In Debt to Doubt

Today's post is the last in a series of stories and reflections from my time spent studying abroad in Central America. These are excerpts from my memoir in progress; stories that have shaped me, shattered my pretenses and preset beliefs, and sculpted the way I live and love and encounter God today. I hope in some small way, you can relate and be challenged to reflect more deeply on the experiences that have influenced you and your faith.

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In Debt to Doubt

“Most early ‘God talk’—without self-knowledge and inner journey—is largely a sincere pretense, even to the person who consciously believes the language. The miracle of grace and true prayer is that they invade the unconscious heart and mind (where our real truth lies)—and thus really change us!” ~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

When I came back from study abroad, I didn’t know how to be me anymore. I didn’t know how to be anything real, except real angry.

At first I told everyone I knew about the things I had learned: the poverty and desperation, the culpability of the United States and the ambivalence of the church, the overwhelming consumerist culture and apathy of Americans. Since I hadn’t been eased into these new ideas in my study abroad program, I didn’t know how to lace my discoveries with grace. The time I used to spend confessing and listening to others, turned into a time of full-fledged assaults on anyone who would listen. I discovered that no one wanted to hear about garbage dumps and international trade agreements. They wanted to hear that I had learned a lot Spanish, visited a lot of places, and, most importantly, had a lot of fun. At first I was angry that no one cared. Small talk conversations with people from church and school left my cheeks flushed and burning, and my heart empty.

I eventually stopped talking. Stopped sharing. Stopped trying.

I meticulously planned my insurrection. I would go to chapel and Bible study, so no one would catch on that I didn’t give a shit. I would share just enough to allow my friends to believe that they were getting the whole story. I lied. I lived selfishly. I imploded.

I used to view this time as a rebellion. As a conscious choice to screw the world and do whatever the hell I wanted. Since then, I’ve been heartbroken for the pain I caused and relationships I fractured with my biting words and calculated lies.

But despite the heartache, I still find myself grateful for this time. Recently a friend called my reaction to my study abroad program as not so much a rebellion, but a rational rejection of two faulty ideologies: that either God only cares about me living up to a certain set of rules so that he can bless me or God only cares about the poor and hates me if I don’t sell everything I have and live in poverty, too. Ideologically, I’ve found a middle ground, which has allowed me to keep more friends and lose less sleep. But the real value of my “rebellion,” of this rejection of all I had known and known myself to be, was that in this darkness, in this absence of pretense and preset rules, I experienced God.

The Living, All-Powerful God.

My semester abroad abolished all pretenses for me in relationship with God, in my faith, in my identity and my role in the world. My rejection of the known started me on a journey of self-knowledge and brought me to grace and true prayer. I am grateful for the questions I was encouraged to ask. For the anger that sparked honesty. For the breakdown that allowed Love to build me back up.

I’m still shaky on my exact theology and Bible interpretations. But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Love is something I’ve experienced. I have a hard time celebrating Jesus’ work on the cross. I don’t really get why we glorify something so gruesome, so awful. I don’t really understand the atonement or who’s supposed to be going to heaven or hell.

But I can celebrate Jesus’ work in my own life. I can celebrate the grace I’ve been given. The freedom I’ve found.

And for this experience of Love, I owe a debt to doubt and to the One who taught me He can more than handle my questions. 

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Have you ever gone through a period of extreme doubt or rebellion in your life? How did you handle it? What did you learn from it? Do you feel comfortable with your doubts now?

Weapons of Mass Deception?

This week I'm sharing a series of stories and reflections from my time spent studying abroad in Central America. These are excerpts from my memoir in progress; stories that have shaped me, shattered my pretenses and preset beliefs, and sculpted the way I live and love and encounter God today. I hope in some small way, you can relate and be challenged to reflect more deeply on the experiences that have influenced you and your faith. Check out Monday's, Tuesday's, and Wednesday's posts to catch up. 

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Weapons of Mass Deception? 

I scribbled down my Biblical reflection, bracing my journal and pen as we puttered along a narrow highway in Cuba halfway through my semester abroad. Throughout the semester, we were required to complete Biblical Reflection assignments, where we were given a verse or chapter of the Bible to reflect on in light of what we were learning about Jesus’ life and God’s overall concern for the poor. By then, the Bible made me especially uncomfortable—I saw it as a collection of words used to convince, cajole, compel, and condemn. 

I’d already scrawled out half the reflection against the rocking bus seat, and I hadn’t even opened my Bible yet.  I knew what I was going to find and I knew what my program wanted to hear: Jesus condemns the empire-supporting Pharisees and embraces the poor.   We got bonus points if we made the connection between the hypocritical Pharisees and our own friends and families who claimed to follow Jesus but refused to sell everything they owned and live with the poor. 

Up until then, I had never doubted the validity or divine inspiration of the Bible, but after examining Biblical passages through so many different lenses, I’d come to the conclusion that anyone could make the Bible say whatever she wanted.  I found that feminists ignore Paul’s call for womanly submission in Timothy.  Poor people cling to Jesus’ revolutionary declaration bringing good news to the poor.   Rich Christians spiritualize hunger and thirst, focusing instead on the souls that need to be won while overlooking the physical and economic needs that need to be met. 

I could make the Bible say whatever I wanted, too, or whatever my program wanted.  The Bible was no longer Absolute Truth, but a tool.  A political tool.  An emotional tool.  A justification tool. 

At best, a tool; at worst, a weapon. 

I share this story to illuminate where I am today, six years later.

Today I still find myself resisting the Bible and anyone who claims their actions are justified because “the Bible says so.” I still find myself asking questions. Analyzing and dissecting my beliefs. I still bristle at “God has blessed America” language and I still thoughtfully reflect on my own role in perpetuating political and economic systems that favor the few, the wealthy, and the powerful.

Instead of a weapon, what if the Bible was used as a starting point? Rachel Held Evans says the Bible should be a conversation starter, not a conversation ender. I like that.

In a devotional I read this morning adapted from Richard Rohr’s, A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters, I discovered an even more satisfactory way to frame the Bible:

“How can we look at the Biblical text in a manner that will convert us or change us? I am going to define the Bible in a new way for some of you. The Bible is an honest conversation with humanity about where power really is. All spiritual texts, including the Bible, are books whose primary focus lies outside of themselves, in the Holy Mystery. The Bible is to illuminate your human experience through struggling with it. It is not a substitute for human experience. It is an invitation into the struggle itself—you are supposed to be bothered by some of the texts. Human beings come to consciousness by struggle, and most especially struggle with God and sacred texts. We largely remain unconscious if we avoid all conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes, inconsistencies, or contradictions.”

“The Bible is an honest conversation with humanity about where power really is.”

I really like that.

I don’t want to be unconscious. I don’t want to parrot rules and right phrases. I don’t want to substitute words for my own experience. As I said yesterday, I want to be more than words. I want my faith to be more than a hollow shell or a list of moral behaviors.

I want to struggle. I want to live. I want to change. I want to experience the living God. And I’m beginning to see that, maybe, just maybe, the Bible might be a good invitation into the struggle itself.

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Have you ever felt like the Bible has been used against you as a weapon? What did you do? What do you think of the idea of the Bible as an “honest conversation with humanity about where power really is?” How do you keep from only focusing on the verses that appeal to you while throwing out all the rest?

More Than Words

This week I'm sharing a series of stories and reflections from my time spent studying abroad in Central America. These are excerpts from my memoir in progress; stories that have shaped me, shattered my pretenses and preset beliefs, and sculpted the way I live and love and encounter God today. I hope in some small way, you can relate and be challenged to reflect more deeply on the experiences that have influenced you and your faith. Check out Monday's and Tuesday's posts to catch up. 

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More Than Words

I could handle the rants on politics and even the exposure to poverty. I’d never been that interested in political ideologies or campaign propaganda and I’d always known there were poor people in the world. The direct attack on my faith hurt most. 

Most days, our professor, Don Mike, would pace back and forth like a lion waiting to go in for the kill. His sporadic mumblings sounded like growls and soon he would be roaring. My jaw would clench as my heart pounded. He would reduce my beliefs and upbringing to egocentric self-validation. A means of exclusion. Judgment. My faith was offensive, a stench in the nostrils of the Almighty God. A darkened city on a hill. The tasteless salt of the earth. The hypocritical light of the world. The hair on my arms would stand up and it would feel like I’d swallowed a car battery. If anyone, he’d be the one to know when the church was being ineffective; he used to be a Catholic priest.

Don Mike lecturing to us on a field trip in Costa Rica.

He would be panting by now; his gruff voice would crack as he condemned American Christianity and everything it stands for. I felt personally attacked as he recounted the horrors of conquest-driven, smallpox-bearing missionaries and money scamming “Gospel of Wealth” televangelists. The blood of every person killed or exploited in the name of God since the dawn of time would stick in the crevices of my guilty hands.

By this point, the pulsating vein in the middle of his scrunched forehead looked ready to burst. I would forget that that he coined himself a “recovering Catholic.” I would forget that he did not hold a monopoly on truth. And while I hated him and everything he was saying, I still began to believe that maybe I was the enemy.

I began to question my entire life as a Christian—which was also my entire life as a person. Appearance was everything. Christianity was only rhetoric. I was only rhetoric—empty words that sounded pretty but meant nothing and helped no one. I could justify and preach and condemn, but loving didn’t come so easily. Although I had been plagued with guilt and self-doubt, I had always thought that I did enough when it came to giving and serving the poor. I was nice to my friends; I didn’t do drugs; I gave money to the church. I prayed. I read my Bible. All of my spiritual strivings turned irrelevant in the shadow of Don Mike’s angry eyes. I thought of the starving children I had seen digging through trash in the garbage dump, begging on the streets of San Jose, and knew that no amount of Bible reading and prayer groups could make the world fair.

I wanted to be more than words.

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How have you been challenged to live out your faith? Have you ever discovered hypocrisy or hollowness in your own faith journey?

T.S. Tuesday: Bearing Witness

This week I’m sharing a series of stories and reflections from my time spent studying abroad in Central America. These are excerpts from my memoir in progress; stories that have shaped me, shattered my pretenses and preset beliefs, and sculpted the way I live and love and encounter God today. I hope in some small way, you can relate and be challenged to reflect more deeply on the experiences that have influenced you and your faith. To read yesterday's story, click here. 

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Bearing Witness

"Some presage of an act
Which our eyes are compelled to witness, has forced our feet
Toward the cathedral. We are forced to bear witness."T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

In the spring of 2006, I was forced to bear witness to a new reality, to a different story.

“How long until he brings up the unofficial story?” my classmate snickered to me as we waited for Don Mike, our professor, to tape up his next chart that would surely detail a history of abuse and exploitation. Don Mike loved to compare the “official story” of Latin American history that we had been taught (or purposely not taught) with the “unofficial story” of the indigenous people, the exploited nationals, the Two-thirds World. We were on our way to Nicaragua to witness firsthand the “unofficial story” of the people of Nicaragua.

In Nicaragua my meticulously constructed faith identity crumbled like a house of cards. I’d seen pictures of course. My family had sponsored a little boy from Colombia named Darwin ever since I could remember. His rich, brown eyes would stare solemnly back at me whenever I raided the fridge for a midnight snack of Swiss orange sherbet or updated the ample grocery list posted below his photo, reminding me of the many who do not have the luxury of ice cream, grocery stores, or even refrigerators.

So I’d seen pictures before.

I’d even been to places much like Nicaragua—the dusty slums of Tijuana, Mexico, the rural, buggy mountains of Ecuador—but it had never sunk in. Mission trips had always left me with immense feelings of gratitude, reminding me that I was blessed.

In Nicaragua, I stayed with a 21 year-old, host, Grey who was a teacher at the local school and didn’t speak any English except for hello and No woman no cry, courtesy of Bob Marley. Sitting with Grey, on the battered stone curb outside the small concrete house she shared with a girlfriend, a rebellion against gratefulness burned within my stomach, an acidic, festering burn harsher than the sting of the snow-white pineapple juice that dribbled down my chin and parched my lips.

Poverty wasn’t a picture on my refrigerator anymore. Grey didn’t stare back at me with a solemn dignity, unattached and disconnected. She shared her life with me. I practiced my Spanish as she allowed me to ask her questions about her family, her life as a teacher at the local technological high school, the small, dusty town of Jalapa, and the cultural norms in Nicaragua.

From Grey, I learned that most women either marry or become pregnant by the age of 16. I was on the receiving end of many a horrified gasp when I’d answer yet again that, no, I did not have a novio, or boyfriend. The ring by spring pressure of my small, Christian college was child’s play compared to these cultural norms and expectations. Grey’s mother, one of the most beautiful and tenderhearted women I have ever met in my life, was one of 18 children. Grey was one of five. Grey explained to me that many women never even get married, an alarming trend that condemns the woman to the restrictions of marriage and domestic work, yet allows the husband the freedom to be unfaithful, irresponsible, and absent. 

In this machismo environment, women without husbands or boyfriends weren’t left with many options. If they could afford to go to school, they would most likely graduate and begin teaching immediately whatever subject was available at the local schools. Grey taught technology to high schoolers and junior highers, though many of the students knew more about the subject than she did. Those with advanced degrees or expertise didn’t stick around. There was little opportunity, and education seemed futile in a town where the majority of community members made a living from the land. The town had been sprinkled with U.S. aid and unfinished projects since the 1980s. Countless development groups, both religious and nonreligious, had been through the town, but little real progress or improvement had occurred.

I was impressed and touched by Grey and my other Nicaraguan friends. Despite their poverty, they seemed happy.

But just because they had found a way to cope and smile in their desperate situation, did not make their poverty okay.

I found it impossible to sentimentalize their smiling faces, supportive community, and “simple life.” They shouldn’t have had to live in poverty. They shouldn’t have had sheets for doors or muddy, amoeba-filled water as their lifeline. Their teachers should have known their subjects. Women should have had more options than marriage and pregnancy. “What shouldn’t be” circled round and round in my head, a waterwheel of indignation. I didn’t find any answers to these deep social and economic problems, but for the first time at least I wasn’t ignoring them. 

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How do you react when you encounter poverty? What have been some tough things you have had to “bear witness to” in your life? What have you done to make things better?

The Breakdown

This week I’m going to share a series of stories and reflections from my time spent studying abroad in Central America. These are excerpts from my memoir in progress; stories that have shaped me, shattered my pretenses and preset beliefs, and sculpted the way I live and love and encounter God today.  I hope in some small way, you can relate and be challenged to reflect more deeply on the experiences that have influenced you and your faith.

The Breakdown

“You didn’t think the world was fair did you?” 

Don Antonio, our program director, smirked like the Cheshire cat while pacing the small study abroad classroom in San Jose, Costa Rica.  For the first day of class, he had proctored a little quiz to test our knowledge of global affairs.  

We all failed miserably. 

In this test we confirmed something we already knew—the world is not fair.  But what we did not know, and our professors would continue to illuminate for the duration of the semester, was that all of this poverty and injustice and death and suffering was somehow our fault. 

“You actually thought the United States had a positive influence on the world?  You thought the Bush administration actually looks out for anyone other than big business and the multinational corporations?” he asked incredulously, assuming that we were rich, snotty kids who’d never had a hard day of work in their lives—which was a pretty accurate appraisal as we were all, with the exception of one Albanian student, Americans who used 80% of the world’s resources satiating our lust for SUVs and bottled water.  Compared to the people of Costa Rica we weren’t poor college students, we were rich gringos with ample financial and social opportunity.

That first day I learned startling and horrific statistics about global poverty and the horrendously unequal distribution of wealth.  Twenty percent of the world’s population consumes 86% of the world’s resources.  A child dies of hunger every five seconds.  One billion people around the world live on less than a dollar a day.  Statistics I’d heard, but never paid attention to.  Statistics that never meant anything before.  I was more ashamed of my ignorance than the miserable state of affairs in the world.       

        

And that was the beginning of the breakdown.

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Have you ever had your core beliefs about culture, politics, and your role in the world questioned or attacked? How did you react? How has that experience changed how you think and view the world now? 

Travels with Aly

Today--just for fun--I'm posting an excerpt from my memoir describing my time studying abroad in Coast Rica. I'm hoping it will one day reach the public eye in some publisher-endorsed kind of way, but for now, you get to be my test audience. Thanks for reading!

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I was sure that I had forgotten something vitally important.  Like underwear or tampons.  I had heard from a few friends that it was difficult to buy tampons in Costa Rica.  At 4:00 a.m. as I scrambled to wash my face, brush my teeth, and pack up the car, I was sure that I had forgotten tampons and would be forced to spend my period sitting in a corner yelling “unclean, unclean” while I slowly bled to death.  It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t even know the word for unclean in Spanish, and I was going to Central America, not prehistoric Israel. 

The stubborn escalator leading up to the maze of airport security beckoned me; I grimaced as I gingerly stepped onto the moving stairs that jerked me upwards, pulling me away from my mom and dad until the black biting teeth fit snugly together again, flattening and disappearing into the floor. My mom had cried and my dad had told me to be safe.            

I shifted from my left foot to my right foot, then back to my left, just a teardrop in the stream of restless passengers in the overburdened security line.  I wiped my one renegade tear and readjusted my backpack, dense with the weight of my laptop, Spanish/English dictionary, and packets of reading material on Costa Rica.  I could do this. 

          Location: Central America.

          Capital: San Jose. 

          Language: Spanish.

          Climate: Tropical.

          It would be like a vacation of sorts. 

          I could do this. 

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“Como es su familia?”  “Que piensa del gobierno estadounidense?”  “Que es su comida favorita?”   “Que piensa de la guerra en Irak?”

How is your family?  What do you think of the U.S. government?  What is your favorite food?  What do you think of the war in Iraq?  

 

In the United States people’s number one fear is public speaking, even dying rates second on the list.  People would rather die than look stupid.  My eyes scanned the barrage of oncoming cars, and I was hit with the sobering realization that there would probably not be a single moment the entire semester in which I did not feel stupid. 

Even Max, the family dog, understood more Spanish than I did.  My host dad, Don Pedro, surprisingly white for a Costa Rican with light eyes and a hint of possible freckles, would yell some seemingly unintelligible command in Spanish and the dog would obediently run, stand, or lie down according to my dad’s latest whim, whereas I couldn’t even figure out how to wash my underwear. 

That night after shy introductions, a strangely silent family meal, and an uncomfortable discussion about politics, I was finally too overcome with exhaustion to feel stupid anymore.  I pulled my fuzzy blanket up to my chin and was filled with ecstatic thankfulness that I could say a goodnight prayer to God in English and He would understand.