraic and Christian sacred texts, time is often associated with the unchanging of the godhead. The Mayans were obsessed with time, and believed that the past was a clue to the future often as a means of anticipating things like war and drought. Ancient Babylonians thought similarly. In the 19th century physicist James Maxwell said time was a continuous running line with an ordered series of events. Eliade debunked this and said that time is a means for us to order things. He said that in all non-Western cultures, time is viewed as cyclical. In the case of Buddhist tradition- time is many layers of cycles and repetition. Newton thought that time was outside of us; whereas Einstein believed time was in relation to things.

Now we live in a scientific world with scientific examinations of time, but individuals still have the intimate experience and understandings of time as we sift through and sort out our own lived lives. While writing a paper last year surrounding Niebuhrian ethics and the notions of self, I came across this quote and it has continued to stir my imagination.

My past is with me now; it is in my present as conscious and unconscious memory; it is here now as habits of behavior, of speech and thought, as ways of cutting up and dividing into shapes and forms the great mass of impressions made on my senses by the energies assailing them from without. My interpersonal past also is with me in all my present meetings with other selves. It is there in all my love and guilt. The self does not leave its past behind as the moving hand of a clock does; its past is inscribed into it more deeply than the past of geologic formations is crystallized in their present form. As for the future, the not-yet, it is present in my now in expectations and anxieties, in anticipations and commitments, in hopes and fears. To be a self is to live toward the future. – H.R. Niebuhr

everybody wants to be found

2007-11-24T15:40:00.001-06:00

but then what?

oikonomos

2007-11-23T18:26:00.000-06:00

As a graduate school student in “middle Tennessee” - - we could call it "central," but don’t get me started on that tangent - - and as a woman likely to be dressed in black, speaking with a sharp accent, I am often asked, “Kate, where is home?” My answer varies depending on my mood. The response I am most comfortable with is some variation of, “Well, my parents live in California, but I grew up in New York state, and I lived in DC for nine years, off and on, usually on.” The question, “where is home?” resonates initially as a geographic concern, but there are other aspects to take into account.

Robert Frost said that Home is where they have to take you in. Others have said that Home is where everybody knows your name. And your name is just a symbol for your story, so Home is a place where everybody knows your story. Home is a place where you can count on being confronted, loved, and hoped for. Home is where there is a place at the family table for you, for sharing and conversation. Home is where the storytelling happens. Family meals are where people gather to tell their stories.

God was the first homemaker by creating this world for God’s people and God’s work, therefore, Home could be described as a place where there is access to the conditions of life.

I spent this Thanksgiving at Home with my dear friend Angela, and her family Emily, Wayne, Eric, and Anna. It was good to be Home.

fleets and harbors

2007-11-19T13:10:00.000-06:00

America

started the official stop-watch on my four days of thankfulness. On Friday I can once again be the greedy consumerist. In honor of the clock ticking, I’ve decided what I am thankful for.

A therapist once told me, “You are the commander of your own ship.” As a child, I regularly stared at a cross-stitch: “A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are made for.”

Through grace, I have seen that I am not a ship out at sea, alone and commanding my own destiny. In the eyes of psycho-therapy and the market system, I suppose I am a loner. If there were fewer material resources in which to place my faith, I would probably have had a stronger belief in community at an earlier point of my life. Community takes a lot of work to stand over and against the individualistic structure of this society; and for me, that reinforces the necessity of it.

So this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my fleets and harbors, past and present.

clanging metal

2007-11-18T20:50:00.000-06:00

Shortly before Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination he was asked by a journalist, "where do you find inspiration for your work and preaching?" He responded, "Your question is very timely, for just now I have come from my retreat. If it were not for this prayer and reflection with which I try to stay united with God, I would be no more than what St. Paul says: clanging metal."

The journey of my own life has been one of constant tension between lived meaning and clanging metal. Many friends & family have honored me by suggesting that I write a book. Finally, (and it might be too little too late), this blog is an endeavor to tell my own story: the journeys of the past, the experience of the present, and my hopes for the future. I hope it will be as humorous and insightful as the concrete experiences have proven to be. Story telling is a gifting process, and I want to give my life away.