Home. Again.

A journey isn't really over until you're home again. And if you've taken a real journey, "home" isn't the same as when you left it, because you aren't the same as when you left. The final step of a true journey is not just getting home but being home, the step of integrating what you've experienced with where you live day-by-day.

So what's the final step of this journey?

Before I left, I said that I wanted to make this trip about being at prayer. I failed. That's not to say I didn't pray -- I said plenty of prayers, aloud when asked, silently when not. But I'd written before we left about prayer being a disposition of the soul, an opening of the spirit to a sacramental, "binocular" vision of outward and visible things radiant with inward and spiritual lights. I'd wanted to dispose myself to such prayer as much as I could on this trip. I couldn't do it -- or at least I couldn't do it as consistently as I had hoped. Sometimes the shovelful of dirt was just a shovelful of dirt, not a finite echo of the infinite creating Word; sometimes the good meal was just body fuel, not a gift of God; sometimes the work team was just a bunch of gabby, crabby people, not a gracefully functioning limb of the Body of Christ. There were sacramental moments, to be sure: listening to Oakley and Olman conversing in Spanish as we drove to Agua Caliente, not understanding a word they said (well, maybe one or two words) but hearing so very clearly the friendship and affection and genuine joy that passed between them; watching a large rock crack under my iron bar and having the sudden feeling that I could see the whole crystal geometry of the stone revealed in a single moment; even the feeling of some genuine hunger, some real appetite, after having been sick, and recognizing it as a touch of healing grace. The trip was not without its epiphanies. But they were fewer than I'd hoped for, my vision was more occluded than I'd imagined, my soul was not so well disposed as I'd intended.

I suppose that should be no surprise. Sacramental awareness is something saints strive for years to awaken. Like Zen mindfulness or yoga suppleness, sacramental awareness is the fruit of long and regular practice; it can't just be turned on and off like a switch. And even with years of practice, as I've had in the church, sacramental awareness must still be cultivated, awakened, invited, as a matter of intention -- it's not just automatic, like a reflex, but is something to which the mind and soul and spirit must be intentionally attuned. And that attunement happens more readily -- not automatically, but more readily -- when you take time for the practices that cultivate it.

For me, one of those practices is taking time alone with my thoughts. I am very introverted, as psychologists measure these things, and I know that if I don't get a certain amount of alone-time each day I begin to get twitchy. Alone-time is not easy to find on a worksite or a bus or a double-occupancy hotel room (even when the other occupant is one's own best beloved), and when the wee hours of morning and nighttime are blanked out by exhaustion. Without quiet time just to attend to the texture of my experience, that experience tends to get away from me, I tend to become too submerged in the rapid flux of feeling, and flashes of impatience, interest, irritation, humor, annoyance, wonder, fatigue, tend to drive me more than me integrating them. I'm sure there were times on this trip when the other mission trippers felt I was being antisocial or distant or just plain ornery, when really all I was was doing was trying to get a little quiet in my soul. And for me, getting submerged in the flux of feeling is a sure way to lose sight of the sacramental dimension of things: the inward and spiritual grace can only shine through if the mind and will and appetites are not too consumed by and attached to the outward and visible things. I am reminded (again, always again) that part of my prayer practice must always be getting time alone just to rise up a bit from the flux of experience and attend to it as it flows by.

And when I can, as it were, sit on the riverbank like Hesse's Siddhartha and observe my experience flow by, something else reveals itself as well. It's that even though the surface features of experience may be jangling or discordant or mismatched -- even painful -- down deeper there is a steadiness, a coordination, a harmony, that comprehends the elements and guides them toward some wholeness. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in "God's Grandeur" -- that sacramental sonnet par excellence -- "there is the dearest freshness deep down things"; Alfred North Whitehead speaks of religion originating in the experience of "a character of permanent rightness inherent in the nature of things"; even Hamlet says "There is a power that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." I believe that to be true, and I believe that to be God. Process theology teaches that every moment of reality begins and ends with God: God initiates each moment with an aim, a hope, a call, for what that moment can become; and when each moment becomes all it can and experiences itself in full, that fullness passes back into God as an element in God's ongoing and everlasting experience of the world. From this experience of the world-as-it-is, God shapes new aims and hopes and calls for the next generation of moments for the world-as-it-can-be. In this way the moments of the world and the outpouring of God are in a kind of constant dialogue, a perpetual exchange that constitutes Creation. It's all very cosmological; but it's very personal as well. The moments of my experience, disjointed as I might find them, form a thread -- a tiny thread perhaps, but a constitutive thread nonetheless -- in God's experience of the world. God is constantly looking at the world through my eyes, feeling the world through my feelings -- and everybody and everything else's too -- and pulling it all together into one whole harmonious reality. God makes me a partner in Creation, whether I know it or not; but I can be a much better partner when I know it, when I pay attention to the quality of the thoughts and feelings and experiences that flow through me, when I am aware of the ongoing dialogue of aims and fulfillments God is having with me, and when I intentionally do what I can to hold up my part of the conversation. Some of my most vivid prayer experiences have come under the image, not of me facing God and speaking, but of me beside God, both of us looking at the outward and visible things of the world, people and oceans and rocks and churches and mountains, and God guiding me to see and respond to the inward and spiritual grace. We sometimes describe Christian service as being God's hands and feet for acting in the world; we might equally well describe Christian prayer as being God's eyes and ears for feeling the world. That is also what it means to be God's witnesses. We can either grieve or delight the Holy Spirit of God with the quality of experience we pass on; we can be inspired and empowered by the experience of God within, shaping the thread of our moments toward compassion and love and beauty and peace and right relationship. That is, for me, the essence of prayer.

And that was the focus I could not consistently maintain on this trip. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. As T.S. Eliot said, "human kind cannot bear very much reality." And I can hardly be surprised that depth of experience doesn't come when I don't do the things that allow my experience to go deep. But God works in us for compassion and justice and peace, even when we're not aware of it; and we are carried on the prayers of others, even when our own prayers aren't as consistent as we'd like them to be. God was at work on this trip, in breaking rock to build a church, in bearing witness to the contrasts between beauty and poverty and strength and weakness, in doing manual labor that the local folks could have done faster and better but couldn't do because they had jobs and lives and survival of their own to attend to, in celebrating Eucharist in a half-finished church. God was there, in my hands and eyes and heart, and in everyone else's too -- and now that we're home, God is inviting me to learn from this trip how to be more attentive to God's calling, rejoicing, always-already-there presence. God is, again, calling me to pray.

Wrapping Up

Today was our last day of work on this trip, and possibly our last day of work at this site. Oakley and Ted and Concepción and Olman have already discussed a new site we may well work on next year (these things can be somewhat fluid), in a barrio called San Pedrito up the hill from Copan. The youth will probably do some work at Santa Cruz when they come in June; but for the adult mission trippers, this was our last day on this site.

As workdays go it was much like the previous workdays: some people mixing cement, some flinging it on the walls as stucco, some breaking rocks on the back hillside. Can you guess which group I went with? We got a lot done, all the way around. The interior of the church is not entirely stuccoed, and it still has to be finished and polished before it can be painted; but when I looked inside at the midday break today, I was amazed how little of the wall was still bare cinderblock.

Meanwhile, out back, we picked and poked and chipped and levered and made big rocks into littler rocks and basically reshaped the hillside. The local congregation members will eventually build a retaining wall out back, to make sure the reshaped hillside stays in place; but from the perspective of one week's work, it's pretty surprising how much we dug out of that back section. Someone showed me a picture they'd taken on the first day; comparing that to how it looked this afternoon was quite a contrast! I'll post before and after pictures when I get a more reliable internet connection.

But we did more than work today — we also ate. Breaking bread together is an important human and religious ritual, and we engaged in it in several different ways. At fruit break in mid-morning there was fresh pineapple, a special treat of this climate. For lunch we had chilaquiles, shredded stewed chicken served over tortilla chips, one of my top favorite local dishes. And in the middle of the afternoon we broke from work entirely to break bread in a different way, by celebrating the Holy Eucharist together in the church.

We've had a concluding Eucharist with the people of Santa Cruz every time we've come here; but the previous two years it was held on a nearby porch. It really meant something that today the service was held in the church. Yes, the floor is still bare cement, not tiled. Yes, the walls are rough stucco, not yet complete. Yes, the dais for the altar is filled with bags of cement and boxes of tile, not with the altar, and, yes the altar is a little wooden table on the floor and the pews are boards on cinderblocks and plastic lawn chairs. It didn't matter: this was their church, their own house of worship, and they were happy to have it and happy to share it with guests. The Christian mariachi band that is part of this congregation, led by Cruz, the congregation's lay leader, has new outfits, black with great gold trim, and they were in their element this afternoon. I read the Gospel in English, and was invited to give the final blessing, which of course I can only do in English (I vow to learn some liturgical Spanish by this time next year!), and I did my best to follow the rest in Spanish. It's a little easier when you already know what it all means, from long familiarity with the liturgy in English. But knowing what it means is not the same as knowing how to pronounce or speak it, nor does it confer the ability to keep up with a roomful of native speakers. But the liturgy is the liturgy, however it's spoken, and the actions of gathering, blessing, breaking, and sharing are the signs of communion in Christ no matter what language us being used. It's another kind of experience of being carried along on the prayers of others.

And so we finished our work for this trip. We got back to the hotel, divvied out the bags of San Rafael coffee — some for personal use, some for Trinity — that each of us must carry, had dinner together as one big group — our only such dinner this trip — and retired to make our preparations for the morrow. We must leave very early in the morning, so bags need to be packed and coffee stowed and sleeping done fairly early tonight. And that is what I must attend to now.

Down Day

I have very little to report today, mostly because I spent the day resting and recuperating and making sure my stomach would behave itself. I read, I wrote, I kept myself hydrated, I prayed for the team at the worksite. I ate lunch and was pleased that I had a genuine appetite for it. And I looked forward to getting back to work tomorrow.

When the team got back, they filled me in on the day. It was sunnier and hotter onsite today, which meant everyone was more tired and dragging than at the ends of previous workdays. There was breaking of rocks (again) and mixing of cement (again). Lee was Superwoman of the Pickaxe they tell me; this makes me proud.

But the big news is that they started cementing the walls. By all accounts this is a very special talent that requires flinging wet cement at the cinderblock wall at just the right angle with just the right force to make it stick. This this is apparently far harder than it sounds. I already have an admiration for those who can do it, without even having yet seen it in action. I'm sure my admiration will only increase tomorrow. I'll probably be outside, breaking rocks. With Lee.

Another neat report the team brought me is that we've bought a high-efficiency wood stove for the church's neighbor. The house next door to the church belongs to a member of the congregation, and for three years they've been letting us use their water, their electricity, their outhouse, and, at times, their porch (which in the local houses is an integral part of the living space) for the construction work. We wanted to give something back, and what we gave was a new wood-burning cookstove that burns 80% more efficiently — and even burns well enough to use corncobs as fuel, since wood can get scarce and expensive here — and will make cooking a much easier task for the household. I'm told that the woman was so happy to receive the stove that she fired it up right away (she knows someone who has the same kind of stove, so she understood how to use it) and made fresh tortillas for the whole team. It sounds like a good gift to me.

So that's a brief report for a down day. Well, down for me; the team was up, and did good work and good ministry. And so we'll do again tomorrow.

Study in Contrasts

Well, yesterday was a strange day — a kind of study in opposites.

In the morning, Lee and I went with Oakley and Ted and Concepción and Olman and Olman's young son on a drive up into the mountains to see three of the other churches that our team has worked on in the years we've been coming here. The mountaintops and high valleys are incredibly beautiful: lush and green, forested in some places, cleared and farmed in others, with clouds scudding along the peaks, alternating mist and sunshine. The communities in these mountains, however, are generally poor. Some coffee plantations make money — it's not hard to notice the bigger, finer houses along the road — and when coffee prices are up, as they are now, the communities where coffee workers live do a little better than most. But I was chiefly struck by the poverty, the rough condition of the road, the pickup trucks stuffed with people in the back because there is no public or commercial transport, the men carrying 100-pound bags of coffee on their shoulders down the hillside, the skinny horses and burros on the road — all in the midst of stunning natural beauty. It was its own study in contrast.

The first church we stopped at is the farthest out, San Nicolas in the town of Agua Caliente. Our mission group worked there on two trips, including one youth trip. The church sits just above a river flowing down the mountain valley, and there are flowering trees and shrubs and vines everywhere, even in January, and it is very beautiful. The congregation there has grown fourfold since the church was first built — from about ten to about forty — and they are thinking of expanding. Two years ago we brought them a cross made by Richard, one of our regular missioners, made of Honduran mahogany and Virginia cherry as a sign of our partnership, and today that cross is mounted just above the main door of the church, as a welcome to everyone who comes in.

The second church we visited was St John the Evangelist (I'm not sure I could properly remember the Spanish name) in Sesemil Segundo. Our team had not done a lot of construction work there — just a retaining wall, and lots of painting — but the lay leader of the congregation remembered Ted and Oakley and welcomed us warmly. The church has lovely tile work on the floor and altar platform, and is clearly lovingly cared for. The musicians' instruments had been left on the platform — two guitars, a gitarron, and two vihuelas — and an impromptu jam session broke out. We weren't all exactly in tune, but the noise was joyful.

After a stop in a mountainside cafe for home-grown coffee with cardamom, we visited the church of San Antonio in Quebracho. The church is built on a plot that was literally carved out of the hillside; there is a huge retaining wall on one side — I think I was told it was thirty feet high — and on the adjacent side another retaining wall running the length of the property. It's a real piece of mountain engineering. The church itself is poorer; the tile on the floor was not as nice, and one side of the church was still taken up with stored rebar cages the team had made some years ago. But the altar table had a nice green hanging, on which someone had painstakingly appliqued a figure of the Lamb of God in Triumph. It was a small touch, but to me it spoke volumes about the devotion of the folks who worship there.

We got back into town around 2pm, and Lee and I decided to just hang out for a little while, rather than make a very active afternoon of it. All my rock-breaking of the previous day had left my back and wrist (the right one, with all the metal in it) rather sore, and bouncing along rough mountain roads in the jump seat of a pickup truck had kind of worn me out.

So after a nice little rest we went out for a bit of wine and cheese before dinner. I must have had something that didn't agree with me, though, because as we wandered through a few shops on the way back, I was feeling progressively odder, until by the time we got back to our room I knew something was not right within. I ended up being quite sick, through a long and fitful night. And now, in the morning, I find I'm in no shape to go to church at Espiritu Santo in Santa Rita. I feel bad about that, since Sunday worship at the first church we worked in is always a major event in the trip, and one I enjoy very much. But I think the rocks and the cheese and the bouncy roads are sending me a message about not overdoing things; so, much as I'll miss it, I'm not going to church. Sigh.

And there you have the contrast: beauty and poverty, devotion and struggle, strength and weakness. I saw remarkable signs of people strengthened by the grace of God to strive for compassion and mutual well-being in difficult places, and I felt pointed reminders of my own weakness and need for compassion and grace daily. And as the mission team gets on the bus for church at Santa Rita, I will take some time for my own spiritual communion in gratitude for God's creating love in all the contrasting places.

TGIF

Today was all about the floor.

We arrived at the work site in gray  weather, looking like it was threatening to drizzle. But there was no real rain, and we got right to it. We'd stopped at the hardware store — a pretty big one, at that — to pick up two more shovels, another wheelbarrow, and a rake. We put them to use right away, hauling soil and stones into the church to level out the floor before pouring the cement. It took a lot of soil and stones to do it, but the floor took shape as load after load was placed and tamped down, and began to look more like a floor and not just ground that happened to have four walls built around it.

And then came the cement. Five and a half batches of it, hand mixed and bucketed into place, by a rotating crew of shovel wizards. I salute them. Oakley and Ted, who understand building, and Hector, the local contractor, received the cement bucket by bucket and smoothed it into place. It was a lot of work, but it went very fast — it kind of had to, to make the floor even — and the cement crews were kept at a lively pace. And at the end of the day there was a remarkable 3/4-finished floor that hadn't been there before.

Meanwhile, there was a little non-floor work that got done. Some of the fill for the floor came from the hillside beside the church on which I'd been working yesterday — and there was, really, a great deal more rock that needed to be broken up. So I spent some of the day with my trusty iron bar, prying rocks from the hillside, breaking bigger ones into littler ones (except the ones that wouldn't break, and had to be carried out in all their largeness), and in some cases just chipping away at solid stone one flake at a time. They need to dig down to the foundation level — where we built three years ago but some of which has gotten covered up again in the meantime — on order to relieve some moisture problems. And some of that digging will be close to solid rock. So, the solid rock has to go. I never knew I could derive so much satisfaction from the single moment when a rock, chipped at length, finally separates from the hillside. So many personal discoveries one makes on mission trips!

Tomorrow, being Saturday, is not a work day. This is a good thing: it will give the floor time to set, and my hands time to recover.

Day One on the Job

Today was our first day of work, and it's telling in my muscles and my stamina!

We are working this year at Santa Cruz church in the community of Nueva Esperanza, where we've worked the previous two years as well. It was a nice feeling to have the bus pull up to the site today — kind of like returning to an old friend. There'd been some work done on the building since the last time we were here: the roof is on, and the interior dirt floor had been leveled some (I think). But it's still not much more than a shell. I understand that there hasn't been much money available — the Honduran branch of Episcopal Relief and Development, which helped provide funding for Santa Cruz, has had to shut down — and without that support the local community was not able to keep on working on the church much between our visits. When we arrived there were bags of cement and boxes of tile sitting inside, waiting for us, purchased, as I believe, with the money we sent on ahead. And that means our main goal this trip will be to fill, level, cement, and tile the floor. Big job!

In order to get that job started, though, some of us were detailed in the morning to go to the side of the church, where the flat place for the building had initially been dug out of the hillside, and to dig out some more to get extra fill for leveling the floor. We actually took down a good bit of the hillside, trying to square it from the surface all the way down to the floor level, and then transporting the rubble we'd made to the altar end of the church. At one point in the day I conceived a real admiration for my Cornish ancestors, who dug in deep rock for tin since the dawn of recorded history, as I was breaking large rocks into smaller rocks with an iron bar, in order to dislodge them from the hillside and add to the rubble pile beneath.

We broke for lunch, and this year,  for the first time, we sat down to eat right in the shell of the church rather than moving up to the porch of a nearby house, as we had the two years before. There was something particularly satisfying about breaking bread together in the place we were building for the breaking of bread.

After lunch it was cement time. I am still not entirely used to making cement on the ground using nothing but shovels and lots of muscle. Seven wheelbarrows of sand, two sacks of cement, seven buckets of water, and a definite rhythm of shoveling the dry into the wet, turning it over and mixing it up, each shovelful getting heavier as more water soaks in. We made enough to cover the altar area at the front off the church — and that still leaves the entire nave for later in the week! I can see that we have our work well cut out for us.

So tonight I'm sitting here with aching forearms — for some reason those muscles reacted worst to the digging bar and the shovel — and rapidly encroaching sleepiness, but also with a real sense of joy to be here in Copan again, seeing friends from before, enjoying the beauty of this valley in the mountains, and doing good work for a church we've known from the ground up.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring...

We are here! We are here!

We have arrived in Copan Ruinas all safe and sound and glad to be here. Our trip was uneventful, which is really a good thing to be able to say about travel like this. The TACA desk at Dulles was actually open when we arrived on Tuesday night — the first time I've seen that happen since I joined this trip — so we were able to check our luggage right off the bat, and not sit around the airport floor with our bags all around us, camping out like vagabonds. It's amazing how hospitable an airport can seem when you're not lugging pounds of luggage around. And so we got to our gate and got on our plane and got in the air in good order. Changing planes in San Salvador was without hitch, and so was our arrival in San Pedro Sula.

About the only thing that was problematic in the journey was the bus ride from San Pedro Sula to Copan. The roads are bad this year — apparently it has rained a lot — and the bus was bouncier, jouncier, and more headache-inducing than in years past. There were some prodigious washouts on some mountainsides, which earned stares of admiration, and not a few gasps, from our crew as we drove by. But our driver Antonio is very skilled, and he handled the damaged roads and the consequently disorganized traffic with style and grace. And so we arrived.

Tomorrow morning we'll go to the worksite. Same church we've been working on the last couple of years. We're told that the roof is finished now, so we'll be working on inside stuff: floors and walls and tile work and things like that. It will be a new adventure for me, at least, since my previous trips have focused on outside work, digging and hauling rocks and making foundations. This will literally be seeing a new phase in working for the growth of this church. Maybe there's a metaphor there I can use in talking about our mission to build the church at home...

Pray for us in our work with our brothers and sisters in the church here in Honduras, and for the good mission of Christ being made manifest here.

Getting Ready for Honduras

Getting Ready for Honduras

Our parish mission group will be leaving for Copan, Honduras on Tuesday evening, and I'm trying to get ready for the trip.

There are the practicalities, of course: getting a new pair of workboots, finding my passport, cutting my packing list down to a minimum, notifying my bank that I'll be using my card in another country. Tasks like these tend to get me antsy. I joke with Lee sometimes that I enjoy being in other places, it's the getting-there that bothers me. It's the kind of joke that's only funny because it's so true. She's being very patient with me these days.

But the preparations are not all tasky and practical: some are inner and spiritual as well. The first time I went on the Honduras mission I was really nervous, and I found myself praying a lot, asking for courage, asking to be kept safe, asking not to feel overwhelmed. For my third trip I'm not so nervous — but I find that prayer is still important. I'm praying for safe travel still — I always do that when going from Point A to Point B — but I'm also praying this year to be more attentive throughout the whole mission experience.

Prayer is about more than asking God for things, and it's about more than reciting time-honored forms of words (though it is about them, too). Prayer at its core is a disposition of the soul, a focusing of mind and heart and will, an opening of the spirit to be witness to the creative work of God in and around us in the present moment. Prayer is allowing the outward and visible details of life to become luminous with the inward and spiritual light of God. I want to cultivate that disposition of the soul on this Honduras trip. It's not always easy. Physical labor in the hot sun can be, for me at least, kind of mind-numbing; it doesn't always occur to me to look for God in the next shovelful of sand or bucket of wet concrete. Working in close quarters with a bunch of other people can lead to lessened patience and shortened tempers; I have to be intentional about remembering that we are all children of God and all beloved. After a hard work day, kicking back with a cold beer and a good meal, which we do, is a lot of fun, and I want to be mindful that these are not just creature comforts, but are gifts of God, who gives us each day our daily bread and gives us our meat in due season.

While we're on our mission trip in Honduras, I want to be attentive to these things, and so I'm preparing myself for prayer.

And, finally, I have one preparation to make that is strictly technological: I need to make sure that I can post to my blog using only my handy-dandy smartphone and not a whole computer. This year, like last year, I intend to blog from Copan, and I'm hoping all the gadgets and connections and apps line up to do so. I'm posting this very message from my phone, and if you're reading it now, that means the system works. I invite you to keep reading over the next two weeks: following us in your thoughts and prayers makes you part of the mission, too.

On Tuesday I'm leaving for Honduras, and by the grace of God may the spirit of prayer be always present on the trip.