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.

Simplicity and Abundance

In our Sunday School this month, we are going through a rotation of lessons on the Parable of the Mustard Seed, pondering how great faith can grow from small beginnings. In a session for the adult group, parishioners Kristin and Aaron Reichert led a discussion on simplicity of material lifestyle, and how it can lead to greater abundance of emotional and spiritual well-being. They offered, among other resources, this extended quote from Duane Elgin, describing varieties of simplicity we might move toward in our lives:

Uncluttered Simplicity: Simplicity means taking charge of lives that are too busy, too stressed, and too fragmented. Simplicity means cutting back on clutter, complications, and trivial distractions, both material and nonmaterial, and focusing on the essentials – whatever those may be fore each of our unique lives. As Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail . . . Simplify, simplify.” Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.”

Ecological Simplicity: Simplicity means choosing ways of living that touch the Earth more lightly and that reduce our ecological impact on the web of life. This life-path remembers our deep roots with the soil, air and water. It encourages us to connect with nature, the seasons, and the cosmos. An ecological simplicity feels a deep reverence for the community of life on Earth and accepts that the nonhuman realms of plants and animals have their dignity and rights as well.

Family Simplicity: Simplicity means placing the well-being of one’s family ahead of materialism and the acquisition of things. This expression of green living puts and emphasis on providing children with healthy role models living balanced lives that are not distorted by consumerism. Family simplicity affirms that what matters most in life is often invisible – the quality and integrity of our relationships with one another. Family simplicity is also intergenerational – it looks ahead and seeks to life with restraint so as to leave a healthy Earth for future generations.

Soulful simplicity: Simplicity means approaching life as a meditation and cultivating our experience of direct connection with all that exists. By living simply, we can more easily awaken to the living universe that surrounds and sustains us, moment by moment. Soulful simplicity is more concerned with consciously tasting life in its unadorned richness than with a particular standard or manner of material living. In cultivating a soulful connection with life, we tend to look beyond surface appearances and bring our interior aliveness into relationships of all kinds.  

Frugal simplicity: Simplicity means that, by cutting back on spending that is not truly serving our lives, and by practicing skillful management of our personal finances, we can achieve greater financial independence. Frugality and careful financial management bring increased financial freedom and the opportunity to more consciously choose our path through life. Living with less also decreases the impact of our consumption upon the Earth and frees resources for others.

From Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin

Do these distinctions of simplicity connect with your own experience? How might you see yourself and your family making use of these notions of simplicity in your life ways?

Discourse and Respect

In my sermon for All Saints Sunday, I spoke about how the celebration of the Feast of All Saints calls us to recognize that we are part of something larger than ourselves. I contrasted that view with a tendency in modern Western culture to make the single solitary self the primary value, and to measure all (or most) other things in terms of how well they serve the self. I included this observation about our socio-political scene:

"Our national culture seems to get more polarized every year, encouraging us to think of our country as a series of entrenched ideologies, each hunkering down around its own base and lobbing slogans at each other from its preferred cable network; but the invitation to the communion of saints reminds us that we are part of something larger than ourselves, and as Christians we carry into public discourse our religious commitment to respect the dignity of every human being, and to treat those with whom we disagree as real persons with whom we want to build up the common good."

Do you think this is true? Is entrenched ideology a problem for us today, or simply the way we frame our discourse? Is there room today for more substantive conversation than exchanging sound bites and slogans? Do different constituencies have enough in common to really speak about the "common good"?

And do Christians have a religious commitment to engage in secular discourse in a particular way? I personally think the legal separation of church and state is a good thing. I don't want the state establishing an official church, any more than I want a single church dictating terms to the state. But I don't think that means religious values and commitments can never be a part of public discourse and secular governance. In the Episcopal baptismal service, we make a promise as part of our Baptismal Covenant to "strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being," as I quoted in my sermon. I think this constitutes a commitment to engage in public discourse in a civil manner, quite independently of any specific religious content. That is, I don't need to say that my Christian values should be imposed on everyone as universal legally enacted values; but I do need to be true to my Christian values myself, by treating those with whom I disagree with respect.

What do you think? Is there a Christian commitment to civility that should be part of the manner in which we engage in secular discourse?