Fellow Traveler

It’s been a little quiet here, but it doesn’t mean my life has been like that.

Since January, when I decided to stop writing about my every day life, I have experienced a profound change. I love letting this blog go. I love pouring out my angst into safer vessels (my journal, husband, and *gasp* even Christ). I love giving up a piece of myself that I was finding just a bit too much identity in. And identity, and vocation, have been very much on my mind as of late.

I started the War Photographer series because I had a lot of questions in relation to my identity as a writer; what I got instead was a collection of thoughtful, hopeful treatises on the inherent value of our neighbors, and an admonition to do absolutely true by them. To love people well, to write about them second. To live life together, and out of the overflow of relationship speak. In the end this is what I discovered: I don’t think we are ever truly meant to be a War Photographer–it is a vocation borne out of the brokenness of our world. The true ideal is much simpler, much less grand: we are called to be neighbors, not transients reporters.

The reflections on War Photography have changed and moved me, and I am grateful to the myriad of voices that contributed. I still have a few more guest posts in the works that you will not want to miss, and then this series will be done. I created a tab at the top where you can find the entirety of the series, in the order that they were posted.

I wrote a little bit about this journey for my good friend J.R., over at her excellent blog. Here is an excerpt:

I am currently in a season where it is not valuable to write about my life; relationships are still in infancy, my own emotions are all over the map. In the future, there may be a possibility of doing it well. But for now I am in a place where I am learning to dig deep wells, both within myself and my community. I am in a place of seeking solitude, of sitting with my questions, of discovering who I am and what I believe. This is not a time to produce, to be subject to the whims of the crowd. This is a time to dig deep, to enter into the wilderness with no knowledge of when, or how, I will ever come out. Like Buechner says: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” By stepping back and allowing some silence into my writing life, I have found the antithesis of fear. I have allowed love to open up my thoughts, words and actions. I have given up the right to represent people, to use them, and to process through them. I am trying to give up my idols of being understood, of being recognized, of putting the entire burden of the world on my small and stooped shoulders. Instead, I am busy pursuing reality, and it is more beautiful and terrifying than I ever imagined.

 

Go on over and read the rest. 

 

 

But: just because I will not be writing about my specific context doesn’t mean I won’t be writing.

Stay tuned for some exciting new stuff.

 

call the midwife

I have long wanted to write about the television series Call the Midwife (and also the books it is based on) because to me it is far and away the best thing in pop culture we have in regards to all these issues of representation we keep talking about.

So I did.

It is funny to me that I find myself writing about pop culture once or twice a month these days. I guess I like doing it because for now, I am still very committed to not blogging about my own life, and am in a season of learning from others. And it seems that every where I look there are places to learn from (both positives and negatives). I actually identify greatly with the heroine of Call the Midwife, as she bumbles about, gets disappointed, shocked, overwhelmed  but generally feels like the luckiest girl in the world to be where she is.

If you haven’t seen the show, I highly recommend it (the first season is on Netflix streaming, and the second is currently free on PBS.com). Trigger warnings GALORE, however. If you (like myself) have experienced a traumatic pregnancy, or if you have any fears about pregnancy, or if you might be pregnant or possibly plan on being pregnant in the future . . . well, bring your tissues, and be prepared to peek between your fingers. It can get pretty rough and raw, but that is the reality of our world, eh?

 

image via Pinterest

Here is an excerpt from my piece:

 

 

In her book, Jennifer Worth describes a conversation she had with Sister Monica Joan, the oldest (and not always lucid) nun in the convent. Nurse Jenny asked the sister about her decades-long ministry with the poor in the East End (Sister Monica Joan grew up in an affluent aristocratic family in which she felt bored and stifled). Wondering about the underlying reasons for her work, Nurse Jenny asked Sister Monica Joan, “Was it love of people?”

“Of course no,” she snapped sharply. “How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don’t even know? Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it? One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through his grace come to love his people.”

 

 

For the rest of the article, please go to Christianity Today’s Out of Ur blog.

 

What about you? Any television/movies/music/books that you think have done a good job in representation?

War Photographer: Kevin Hargaden

Kevin Hargaden is a treasure of the internets. I just recently found out it was because he is Irish–none of that American Christian grimness about him, no sirree. He is funny, delightful, and heartbreakingly aware of just how bad things are on the ground. I’m so glad he agreed to write this post, but I am even gladder still for the life and calling he has chosen to live. Please do check out his always excellent thoughts over on his blog, and his be sure to follow him on Twitter as well.

 

 

For the last fifteen years in Ireland, living as a Christian has meant living through story after story after story of people abused horrendously within churches. I grew up and came to faith in that time. It has seemed as if every successive year there is another detailed report into the terrifying violence that took place within the church, which was conducted by leaders in the church, which was covered up by the people of the church. For this the church still has not acknowledged wholeheartedly and repented truly.

Invariably war photographers have to document carnage and brutality and their goal is that somehow by recording it – by broadcasting it, by capturing it – the stories of what has happened won’t be lost and won’t be forgotten. The war photographer hopes that by taking photos of war, they will contribute to the cessation of war. As an accidental war photographer of abuse within the church, I feel compelled to retell the story in such a way as to honour the victims, to expose the truth and to prevent it from happening again.

When trying to share these stories there is much to be avoided; the tabloid desire for prurient details, the brutish hunger to turn in aggression against perpetrators and most importantly the commodification of the stories so that they become an instrumental tool to achieve some other aim. The last concern is one about which I must be most alert. I feel like a war photographer who gets his work seen from an obtuse angle. If I present an academic paper that critiques pristine, abstract theological models of church, I will write it heavily influenced by the decrepit, actual crimes of our churches. Yet my address might only tangentially touch on the abuse scandal and instead appear to be preoccupied with the writings of Henrí de Lubac or Karl Barth. I imagine it is a bit like a war photographer who gets his pictures published in a botany journal. “Look! I found this rare orchid… Yes, well noticed. That is a war waging on in the background right behind the flowers.”

There is much to be avoided but there is one thing that I seek: to dignify the victims by honouring the truth of what has taken place.

My First Holy Communion

I had a very low intensity exposure to the church growing up. We had a parish priest called Fr. Vincent Keaveny. When he would visit our primary school, classes would be suspended and we would all be herded into our cramped little makeshift assembly hall. This man, who seemed as old as Abraham to us, with yellow skin, would stand on a little stage in front of us and teach us to sing, “See this little light of mine? I’m gonna let it shine” while performing actions that went along with the song.

It appeared to us as if Fr. Keaveny’s primary purpose was to inform us in many different ways that we were good and that we could do good. He had a curate, Fr. Rossa Doyle, a priest who moved with a deliberative patience that put us at our ease. He was a man who never confused us. When your job is to explain the mysteries of God to children, that is a remarkable achievement.

In recent years I have often thought back on Fr. Keaveny’s approach to pastoring a congregation and teaching young people. At the age of 6 or 7 he left me with only the vaguest impression of who Jesus was, barely a concept of what the Gospel was but absolutely no doubt that God thought I was good.

There is something saintly in that.

My father, growing up in 1950s rural Ireland was an altar boy into his early 20s. He later confessed to me that he would have considered joining the priesthood but he knew he needed a suit to go up to the seminary. His family could not afford that. I wanted to be an altar boy like my dad. How good it would be help Fr. Keaveny as he went around doing the good work of telling people they could be good.

Also, if you did a funeral or a wedding, sometimes the families would give you five pounds and I could spend that on World Cup Italia 90 stickers or put it towards some more Transformer toys.

The only truly negative experience that I had in a church growing up was to do with serving the altar. I was probably too young and I was definitely insufficiently trained. One summer’s morning I went down to the church and there were no older boys around to help. I had to do the job solo. I tried desperately to remember when it was I should ring this bell and when it was I should bring over that chalice.

I can honestly say I did my absolute 8 year-old best that day. And in retrospect, I can see that there were few more sincere, heartfelt acts of worship in my youth. When mass finished, I went into the sacristy and the priest followed me in and began shouting. He called me an embarrassment. He asked me what did I think I was doing out there? He told me I should be ashamed of myself.

At the back entrance to our parish church there is a gentle slope up to the road above. The footpath is lined by cherry blossom trees that would explode into bloom in late Spring. I realise now that their chorus of colour was a Psalmist’s cry, rendered in leaf and bud, ushering the parish into the everyday magnificence of Ordinary Time on God’s watch.

I wasn’t used to adults raising their voices at me. My parents were gentle and calm. My teachers tended to like me. My football coach trusted me. I went for speech therapy with final year students who practiced on me as part of getting their degrees and in my mind they were the most beautiful women God had ever put on Earth. Adults never shouted at me.

It must have been shock then, that allowed me to maintain my dignity and protect my pride by holding my chin up while I walked out of the sacristy and out of the church. But the moment I crossed the threshold the tears began to fall. My face stung as if I had been hit. There is an inner-city Dublin phrase to describe blushing; that you are “scarlet.” But the “t” goes silent so you say “he was scarleh.” That wouldn’t begin to describe me. Running up that hill felt like scaling a mountain. I sprinted as fast as I could for as long as I could until I was out of breath and then I walked as slowly as I could manage because I wanted to gather myself.

I needed to get myself together because I wanted to hide what had happened from my family. After all, it followed that if the priest was embarrassed by me, I would embarrass my family. If the priest thought I had shamed myself, I surely had brought shame on my family. I didn’t want to disappoint my dad. In my child-logic, that is what this would be. My grandparents were deeply, sincerely devout people. My paternal grandmother lived in the house next to mine. She appeared to pray constantly without any joy. My maternal grandmother lived on the other side of the country. She appeared to have turned joy into prayer. I didn’t want them to know how I had let them down.

For the last five years I have been in college with men training to be priests. From listening to them and from sitting through way too many Canon Law lectures and studying liturgy and the Catholic theology of Eucharist closely I can better understand why that priest lost his head with me. In the gracious providence of God I can report that he has mellowed over the years. Decades since he left our parish, he still checks in on my siblings and me, wanting to know how we’re doing.

I made it back to my house. I sat down to lunch as if nothing had happened. I let it casually slip a few days later that I didn’t want to be an altar boy any longer. Nothing more was said.

And I didn’t tell another soul what had happened until more than fifteen years later when I told my wife.

Protest art about church abuse on the streets of Dublin. (credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/8010431147/in/photostream/)

 If I felt such shame for something so trivial – if the holy authority of church leadership unintentionally exerted such trauma on my conscience that I harboured a secret for the majority of my life over something so negligible and so forgettable as ringing a bell at the wrong time at mass – how hard must it be for victims to speak about abuse in the church? What courage must it take to stand up and confront their abusers?

In 2 Timothy, Paul seems to talk about passing on leadership in the church as if it is a relay race. Becoming a leader in the church is like receiving a baton from the older leaders as they finish their laps. For me and my generation, coming into leadership in the Irish church, the baton is damaged almost beyond recognition. It looks so different from the way it ought to look that it is natural for us to question if they are really handing us the Gospel at all.

The succession of investigative reports published since 2005 have revealed a culture of abuse that was “endemic within institutions where there was a systemic failure to provide for children’s safety and welfare.”# My suspicion is that we have not heard the end of this story. My hope is that no similar story will unfold within evangelical churches but my hope is faint.

As I receive the baton then, I feel it is an obligation on Christian leaders to point out the ways in which the message of Jesus and our witness to his Kingdom has been marred by the abuse of children God put in our care. We must continue to re-tell these stories of abuse, in ways that honour and respect the victims, because until we as church absorb them into our identity, justice has not even begun to be done. The astonishing good news that we declare in our churches must be tempered by an acknowledgment of the astonishingly bad things that have gone on in our churches. We re-tell these stories because justice is not opposed to grace, but an integral aspect of it.

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, one of the most impressive voices for reform and repentance in the Irish church. (credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/8417299148/)

Finally I think it is part of the vocation to leadership that we must tell these stories because the only way to stop abuse in the church is to widely disperse the responsibility to protect against it and expose it. In every ecclesial abuse scandal, in every church or institution, regardless of location or denomination, the key criteria at play was the unaccountable access that leaders had tos children and the unassailable authority that leaders had in the face of accusations. Only when we confront ourselves with the stories of the victims and the sins of the church we inherit can we hope to build a church that leaves no space for such violence to grow. Until then, the war photography cannot cease.

 

 

 

Kevin was born and bred in the Dublin suburbs. He has an Irish
aversion to writing bio-pieces since they invariably sound cocky. He
is training to be a minister with the Presbyterian Church in Ireland,
but is studying for that at a Catholic seminary. He can’t sing but he
does lisp. He loves the Simpsons, the parables and making lists but
perhaps not in that order. He blogs at www.hargaden.com/kevin about
faith in contemporary Ireland and he can be found on twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a reminder, the War Photographer series seeks to ask and somewhat answer questions of representation. How we go about sharing stories that aren’t our own–specifically the hard stories? How do we put a spotlight on some of the forgotten stories of our age while still giving dignity and respect to the subjects?

For more in the series, please click here.

War Photographer: Tara Livesay

Tara Livesay is my real-life hero (she will throttle me for saying that, but still–it’s true). She is a killer writer, thinker, mom, missionary, midwife, and long-distance runner. I love her because she is so honest, so in the thick of everything beautiful and awful about our world, and she can be absolutely hilarious in the midst of it all. I beg of you to check out her website, where you can learn all about her fabulous family and their life in Haiti. I have been looking forward to this post for a long time, and it dropped the hammer, just like I knew it would. Tara and her family are truly people who ask the question: how do we share these stories well? Because they must be told. 

photo by Troy Livesay

A young couple moves into a new neighborhood. The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the young woman sees her neighbor hanging the wash outside. “That laundry is not very clean; she doesn’t know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.” Her husband looks on, remaining silent. Every time her neighbor hangs her wash to dry, the young woman makes the same comments. A month later, the woman is surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and says to her husband: “Look, she’s finally learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this? ” The husband replies, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.” And so it is with life… What we see when watching others depends on the clarity of the window through which we look.–Author Unknown

 

When one of the poorest countries in the world happens to be positioned a mere 700 miles from the southern tip of one of the richest countries in the world,  short-term and long-term missions abound. I am citing no source but I’d venture to guess this is the most visited, blogged about, and photographed “mission” destination on the planet earth.

 

The convenient 90-minute plane ride from Miami means an estimated 200,000 people per year come to Haiti. Many seem to think that their group or purpose or trip is a one-of-a-kind and are incredulous when they hear how frequently large groups of matching T-shirts arrive here with similar plans. Additionally, there are thousands of longer-term workers sprinkled all across the island.

 

It is common for these expats to arrive thinking of people as projects.

 

As we are all prone to do, people show up here having already decided things about Haiti. They hear the tag lines and have watched or read the mass media news stories and they build their image of the country and her people and what they need before they ever set foot on Haitian soil. Wherever they hail from, they seem to arrive having heard about vodou, poverty, danger, an earthquake, and orphans.

 

For whatever reason there is a movement among evangelical churches and faith-based organizations that markets mission trips in such a way that it casts the missionary as a hero and those on the other side are in dire need of their help. This means that in addition to what the prospective visitor has heard and decided about Haiti, they are also being told that in one or two weeks they might be able to make a significant impact.

 

For an extended time, our family has been learning and growing and being uncomfortably twisted and molded by living in this land that so many visit. During these years we’ve learned about our own pride, our own soul poverty, and our preconceived ideas. (Related: We have become cynical and skeptical and things we don’t like too.) We now better recognize the ways in which we have painted this place with a broad brush and forget that individual souls created in the image of God should not be reduced to our small-minded descriptions or looked upon as a project.

 

As a body of believers called to bring the justice of Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven to earth it does little good to arrive with anything decided. Each one of us is wonderfully complex and unique and we would do well to remember that is true of everyone, everywhere. Media reports and the State Department don’t have the ability to summarize hearts of people. Churches and mission organizations should not market with the “go save them” narrative.

 

In our time here, working with and observing different organizations, we’ve had an opportunity to witness many visitors. Perhaps the marketing of short-term trips feeds the problem. When cast as the hero, you are bound to come in with an air of superiority.  That to say, at times we cringe over things said and done.  The cringing comes partially from a place of our own guilt, in knowing we once said and did disrespectful things; in knowing we probably still do sometimes.  Other times we gasp at the disdain some ‘heroes” carry with them.

 

It is not at all unusual to hear visitors botch something up they are working on and say, “Oh well, it is good enough for Haiti.” I confess that it is those people who I want to follow home with a gallon of ugly colored oil paint and an old tattered brush and walk into their kitchen to show them what my “good enough” looks like at their house.

 

On occasion our second daughter agrees to translate for teams.  One such medical team was performing minor surgeries.  One of the surgeons brought his fourteen-year-old son on the trip.  The son observed the surgeries and occasionally held a tool or handed his father something.  At one point in the week the father asked his son if he would like to do a spinal-block.  The Doctor stood nearby as his son performed the block.

 

I am certain the doctor didn’t necessarily mean harm, but when a well-trained, perfectly able physician allows his fourteen year old to stick a needle in someone’s back it says,  “This is good enough for a Haitian”.  As my daughter told me this story I wondered if the physician would appreciate a rookie shoving a needle in his child’s back.

 

The truth of the matter is this, somewhere along the line we all became convinced that we are a big deal arriving to a place or a people that need us.  Therefore, anything we do is better than nothing, right? (That doesn’t sound like Jesus to me.) This superiority leads us to think, and even say, “Well, it is good enough for them.”  Casting ourselves as the fixers and heroes and “them” as the project is troubling on many levels.

 

If we want to let the river of His justice flow through us, we have to arrive aware of how prone to superiority we are, how prejudiced we are. We must examine our motivation and presuppositions in the light.  What window am I looking through when I look at others?  What window am I seeing myself through? I know my tendency is to think I am needed. It is a difficult but necessary exercise to continually spend time asking Jesus to mercifully guide us as we attempt to walk with people in wisdom and humility.

 

God is not made manifest in our ability to “fix” or “heal” or “solve” anything.  He has not cast us as the heroes. He is made manifest in our humility and in our own need to receive healing.  When I can see my own weakness and pride and my need for grace and healing I am left in a position of having nothing to offer …

 

And you know what?

When I have nothing to offer, Jesus shows up.

Tara tries hard to learn life’s lessons the first time but usually doesn’t.  She is mom to a rambunctious crew of kids and is learning and working in the area of women’s health/midwifery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She writes at www.livesayhaiti.com

For more in the War Photographer series, click here.

Notes from the Margins

Hey all. Just wanted to let you know I am writing a bi-monthly column for Christ and Pop Culture on the topic of the kingdom of God, marginalized peoples, and popular culture. I know, right? Dream gig! My first one is (ostensibly) on Beasts of the Souther Wild, but I get to rant a little bit at the end too (read it here). I would love for any suggestions on anything pop=culture wise that you would like to be addressed. Where are people in the margins being portrayed well (Beasts of the Southern Wild)? Where are they not (um, Honey Boo Boo, reality TV in general)? And what is in that weird in-between (30 Rock, Macklemore, etc). I would love to hear some ideas, so leave them in the comments plz.

 

But seriously, it is great to be able to write out some of what I am learning during my apprenticeship year with my mission organization without overstepping any personal boundaries (popular culture is quite large and anonymous). Taking a break from blogging about my personal life has already shown rich fruit in my life of journaling and prayer; meeting up with others in my organization has also lended to me not feeling so isolated and therefore “driven” to write out stories that might be shared prematurely.

 

Thanks everyone for reading the incredible posts we have had so far in the War Photographer series. I am excited to continue this conversation, and excited for the many more voices who will be added to the discussion.

 

Again, I won’t be posting here every time I write my column, so if you want to stay connected you can like my FB page or follow me on Twitter.

War Photographer: J.R. Goudeau

J.R. is the coolest. I could gush all day long about how smart and cool and driven this girl is. She starts companies that empower refugees, raises her girls, writes her doctoral dissertation on poetry (!), and she sends me care packages when I am sad and lonely. I love J.R. because she laughs at all the same things I do (how all our international friends adore Spicy Hot Cheetos, for example) and cries at all the same things too (refugees, orphan care, the marginalized). For me, meeting J.R. makes the internets worthwhile. She is my sister-from-another-mister, and I can’t wait to squeeze her one day in real life. So read her killer post, and then head on over to her blog. You won’t be sorry. 

image from the cover of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Bishop and Lowell

How Free do I have the Right to Be?

The mid-twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop spent much of her adult life living in Brazil. Her partner and many of her friends were well-known Brazilian artists and elites; in many ways, she is the definitive translator of Brazilian poetry to this day. Her long-time best friend and pen pal Robert Lowell was also a poet and sometimes translator. The title of his book of French translations, Imitations, gives an idea of his values in translation. He translated poems in the same free-wheeling, anything-goes way he wrote about his life; he was part of the confessional movement in poetry, along with Sylvia Plath and other poets beloved by undergraduates everywhere.

Once he just put line breaks in his ex-wife’s actual letters and published them in a book. Understandably, she was pissed.

Lowell’s translations made Bishop really uncomfortable. After Imitations came out they had one of their very few arguments. As Bishop wrote Lowell in a rather tense letter, “I just can’t decide how ‘free’ one has the right to be with the poet’s intentions.”

Her concern about translating a poet’s intentions was ethical: she valued faithful translations that carefully matched, often literally, the word choices made by the original poems in Portuguese, Spanish, or other languages.

The problem with this, Lowell would have countered, would be on an artistic level—he may have changed the French poems significantly, but the end result was a beautiful poem in English. He valued aesthetics more than ethics in translation.

Their poetic argument might seem like the kind of stuff academics argue about without any sort of effect on real life (except for the undergraduates who I force to write papers about these poems). But they reveal a spectrum that is critically important for me on a practical level every day.

I have two jobs: I’m a grad student writing a dissertation on translation and poetry who teaches undergraduate English. I’m also the director of Hill Country Hill Tribers, a non-profit that works with Burmese refugee artisans in Austin.

In order to tell the background about the women and men who hand make earrings, scarves, bags, baby dolls, and other beautiful things, I “translate” their stories into narratives that are familiar to my audience. And in doing so, I hear the voices of the critical theorists and postcolonial scholars whose work I study in graduate school. For me what was an academic conversation, examining how writers translate poetry, turned into a very real question of what to write on my blog and in the online store and our artisan descriptions on our website.

I am constantly conflicted about how “free” I have the “right” to be.

These stories are not mine. I want to tell them in a way that is appealing (in order to sell the products my friends are making), aesthetically pleasing (because I want to be a good writer) and economically valuable (so someone is more likely to buy the scarf my friend has made) without objectifying my friends or using meaningless tropes and lingo (because they are people, not objects of pity or “the poor”).

I don’t want to reduce my friends into simply inspirational, Hallmark-card stereotypes.

These are complicated issues that I find myself wrestling with all the time. Like Bishop, I’m not sure I have one over-arching theory of how to do this. But I think it’s critical to lay out a framework from which I can at least begin to work.

The first thing I think we need to recognize is that there is violence in representing one group, language, text or people to another. As Anuradha Dingwaney says in Between Languages and Cultures, “The process of translation involved in making another culture comprehensible entails varying degrees of violence, especially when the culture being translated is constituted as that of the ‘other’” (4). We don’t always acknowledge the ripping act of violence that occurs when we tell stories in a way that “others” other people.

Any act of simplification is also an act of violence.

The expectations of the audience who is reading these representations, whether it be Hill Tribers’ customers or mission-board members or Facebook friends, affect the way we portray people. It is something I constantly resist—the desire to play up my friends’ poverty and their gratefulness and downplay the difficulties we have in relating to each other.

I have to recognize the conversation I’m entering and my own position of power within it. As Dingwaney continues, it is critical “to recognize that translations can be (and often are) tainted by power, time, and the vagaries of different cultural needs” (6). There are power relations when people talk about other people who are different from them. When the translator and audience are in a position of economic or cultural privilege, the power relationship is asymmetrical—skewed to the power.

It’s hard. And yet, translation is important. The representation of poverty is important. The telling of these stories is important. This struggle to be an effective, ethical, aesthetically-pleasing, economically-helpful translator war photographer is important.

I love the way Talal Asad puts it: “translation is not merely a matter of matching sentences in the abstract, but of learning to live another form of life and to speak another kind of language” (quoted by Dingwaney 7). The implications for me as a Christian of Asad’s argument for anthropologists, ethnographers and translators is remarkable: I need to learn to live another form of life and to speak another kind of language.

This means analyzing my own tropes, my own baggage, my own expectations, my own firmly-held beliefs. It means being aware of my privilege but not paralyzed by it. It means letting go of my own intentions and learning to listen hard and well. It means educating myself and educating my audience on the issues and values of the community I’m portraying.

Asad’s use of the gerund “learning” implies that this is an ongoing, never-ending, ever-changing process. I have certainly not arrived at a definitive solution about how and when and why to portray my refugee friends, much less other groups. Like Elizabeth Bishop, I have more questions than I have answers. I’m still not sure how free I should be in translating their stories. 

I just know that I need to keep struggling with it. For me, the halting, hesitant act of translation is part of the new language I’m learning. This place between cultures is the new form of life I’m learning to live.

J. R. Goudeau is the Executive Director and co-founder of Hill Country Hill Tribers, as well as a grad student in English literature. When she’s supposed to be working on her dissertation, she can usually be found blogging about books, babies and Burmese refugees at loveiswhatyoudo.wordpress.com.

the writing life

from http://bistropetit.tumblr.com/

The writing ebbs and flows. Some things are changing: no personal posts on the ol’ blog (which frees up space for some fabulous guest posts, starting on Thursday). I’ve been journaling more, in my trusty little moleskin notebook, finally writing to an audience where I don’t have to edit myself. I am slowly trudging along with my book, piece by piece. All in all, pulling back and regrouping is going well (3 weeks in, I might add).

But today I wanted to let you know about something NEW that I am involved in–writing for a site called Christ and Pop Culture. While this might seem out of left field, I really like the kind of stuff CandPC are writing about (srsly, go check out their year in review post) and I get to write a column about the kingdom of God and popular culture. Holla! I think it’s a perfect blend of working on my writing skillz, but I get to write about all the ridiculous things I think about without stressing about the boundaries I need with my personal life. Win-win!

My first little “Of the Moment” piece is up today, about Jodie Foster’s speech at the Golden Globes. I know, I can’t believe that I watched the Golden Globes either. But take a look, why don’t you? It actually got pretty poignant all up in there.

(PS, feel free to find me on FB if you would like updates on the various little pieces I write. I will try not to clutter the blog up with it all)

The Migrant Mother

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. –Dorothea Lange (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

The other day our car was broken down (again, again) and we walked to the free art museum which happened to be 1.3 miles away. No matter the snow, or the biting wind–we had bags full of snacks and a blanket to wrap around the toddler. As we walked through the streets, past now familiar sights–the corner where all the deals go down, the popular cigarette shop, the statue made of melted-down guns kitty-corner against the park where people still get shot–we eventually found a tree-lined park, and the majestic columns of the art museum. We wandered in, unsure of how we had found this haven of calm, order, and beauty.

Between chasing our daughter (under the stern eyes of the guards) and wandering the many rooms of ancient art, we finally made our way to my favorites: the photography section. There, I was struck by a high-quality print of a photo I have seen time and time again: Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother, shot in 1936 in Nipomo, California. The look in the mother’s eyes, the way her children shun the camera–hair tangled, eyes never meeting our gaze–made me stop in my tracks and look long and hard.

I was gratified to read the above quote by Lange, which accompanied the photograph. The stories behind the photos are increasingly becoming more important to me. When she says there was “a sort of equality about it”, I want to believe her. I do believe her. I think Lange knew what she was doing, that she herself had been changed by the landscape, the shifting nature of migrant work, the way it bound and enslaved families in a desperate struggle for survival.

I went home and did some research. I found another article, talking about the photo from a different angle–that of one of the children in the picture, the girl huddled to her mother’s left. She talks of how ashamed they were of their situation, how they didn’t want anyone to know it was them in the picture. She talks about how ultimately, the photo did and did not come to define her mother (who died in 1982 and whose gravesite reads Migrant Mother: A Legend of the strength of American motherhood.). When asked to describe her childhood, the girl in the picture sees a fuller perspective: “50% good times and 50% hard times.”

That last bit struck me. When I see the photograph, all I see are the hard times: the people starving in the work camps, the way the depression settled like dust in the lines of your face, the strain such nomadic and unstable lives put on the children especially. What I don’t see are the other times–the music they loved (yodeling, it turns out), their fierce bonds, the normal imaginative play of childhood. But now I do, and it makes the picture even more impactful, makes it less of an exotic mystery (something I read about in a Steinbeck novel, for instance) and brings it directly into focus with the lives of the people I live next to every day. Lives full of hardships, lives full of joy. Moments of desperation buoyed by gratefulness, sickness tempered by celebrations, always the hope that the next crop will come in, that next year will be better.

This is just me; I have no thoughts on what exactly Ms. Lange would have me feel about the photos she took that day–but I do know that they changed her. They also changed the lives of the family in the picture, and deeply connected with the rest of the country. And the world has not changed all that much; Les Miserables are still all around us, dreaming for a better future, working and fighting and dying for it. And so, pictures like Migrant Mother continue to speak to us, and hopefully draw us along to something more inspired than pity, stir in us a curiosity for relationship and a longing for the kingdom to be fulfilled.

I’d be curious to know of other pictures/art that have moved you in such a way that you needed to know the back story behind them. For more information on the thought behind this series, go here.

a life lived fully

instead of contemplative year-end posts, i am likely to make wild decisions about social media usage. around december, the clamour of facebook, twitter, and the blog world starts to get to me. i crave books, edited words and thoughts, quite and contemplation, a re-set on my own frenzied mind.

this year is no different.

last january i quite facebook (for a month), and it was good for me. in the past year i started both this blog and a twitter account, which has been fun and annoying, to be perfectly honest. i still don’t know all the rules about these things. the crowd, it turns out, is a fickle thing. some of the posts that i liked the best hit the floor with a dull thud, while the ones i shot off rather ill-conceived and in haste got passed around like popcorn. i don’t get it. and it has started to influence me.

in social-media-land, i tend to want to stick to the easy stuff. just like in my missionary life, i want to write only about the miracles in the support letters. or how when i am having a bad day, instead of praying “jesus be near” i would much rather tweet about how terrible someone else is.

but this kind of easy engagement doesn’t work for me. because both doubt and faith, sin and redemption, miracles and tragedies are the realities of my days–i can’t pick just one or the other. but for whatever reason, in our times nuance does not get rewarded. and i am a creature that is trained by praise just like everybody else.

i want to write about good and true and hard things: about the miracles of god at work in the world, the ways i fall short every day, and laments about the evils in the world. and if i am not writing about these things, then i get myopic, narcissistic, and shallow. in this regard i have seen how social media land has a large pull for me–immediate reactions and gratifications, allowing me to feel connected. which brings up another point: because the reality is i am starting to feel more and more disconnected, every day. in my not-online life i have experienced so much change and craziness in the past 12 months i feel like a champagne bottle ready to pop. but if you asked me how i am doing i would say “great” and leave it at that. if you asked again, i would say “well, you know, god has really revealed a lot to me in the past year. he’s really working on me.” if you gave me a stern look and asked one last time, you would probably have a sobbing mess on your hands, a broken girl who is alternately exhausted and exhilarated about life on the frontiers of the kingdom.

if you really asked, i would probably talk about seeing prostitution up-close for the first time, of learning to recognize the smell of crack, of the many times i have wondered “wait, should i be calling the cops right now?” i would probably talk about the amazing food, the ways people have risked everything just by extending me friendship, how happy walking the streets of my neighborhood (the most diverse one in america) makes me feel. i might talk about the boredom of being home alone in a new city with few friends and no family, with a two-year old that gets sick a lot, how i start to click re-fresh on my facebook so often it feels like a disease, how my life seems to be heading in different directions from most everyone i know. i might talk about co-ops and community gardens and esl classes and somali language classes and being the only white girl in an east-african parenting class. i might talk about the loneliness i have experienced, and how i am only now starting to realize that maybe christ is all i need, after all.

so there, now i told you. but i am still struggling with how much of my life needs to stay private, protecting the dignity of my neighbors and friends. how much of my writing is helpful for others, or is simply just a way of me processing my emotions? i have already started plaguing people in my mission organization to write more, because those kinds of books changed me. but i know why they hesitate, and i see how they are so busy living out the kingdom they don’t have time to sit down and write about it. i see the need, and i see the pitfalls. just like my own writing life.

so for me, this new year is going to start looking differently. i feel strongly like i am supposed to write, just not necessarily for this blog. i feel the need to curb my reliance on instant gratification, and the desire to cultivate my own inner voice. i want to achieve excellence, which in this time and place means stepping back. i want to be able to process, freely, without holding back all the grit or the glory. while this is only for a season, i am excited about the possibilities.

this doesn’t mean this is the end, of course. i am actually planning on doing a series about how we share the hard stories in our lives that aren’t our own (look for more information on this coming soon–plus, i have some FABULOUS guest writers/artists!). i am looking forward to sharpening up whatever this space is meant to be.

but in the end, it all comes down to what i want to pursue in my life. excellence in writing, leaning away from the reactionary and towards nuance. a renewed focus on contemplating what it really means when i am bored, lonely, and fretful, instead of turning to social media for distraction and community. relying on my family, my neighbors, and christ to fulfill my needs of friendship and understanding, to know and be known. really, it can be summed up with a quote by thomas merton that my friend cate recently posted (on facebook, naturally):

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”

merton is so right. and as i am slowly learning to identify those things which keep me in limbo, living in two worlds at once, not happy in either: i am excited. because if this year has taught me anything, it is this: the sooner i give up my life, the sooner the whole word opens up for me, my eyes finally able to see the miracles everywhere, hiding in plain sight.

so for this next year, it is all about cultivation: of my eyes, my ears, and my mouth. that i would taste the bitter and the sweet, see the beauty and the horror, and speak the truth of the kingdom. and for me, this means taking a step back from the thousands of voices which would seek to influence me, for good and for bad.

 

 

i’d like to know: how has social media changed your writing? what are the benefits/drawbacks of blogging/tweeting/posting on facebook? what things are you being called to give up in order to live your life fully?

 

 

ps: this stepping back has been some time coming (based on my own reflections/journaling/prayers), but was recently re-motivated by the reading of The Crowd, The Critic, and the Muse by M. Gungor. I highly recommend this book on art and creation and everything in between.

all hail the refugee king

 

the hubs took this rad picture of our tree.

Are you sick of reading about Christmas-related stuff yet? I hope not, because I have one piece I want you to read.

I’m over at A Deeper Church today talking about what it means to hail the refugee king. As many of you know, several months ago we up and moved to the exotic midwest, far from friends and church and family. It isn’t exactly the end of the world, but sometimes it feels like it is. Shedding off so many layers of our built-up lives has been painful, costly (in many ways we did not expect), and worth it, without a doubt.

In many ways I wonder where this journey will end (thank goodness, that isn’t for me to know). We all have invisible lines we will not cross–I will not put my child in danger, give up my morning coffee, say goodbye to my family (just as, you know, “theoretical” examples). And I’m not saying you have to jump those lines just yet; but what if you simply started to wonder about what you might be missing out on, while you keep your hands held tight over your eyes and ears.

We visited a church this past Sunday and the sermon was on “Jesus as a Refugee”. It was so lovely to hear it from a pulpit, gray heads nodding in agreement, candle lights flickering in the background. The pastor also showed a clip from God Grew Tired of Us, an amazing documentary detailing the experiences of several Lost Boys of Sudan. Here is the clip, which juxtaposes the recently arrived-refugees experiences with American Christmas and how they celebrated in their refugee camp (Kakuma, where many of my friends lived for years and years). It just made me sob:

 

 

After that clip, the worship band ended with a song by Rich Mullins, “My Deliverer“, which left both the husband and I with Ugly Cry Face big time. I used to play that song and pray it over my refugee friends, all the time.

 

So all of this to say, the concepts of refugees and Christmas have been swirling around my brain. So I wrote about.

 

 

Head on over and check it out? Don’t be shy, now.