Stamps or Stories

I read a report from UNICEF that "More women and children have been used as suicide bombers in Northeast Nigeria in the first five months of this year than during the whole of last year" and that one-third of all attacks so far this year have been conducted by children--specifically girls--aged 7-17. UNICEF believes most of these girls are unaccompanied and are being used intentionally by cold and calculating adults, not instigating these attacks themselves.

As I was telling this to my wife Janet tonight, she asked me what I meant by the term "unaccompanied." She wondered if I was saying these girls carried out the suicide attacks without an accomplice.  Rather, I explained, "unaccompanied" is shorthand to designate that children have been separated from their parents or other guardians. They are unsupervised, unprotected... unaccompanied on the road of life by a caring adult.

In this situation, of course, they are far more vulnerable to many forms of abuse, particularly female children. Who knows, who can imagine, the crushingly personal story that leads an individual to the tragic act of self-annihilation and terrorism?

I find it quite frustrating that in humanitarian work there are many terms like "unaccompanied" which are technically precise, and yet which are completely devoid of the real human drama behind them. I've been hearing terms such as "unaccompanied children" a lot lately in relation to the recent earthquake in Nepal and the children left without parents or separated from adult family members. For these children, the tragedy, destruction and disorientation felt by everyone around them is compounded by the additional loss of those who protected and watched over them.  "Unaccompanied minor" captures none of the pathos of a child who lacks a caring and compassionate guardian as they navigate the confusing and sometimes dangerous world around them.

I understand the value of creating categories and monitoring statistics. Yet I've come to spurn these terms that are technically accurate yet prophylactic and clinical. My grandfather owned an auto dealership in North Dakota, where I grew up. When I’d visit Trenda Motors, sometimes I'd take a big rubber stamp and ink dauber out of his desk.  I'd roll the stamp in the spongy dauber and plaster some blue/black word or phrase on a piece of paper...something generally meaningless to me, and yet the act of stamping an indelible label on a piece of paper seemed magically declarative, authoritative and permanent.

Unaccompanied!

"Internally Displaced Persons" is another of those stamps.  An IDP is a refugee still located in their home country, but living away from home, often in a crowded encampment. 

In Uganda recently, we drove past an area which had housed an IDP camp during the 20-year reign of terror which the Lord’s Resistance Army visited on the northern Ugandan countryside. Hundreds of thousands of families fled their homes and villages to flee the violence of the LRA. 

On this trip, Janet and I had the pleasure of meeting a little girl who is one of the children we sponsor.  Her dear father Pius is a kind and soft-spoken farmer who in his spare time serves as a sponsorship volunteer, overseeing 306 children, and also as chairman of the local Child Protection network. Protecting children is close to his heart.

Pius himself was the youngest of 12 children, only six of whom survive today. I sought him out away from our group to hear more about his story privately. Two of his siblings died of AIDS; another was killed by Idi Amin’s army in the 1970's. Then in 1995, his brother’s son was abducted by the LRA and has never been never found. And in 1997, their home was ransacked by an LRA raiding party while he was away. At that point, he and his family finally fled to an IDP camp for protection, living there for four long years before returning home.

Other than proximity to home, life in the IDP camps is much like any other refugee camp, with relief rations, crowded and unsanitary conditions, and the unsettled disorientation that comes from not having a safe and secure home.  Pius’ 7-year-old daughter was born after those years and has no more experience of life as an IDP than I do. But this makes the experience no less real, frustrating and emasculating to her father. He has worn the IDP stamp, and I expect some of the markings are indelible.

One of the stamps I most loath is "Child-Headed Household." The rubber-stamped acronym “CHH” became very common during the worst years of the AIDS pandemic. But visiting the shabby hovel occupied by Rosy, Lamiri, and Lomiani in rural Tanzania was anything but common. Their faces and ragged clothes are etched in my mind, along with the face of Evelyn, their Home Visitor volunteer. Evelyn is not some neighborhood Avon Lady knocking on the door to sell something. She's an angry mom, angry that there was ever need for such a term as "child-headed household," angry that any children should have to fend for themselves and run a household on their own... especially a household of girls orphaned by the ravages of AIDS.  As long as she could help it, kids without parents living in Evelyn’s community would navigate the life with someone they could trust and count on… to listen, to pray, to provide whatever resources she could make available, to care, to let her heart be broken... again. She would make sure they were accompanied.

For Evelyn, there was no such thing as a CHH. There were only kids like Rosie and her sisters, living alone, just trying to survive, the older ones often forgoing any chance of schooling in order to grow or scrounge or exchange sex for food for their younger siblings.  Evelyn understood that a technical term like Child-Headed Household might serve some statistical purpose, but it would never take the place of compassion and love for the children living in one.

These are the invitations I feel nowadays, to move from the stats and the stamps to the stories, from my head to my heart.

"Just the facts, Ma'am." Maybe that worked for Joe Friday on the old "Dragnet" TV show, but terms that allow the statisticians to check various boxes do little to explain the exigencies, the unique stories and personal traumas of individual lives. 

I take comfort that God knows each person inside the numbers, not merely as a statistic, but in the personal and unique realities of each singular life, those uniquenesses that don't fit neatly onto a rubber stamp... those whose very lives are in fact the polar opposite of "neat."

Cory

June 2015

And On the Sixth Day, They Played

Tonight, I watched a moving video. It was less than two minutes long, but in that short glimpse my “practical” side, my hard head, grasped an aspect of "soft-ware" that I hadn't paid much attention to in the past. 

In World Vision, we talk a lot these days about "software." Having worked in IBM's computer mainframe division, I like this term, because it evokes something we all understand: that the best hardware in the world can't accomplish anything without good internal software.

In humanitarian work, the software refers to the human element that makes the "hardware" actually work. One example among many: World Vision borehole wells last far longer than the norm because we organize community members into trained Water Committees who collect user fees so they have funds available for repairs when the pump inevitably has a breakdown. It's probably an overstatement to say that Africa is "littered with abandoned handpumps" by well-meaning groups who only focus on the hardware pipes and pumps, but I've seen enough of those myself (including one earlier this month in Malawi) to know the frustration which leads to such sweeping statements.  Without the software, the hardware is soon useless.

Tonight the software I witnessed was very different, closely related to the terrible earthquake which rocked Nepal just six days ago.  It's a simple video report showing a Child Friendly Space which World Vision has already launched in Kathmandu, with several more to follow in hard-hit rural areas. So, even as water, food, tents and other basic necessities are just now being distributed by World Vision and other helping groups, on this sixth day after the quake, a Child Friendly Space had already sprung into being.

A "Child Friendly Space?" The term sounds so benign, maybe even evoking a slightly paternalistic smile and a mental "Gee, isn't that nice." I remember when I first heard the term, after the Haiti quake five years ago. What did it even mean? I've always liked the concept of a safe place for children to hang out, yet it seemed very high up on Maslow's hierarchy of human needs in an emergency situation, to the point of being something nice-to-have, maybe 6-12 months after the basic needs are met.

But this video changed all that for me. Maybe it was because the Innovation Fund just made a grant for our health programs which are starting to incorporate Early Childhood Development into their goal of "child wellbeing", recognizing that mental and emotional development are also critical to a child having a healthy future.

Watching, I realized that for these kids in Nepal traumatized by the earthquake--perhaps having lost a home, a parent, friends... for them, even five days of complete disorientation and insecurity in a makeshift relief camp is an eternity. Seeing these children engage, smile, play and process grief in a safe and supportive place, I realized what a huge part of their emotional and mental recovery these things represent, practically as important as physical healing. 

Enjoy this short glimpse from today's "grand opening" session... and notice the energy and engagement of the children, and how they behave at the end of just the first day. If you didn't already know their situation, their traumatic context, you'd think you were simply watching an energetic after-school program.  But in a context where there is no school, no playground--maybe no house or even family--it's a remarkable sign of hope, of life...  http://www.wvi.org/nepal-earthquake/video/safe-place-children-affected-nepal-quake

At IBM, I was never much good at writing computer programs; but I'm a huge believer in the power of software.

Cory

April 2015

Looking Beyond the Fence

I’m flying home from an encouraging, albeit hectic, trip to Malawi to see World Vision water projects there.  We ended the trip in a lovely setting for some decompression and debriefing along the coastline of Lake Malawi, a ribbon of water that snakes along most of the length of that small nation.  My grandson Sam came along, and he and I had another 24 hours there after the other travelers left.

Unlike some carefully insulated resorts in developing nations, walks along this hotel’s beachfront ended rather abruptly at a thin, spare wooden fence. Peeking through it, we could observe community members from the neighboring fishing village.  Small children were getting their morning bucket bath from moms who were also washing clothing and watching a boatful of husbands work hard to dig their oars against a stiff wind, slowly traveling past "our" shoreline to bring in their fishing nets and the morning catch.

Later I discovered that from the raised landing of our tidy veranda, I could simply glance to the right and be quickly transported from our gated cloister to an existence far more similar to that of the impoverished villagers we'd just been visiting a hundred miles away than the one we were now experiencing on our flowered and manicured side of that rickety fence.

This is not a new experience for me on these trips, and I more easily work through the mental dissonance of these moments than I did in years past.

But I'm reading now an email from another supporter who was recently with me in Uganda, in which she writes and writhes about her own dissonance with returning home, and the anxious reaction of women in her Bible study group who had asked about her trip. She comments, "One lady said that she really needs to hear the positive of how WV is helping, because she couldn’t get her head around and dwell on the negativity and difficulties of these people’s lives, because she doesn’t understand 'how God could allow this'?”

How could God allow this?  In some sense, it's a critical question we must all confront.  It also needs to eventually call into question the askers’ comfortable understanding of God. The velocity and ferocity of the facts on the ground about poverty and inhumanity can peel the plaster right off our tidy first-world understanding of God, leaving it exposed and ashamed, as flimsy and gaping as that beachside barrier between us. 

Our theology is often just one more gated community that shuts out anything unpleasant that we wish to not deal with, and my friend's heart-wrenching trip report forced her study partner to confront reality that wouldn’t fit inside her well-constructed view of God.

As those who choose to believe in a loving God, this is a question we must all confront, because otherwise as modern Bible translator J.B. Phillips titled a book, "Your God Is Too Small." If we are unable to look squarely at the inconvenient truths beyond the fence yet still have an answer to this question, our "god" is either powerless, uncaring, or cruel... a simpleton tribal deity who simply keeps 'us and ours' comfortable inside the friendly confines of our midweek Bible studies and amplified praise music.

Many have given up trying... I've just finished watching the in-flight movie "The Imitation Game" about the British mathematician who broke the Nazi Enigma code that helped win the war. He says in one of the closing scenes, "But God didn't win the war. We did." 

Though the words took me aback a bit, there's some ring of authenticity in it for me. It puts the onus upon us: to act, to put our own gifts and skills into active service for humankind and causes beyond ourselves. And as the hot-and-bothered writer of James' epistle points out so emphatically, there is no such thing as "faith" without action.

Which brings us back to the frightening question, "How could God allow this?" and turns it on its head. Because the only meaningful response for me is another question: How could we allow this? And more importantly: What are we going to do about it?

Maybe the Bible doesn't promise that “God helps those that helps themselves” [sic], but it certainly purports that God helps those who help others.

The donors I took to Malawi had doubled their giving through a wonderful matching gift. But I’m still holding out for the 30-, 60-, 100-fold ROI that Jesus talks about, and I am content to come home and once more put my hand to that plow.

Cory

Holy Saturday

April 2015

Where We Hang Up Our Lives

I went to weekday mass this morning, for the first time in a few years. I'm getting over jetlag from a World Vision trip to Uganda last week, and as I lay in bed in the dark this morning my mind could not help but cling to the darkest portion of our many projects visits.  While we saw plenty of positive programs, met communities engaged in their own transformation, and celebrated compelling signs of hope, the week was bookended by two riveting experiences that seem to overshadow the others, at least at this point in my recovery.

I had cringed when I saw our planned agenda a few weeks earlier, knowing the impact of these visits but also aware that the logistics of our travel would require that these be at the beginning and end of the trip. Knowing this in advance probably shielded me from some of the initial "blast" of the experiences, but even that could not protect me from the stinging and clinging residue.

On Monday morning, we visited a project designed to combat a hideous practice called "child sacrifice" for lack of a more accurate term.  Children are abducted in order to harvest their blood and body parts for superstitious practices carried out by witch doctors. This happens in only one quadrant of Uganda, so I hesitate to even tell about it for fear of perpetuating old stereotypes of "deepest, darkest Africa."  But without a doubt, this is a very, very dark practice.

We saw all sides of it: First we met Robert, a lovely young boy with a fun-loving smile who was found and rescued in the midst of getting his throat cut. Today he is in a wheelchair, his spinal column mostly severed but hopefully healing. Nothing can keep this seven-year-old down, and he showed us how he can now walk again while hanging onto his chair or his grandmother.

Next we met an energetic committee of community members who have implemented an Amber Alert-type system activated with drums, loudspeakers, cellphones, and motorcycle taxis, with all the government and community leaders involved.  Because of this project, which was underwritten by the Innovation Fund, there has been an 85% reduction in the incidence of child abduction and sacrifice!

The World Vision project leader, Obed, risks his life to come up against an unholy alliance of witch doctors, superstitious customers and kidnapper/body-snatchers, all powered by the money that the ongoing demand creates.   The project is empowering the community to stand up against this evil practice, change hearts, immediately send out search parties, and prosecute the perpetrators.  

About 80% of the 500-plus traditional healers have now taken a pledge rejecting this practice, and our next visit was to one of those. We all entered his compound, but only half the group ventured into his lair. At one point, Obed said, "You see these rocks in the bowl between us? That's where in the past he would sprinkle human blood." Obed had comforted some of the reluctant ones in our group when we arrived there, "You have nothing to fear. You're covered with the blood of Jesus."  So I went into his hovel, to affirm the commitment this witch doctor made... but I can't say I'm glad that I did.

Our last visit of the day took our breath away. Jimmy was 18 months old when he was abducted last year, his heart, genitals and blood 'harvested', and his body dumped back on his family's land to be found by his six-year-old sibling. We met his grandmother, father and uncle. Mom has been sent away to recover, and Jimmy's siblings are clearly traumatized. They clung to Jaaja (Grandma) until the conversation got so graphic that we sent them out to play. Wise or unwise, the adults wanted to show us the spot where Jimmy was found, and then the family plot where he is buried. But the young father couldn't do it. He hung behind by a tree ten steps away and wept silently, breaking everyone's heart.  We witnessed the depth of trauma that this hideous act has wrought on three generations of this extended family, a broken, motherless home that will forever be scarred, and a killer who is still on the loose.

Mercifully, the next few days were encouraging ones of visits to other projects underwritten by the Innovation Fund, projects which include radio and cellphone training of saintly Volunteer Health Teams who are the first-line of defense in the health system; mobilizing faith leaders to advocate for sanitation and hygiene to their congregations; and a low-cost way to manually drill for water which is sometimes inexpensive enough for community members to pay for a pump-well themselves! Along the way, we visited a health center where a woman was just then giving birth and were invited to see the suckling 8-minute-old baby, we learned a lot about defecation in the Bible(!), and we passed through a national park complete with safari animals and a ferry ride across the Victoria (White) Nile River.

Then on Friday, before we flew home, we had the opportunity to visit the recently-closed Children of War center.  World Vision's regional office is now housed in this compound, and I'd heard about this program and advocated and prayed for it for so many years that I was very eager to see the place firsthand, even as an 'historical' site.  

The center was created because of the 20-year reign of terror of the marauding bands of the so-called Lord's Resistance Army, an abhorrent and aberrant-Christian version of ISIS.  Among their despicable practices was abducting children between 10-16 years old, the boys to become trained killers and the girls to be given to LRA commanders as "wives."  The Children of War center was the primary facility for healing and repatriating abducted former child soldiers and child brides, and we were told that some 15,000 former abductees had come through this program since 1995.  

We were hosted in our visit not by the World Vision staff, but by two former child "wives" (often one of 20 or more "wives" of an LRA commander) who had escaped with their children born while in captivity.  Angela and Janet have now started an organization called We Have Hope, not so much to support former child brides, but primarily to help the fatherless children of these women, who face great stigma and behavioral issues, and who were sometimes brainwashed by the LRA before their mothers escaped with them. 

Hearing about the ongoing, multi-generational damage from this evil and violence--after our Monday experience with the child abduction project and Jimmy's family--became a very heavy weight.  Lying in bed today, I realized I must take care of my soul to avoid hitting a wall, sinking into an abyss of unbalanced despair by allowing these searing dark memories to overly-shadow the bright light of the others.

That's when I felt motivated to go to Mass.

I arrived late, and there were lots of distractions.  But as the service was concluding, I gazed up at the cross. There Christ still hung, in proper Catholic tradition.

And as I gazed up, a song began to run through my mind from the musical Godspell. It's a rendering of Psalm 137:1-4, with a lamenting melody that perfectly fits the lyric:

On the willows there we hung up our lives

For our captors there required of us songs 

And our tormentors mirth, saying, 

"Sing us one of the songs of Zion"

"Sing us one of the songs of Zion"

But how can we sing, sing the Lord's song, in a foreign land?

On the willows there we hung up our lives

Captivity. Torment. Joylessness. Despair... Reverence. 

That's when I realized the solace so many have found over the centuries: by hanging their overwhelming burdens up there on the cross with Him who is crucified. He who bore the sins of the world stretches wide his arms to also welcome and bear our burdens.

I accepted the invitation.

The cross is a story of utter defeat, of no one coming to save the day. 

But it was not the final day. Nor did death have the final say.

On that willow there, we too can hang up our lives.

Cory 

March 2015

Enough Is Enough

One day a couple weeks ago, the top three headlines on the daily news emails from both the NY Times and LA Times were all concerning Ebola, and ominously, the focus of each was on Ebola-related topics here in the USA...who’s actually sick, protection measures, CDC guidelines. It seemed to me then that America’s focus was shifting inward once again, that the thousands of Ebola victims in West Africa were taking a backseat to the two or three possible cases here.

Since then, the mix of Ebola stories hasn't changed much, despite a few very moving profiles of West African medical personnel who risk their lives daily to staunch the growing epidemic at its source. If we can take our eyes off ourselves, through print and video stories like this one we can witness in our lifetimes the drama of those risking their own lives in a modern-dayplague: http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/africa/100000003187061/the-ebola-ward.html?smid=fb-share 

But these stories are increasingly the exception. And the shift by the media to insular coverage both reflects and stokes the fires of more fear, less compassion.  It came to a head for me yesterday... 

During our team devotions, a colleague gave thanks for her successful trip last week to Zambia, in southern Africa. But she also asked for prayer for two of the travelers.  

The first was a teacher at a parochial school in the Midwest. As the team changed planes in Johannesburg on their return trip, she began receiving unexpected emails and texts about her upcoming “voluntary” 21-day quarantine before returning to the classroom.  Then she saw the email from her principal about how parents were applying pressure to keep the teacher away from their children. So she was being asked (read: told) to take a paid, 21-day leave.

Now, I must stop here and point out that Zambia is further from the Ebola zone in West Africa than Omaha is from...wait for it...Caracas, Venezuela.  Can you imagine someone traveling from London to Omaha and being quarantined when they returned because they were deemed too close to Caracas? Or take the analogy north instead…they were deemed too close to Fairbanks, Alaska!  It's absurd.  On top of the sheer absurdity of it, it'd be offensive to the people of Omaha that Londoners wouldn't have any better sense of geography than that.

The returning teacher prayed about it and decided that to comply with this commanded absence would only perpetuate fears and stigma. So instead, she resigned, telling the administrators of the school that the parents’ fears were unwarranted and that as a Christian she could not in good conscience contribute to this uninformed stigma against any person who touches an entire continent. 

My colleague's second prayer request wasn't much better: another woman who was on the same Zambia trip got a call from her housekeeper when she got home. The cleaner explained that she wouldn't be able to come clean the lady’s house for at least 21 days, because her other clients told her they would not allow her to clean their homes again if she entered the traveler's home.  Of course, the charwoman had little choice—she is a pawn in this little drama; she needs the money the most and would lose multiple clients by not giving in to this demand. Again, we’re talking about a traveler who was about 3000 miles from any Ebola-impacted areas.

Call this what you will: fear, hyper-diligence, snobbery in its own way, etc.  Here's the tricky part: I'll bet many/most of the housekeeper’s clients are parents. They are thinking, as are the parents at the Christian school, "I'm responsible to protect my children from harm." Who can argue with that?

But we've taken this principle to be supreme, as though it has no boundaries. There is nothing in our faith that calls this a first principle. If it were such, there would never have been a missionary who took their family with them to serve others. No, we must admit it: this is completely a cultural overlay that we decorate in a Christian wrapper to justify as honorable and diligent. We throw up two or three weak Bible references about children being a gift from God, and act as though those gifts are to be hoarded.

Whatever happened to civility, to treating others as we would be treated? Whatever happened to bearing in our bodies the sufferings of Christ, to bearing one another's burdens?  

Our nation’s current response to Ebola, in the Christian as well as secular community, breaks my heart as we elevate our personal safety, and that of our children, above practically every other consideration... compassion, mercy, justice, selflessness… meaning, of course, that we stand in direct contradiction to everything Jesus ever stood for.

Cory

November 2014

PS: I’ve since heard several other equally shocking Ebola-phobia stories, and also read this useful piece on discerning reasonable fears from unrealistic worry… http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2014/october/what-ebola-panic-reminds-us-about-worry.html

Conditional Grace

I had a very gratifying dinner with a World Vision supporter last week. Ed and his wife had spent a day at a World Vision project in Ethiopia recently and was telling me about the experience. He said that one of their most meaningful encounters was meeting a group of clergy, consisting of both Christian and Muslim faith leaders. These pastors and imams admitted that they used to distrust and even hate each other and would cross the road to avoid encountering each other.  Yet today they are collaborators and co-laborers for the good of their community.  Ed and his wife visited a community-wide childcare program operating in a church, and a program for widows and orphans run by an imam. And today, these faith leaders, former enemies, now smile and touch, a friendly arm on each other's shoulder. 

This change is stunning, worthy of Isaiah's vision of dangerous animals lying down together. 

(Parenthetically, this report was also very gratifying for me personally, because World Vision's Innovation Fund underwrote the pilot of this “Faith-Based Forum” project. FBF had recently been created in the tinder box of mixed-religion refugee settings. Great distrust turned to enmity and was erupting in violence. Creating clergy dialog and joint programs for the benefit of children was beginning to bear fruit in that setting, and now our grant attempted to apply this same promising idea in well-established mixed-faith communities, where tensions could also simmer and were at times erupting.  World Vision itself has experienced some violence against our offices in the past.* FBF is designed to engage the disparate faith communities in their shared commitment to their children, and in the process to build understanding, trust and peaceful relations between the faiths. Three years ago I was in a different region of Ethiopia where we met two nascent FBF groups. They were collegial though still somewhat formal, and they were making early plans to create programs, and were also honoring and even attending each other's religious holy day events. So Ed's report was the next gratifying chapter, both in the progress of interpersonal relations and their solid and active programming. These were no longer simply plans, but now established efforts caring for the most vulnerable. And FBF is spreading all over Africa, which is exactly the goal of the Innovation Fund!)

Ed said that the imam who ran the outreach for widows and orphans was quite intimidating at first encounter... tall, dark, formal. But immediately as this Muslim cleric began talking about the outreach program to orphans and widows, and the collaboration between the faith communities for the sake of the most vulnerable, his passion shined through and warmed the room.

To Ed, the whole idea of Faith-Based Forums was a great encouragement.  "I grew up in a church that talked a lot about grace. But this always seemed to me to be a conditional grace, dependent on a person doing certain things or believing certain things. But here World Vision is extending grace and help to everyone in the community without reservation. There was no withholding of assistance or relationship or engagement as a way to pressure or coerce anyone."

As I listened to Ed, I thought it interesting that World Vision puts this program under its "Christian Witness" umbrella. We both wondered if some might disagree about this being a "witness", and yet it struck me as being perfectly so.  It mirrors exactly Jesus' approach to people, and as such, WV’s actions here are a living, active witness to Jesus himself… not to mention a reflection of God, who provides the sun and rain to everyone without condition. (Matt 5:45)

"Conditional grace." It doesn't even make sense.  Yet how often is this exactly the kind of grace I extend, which isn't grace at all.

Really, is "conditional grace" any kind of witness to the real Jesus? It's certainly an adulteration of how we claim God treats us. Yet we are so very adept at bending our interpretations to accomplish our agenda or to get others to do our bidding, even to the point of withholding the very love we've been shown. Where's the good news in that?

Lord, have mercy on us. Show us Your grace. And as a result may we extend the same authentic love and grace we have been shown. May we truly be your children, as it is written: "But I say to you, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven." (Matt 5:44)

Cory

October 2014

* Inter-religious distrust has impacted WV offices including in Afar, Ethiopia, where the office was attacked by an angry mob of youth and the ADP manager was nearly killed. My granddaughter Emmy and I had a powerful experience of being with this man on the day he first encountered some of his former attackers... at their high school! You can read about it here: http://corytrenda.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-new-hero.html or catch up on other past meditations.

Speed Filing

The other evening on the radio, I heard an excerpt of a TED talk.  The topic was how infants and toddlers think and learn, presented by Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC Berkeley.  

[https://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think#t-954295]

She marveled at the ability of toddlers to take in reams of disparate information: one moment a crawly bug, another an airplane high above, then a boo-boo, then a kitty cat. They are terrible at focusing and drilling deeply into one subject, but are far more adept than we adults at allowing in and noticing all manner of information, the vast majority of which we more advanced grown-ups filter out…they have “a lantern of consciousness rather than a spotlight,” she explains.

We all get a little glimpse of this phenomenon when we go to a very different culture, as is the case on vision trips to a developing country. We haven't yet created categories for the plethora of new stimuli coming at us--those odd smells, sounds and living conditions, so we can't easily categorize and dismiss these in order to focus on the few truly "important" bits, like the presentation a community member might be making about child mortality rates and programming strategies. 

It's not uncommon for a visitor to wander off from the group or become absorbed in a game with children, whether from overload or fascination. Sometimes the "Agenda Trenda" part of me wants to grouse at the errant visitor, "Hey, you're missing the best part!"  

And at the end of a week on these trips, we can't believe all we experienced …it seems more like we were there a month!

Frankly, these trips can be exhausting.  We need time to process, to sift through our memories of all the experiences and information and people we encountered. We hold onto it all, not sure what is most important and not wanting to exclude or ignore any possible 'treasure'.

Children it seems are on a constant treasure hunt.  No wonder they need so much sleep!

The morning after hearing this talk, I read a meditation from Richard Rohr that reminded me of it and highlighted one aspect of my adult mindset I need to "unlearn." Like many of us, I can pride myself on being a "quick study" of other people and new situations. We adults are adept at categorizing each new situation or person we meet. We have pre-constructed strategies for dealing with each category and are able to glean the key information and respond quickly. We believe our response is usually the correct one; but when we turn out to be wrong, we’re quick to forgive ourselves, knowing that this skill allows us to move through many situations quickly.  

One could say we are fast at filing. Heck, we might want to apply to be an administrative assistant to God, because in fact we often do the very same thing with new situations that bump into our religious convictions. This is sinful, that's apostasy, this is theological error, this is good, that is bad. We are fast, we are certain, we are comfortable. We find people who agree with us, and we play Speed Filing for God. 

But Rohr calls us to something different perhaps, something higher and holier than being adept filers into pre-assigned categories:

   Contemplation is a panoramic, receptive awareness whereby you take in all that the situation, the moment, the event offers without eliminating anything. That does not come naturally. You have to work at it and develop practices whereby you recognize your compulsive and repetitive patterns.
   It seems we are addicted to our need to make distinctions and judgments, which we actually call “thinking”! Most of us think we are our thinking, yet almost all thinking is compulsive and habitual. After a while you see that this kind of thinking is not going to get you very far, simply because reality is not all about you and your preferences!
   Non-dual consciousness is about receiving and being present to the moment and to the now exactly as it is, without judgment, without analysis, without critique, without your ego deciding whether you like it or whether you don’t like it. It is a much more holistic knowing, where your mind, heart, soul, and senses are open and receptive to the moment just as it is. 

Just like the TED speaker pointed out, maybe there is something to be learned from little children. To survive in the fast-paced adult world, we needed to learn the skill of ignoring most information much of the time in order to grasp quickly what was expected of us in a given moment. But in the process, we've abandoned the critical skill of paying attention to extra information. "Extraneous" we label it, but sometimes it's the very information that might take us to new places. Just like how sometimes it's that unplanned but precious encounter not on the formal agenda—talking with an impoverished child or being invited into a humble hovel—which might prove to be the most impactful memory in a travelers’ cross-cultural journey. 

There's an invitation here. And an exhortation. As I recall, somewhere Jesus says unless we change and become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of God (see Matt 18:3). Maybe Jesus wasn't nearly as afraid as we sometimes are of information that doesn't neatly fit into our pre-defined categories. 

Personally, I sense a gentle invitation to once again be open and expansive to something higher than Speed Filing; something childlike that allows the Spirit to still speak. 

Cory

September 2014