development.

This probably goes without saying, but I haven’t been blogging much. Or writing. But every time I sit down to write something, it ends up sounding very similar to what I was saying three weeks ago. Yesterday I sat down to write an e-mail to a friend, but after writing a paragraph I realized that my e-mail was almost exactly the same as an e-mail I sent her a month before.

The external change has been obvious. Working in a church is new. Community organizing in indigenous communities is new. Public education around sustainable agriculture is new. Living in Spanish is new. Resistencia is new. The food is new. The support systems are new. The options for how to spend my free time are new. Almost every day I experience a new situation or setting or question or event.

But even though the external change has been profound, the internal change has taken more time. Every once in a while I am confronted with an aspect of this change, but something I learned quickly was that understanding what has changed doesn’t mean I have any idea what to do about it. For example, a couple of days ago a friend asked me if I was growing spiritually.

Um…probably?

The thing is, the things I used to do for spiritual growth and fulfillment – prayer services at church, conversations with certain friends, meetings with my spiritual director – aren’t options in this new setting. I know what I’m missing. I know that I’ve lost the consistent space for community prayer, the sounding boards for new ideas and the spaces to talk about old questions. What that leaves me with, though, are questions and needs, but not necessarily with any answers. Recognizing (and even embracing) the change is one thing. Moving from the loss of certain things to the acquisition of new processes, routines and systems seems to be a whole different story.

I’m currently in the middle of The Way We Were: A Story of Conversion and Renewal by Joan Chittister. It's a book about how a particular group of nuns confronted the effects of large-scale social change in their small religious community and their personal spiritual practices. A few days ago I was reading and came across the following passage:

It was a time of transition, of course, but to what?

Simply dismantling the assumptions of a past era, we soon learned, had little or nothing to do with making a successful bridge to a new one.

In the first place, new eras evolve slowly. They do not appear overnight. Scripture is clear about it: the chosen people wandered for forty years in the desert “until the older generation died off.” Social transition demands that people be given the opportunity not simply to put down old ideas but to try out some new ones along the way.

In the second place, people must be ministered to tenderly in times of great change. None of us is independent of the ideas that formed us. They tell us what our world is like. They tell us our proper place in it. They tell us who we are. To lose those definitions is to lose the very mainstays of our lives. To lose all of them at once is even more traumatic.

Development of ideas and the development of people go hand in hand, then. All the time we are exploring new ways to go about life, it is equally important that we support in their personal growth the people who will be most affected both by the loss of the past and the demands of the new future.  After all, however irrelevant the things of the past may now be, they are at least familiar. However enticing the future may seem, it is at best unpredictable.

Last week I spent a day in the home of a community developer who works with indigenous communities living in and around a town called La Leonesa. Until 1991, the economy of La Leonesa and nearby Las Palmas was almost entirely dependent on a local sugar mill. In ‘91, after 109 years, the mill went bankrupt and left many people without jobs and at risk of being evicted from the land on which they were living, which had previously been owned by the sugar company. The indigenous communities organized and were able to take control of the land. As it turned out, though, that was only the very beginning of the process. After over 100 years of a local economy sustained almost entirely by sugar production, the communities had to re-learn how to use their land to produce the things they needed. It was a slow process, defined most often by long periods of information gathering and evaluation.

More than anything else, this man emphasized the slow process of development. Simply re-gaining ownership of the land on which they lived did not mean they knew how to best utilize the land as they worked to rebuild the local economy. And learning the technical aspects of running a ranch or dairy farm did not immediately lead to the shift in social customs necessary when moving from one general lifestyle to another. For example, in the past few years, a major topic of discussion has been finding ways to teach younger generations the knowledge needed to sustain an agricultural lifestyle and instilling in them pride for agricultural work. The buy-in of younger generations is a necessary part of creating a sustainable economic system, but this wasn’t something they could simply make happen. It has been a process full of many questions and a lot of learning.

I was struck by the ways that the experience of the community in La Leonesa spoke to the feelings I had been having for the past couple of weeks. It was a good reminder that this year is a process, and that I will not just know how to live well in this new setting, but will have to take the time to learn, to adjust, to try different approaches and evaluate the experiences I’ve had. I also hope it will be a lesson I will take with me as I continue to work in the world, pursuing justice and supporting community growth wherever I end up. After 20 years, the people of La Leonesa are still committed to growth, still asking questions, and still willing to acknowledge and address their weaknesses. Beautiful.

All my love.

bariloche.

Misión María Magdalena (MMM), one of my placement sites this year, is a church community consisting primarily of women and their children. Because of this, an important part of the church's work is promotion of women’s health and safety. To support this work, each year the church sends a group of women to the National Women's Gathering. A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to accompany the women as they traveled to Bariloche for this year’s gathering. We also had the chance to visit the local Lutheran church and the local YAGM volunteer, Emily! What a wonderful blessing to have some time to sit with her and talk about our experiences here in Argentina so far (and get in a couple of episodes of 30 Rock).

The National Women’s Gathering is a coming together of thousands of women from across Argentina who participate in workshops (really more like discussion groups) on a variety of subjects related to women in society. During the last session of each discussion group, a conclusion statement is written. These conclusions are read to the entire group of women on the final morning, and then all of the statements are used by the event’s organizers as a basis for their advocacy work and policy promotion during the coming year. The women of MMM attended a workshop on reproductive rights, and were recognized in their group’s final statement as positive examples of church action in social issues. This was an important moment for these women as they reflect on their work over the past years and prepare for the upcoming changes in leadership and structure at MMM (I’ll talk more about this as time goes on).

We were also able to fit in a few days of sightseeing, both in Bariloche and in El Bulson, two hours south. Below are some pictures from the week. 

All my love. 

stages of instability.

I’m feeling impatient. I am reminded again and again of why I am here, of how well this community fits with my questions and interests, but it often feels just out of my reach. There are wonderful things going on all around me but I don’t always have the Spanish skill or the background knowledge to understand or participate in what is happening.

I go to meetings and events excited to ask questions, to listen and learn, to get to know the people in my community. Usually, though, after a few slow, concentrated conversations, my energy begins to fade. Even when conversations go well, my vocabulary level doesn’t allow for particularly engaging discussions. Really, this is what I expected, but when talking with a woman about how the local church can provide better support around the issue of family violence in the neighborhood, or listening to parents discuss their efforts to organize a advocacy group for parents of children with disabilities, or talking to a group of teenagers about the effects of pesticides in their communities, I want to wrestle with the ideas, not with the words themselves.

Thank goodness for the patience of others. Today, as I walked home from work after a day of collecting dirt from the backyard that we will make into clay for the kids, I thought about a sermon I heard in high school. At the time, I wasn’t particularly blown away, but for some reason it has stuck with me through the years. The point was that throughout the Gospel, people approached Jesus in many different ways, but all with similar results. Some came looking. Some were sought after. Some were making a desperate final attempt at finding some peace. And some were carried. Sometimes when we are incapable and unprepared, the people around us are the ones that do the important work. Now, as I struggle to have patience with myself, I am feeling carried by the patience of the people around me: the effort of my host parents as they take the time to really talk to me, the willingness of my supervisor to meet with me after every meeting to go over everything at a slower pace, an e-mail from home that says exactly the right things.

In my human moments, the moments where I forget about grace and patience and just feel frustrated, I often make my way back to a prayer I was given a couple of years ago during another period of impatience.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are, quite naturally,

impatient in everything to reach the end

without delay.

We should like to skip

the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being

on the way to something unknown,

something new.

And yet, it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through some stages of instability–

and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.

Your ideas mature gradually–

let them grow, let them shape themselves,

without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today

what time (that is to say, grace and

circumstances acting

on your own good will)

will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say that this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of

feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Teilhard de Chardin

All my love.

iguazú.

It occurred to me that you might want to know a bit more about what I've been doing here in Argentina. So, in an effort to make this blog about more than just my feelings, and in an attempt to show off the fact that I've actually taken a few pictures (something I haven't done in years!), here we go...

My first weekend here I traveled with the women of Misión Maria Magdalena to Misiones, a province in northeastern Argentina, for a meeting of Lutheran women in Northern Argentina. It gave me a chance to meet a variety of women and learn from them as they discussed what it meant for the church to be present with older women in their communities. From there we drove the extra 90 minutes to Iguazú Falls. It is the kind of place that seems too beautiful to be true. These pictures hardly capture the falls’ enormity or exceptional beauty, but they’ll give you a taste of what we saw.

All my love.

pack nothing.

I have a history of overpacking. Even going to the grocery store, I have a tendency to carry two or three books along, just in case I have an extended period of time to read. Still, during our orientation in Buenos Aires, when we were asked to share something we packed that represented what we might bring to our new communities, what of ourselves we might share or leave behind, I found myself at a loss. So much stuff, and couldn’t come up with anything that I might have to give. Throughout orientation, some of the other volunteers and I joked that the only thing we were really good at was hugging. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem appropriate for the current setting.

I couldn’t come up with any skills, any pieces of knowledge or gifts, nothing tangible that I could think to share. And really, I felt this way consistently as I prepared for the year. I expected to come and live and learn and fall in love with people and places and simply be here in Resistencia. But no part of me expected to come here and have anything to give. Nothing beyond the giving of oneself that is always a part of relationships.

Yet somehow, for now, this feels like enough. I am here because I am trying to trust in the value of simply being together, trying to have faith in the possibility of learning lessons from one another that are not intentional, but sneak in unexpectedly. I am here because of the consistent reminders that God is present with the people in Resistencia, and because of a hope that through them I might find some of the ways that God is present with me and my community in the US. I am here because I think that God is doing good things in the world, and we as people of God need to figure out how to be a part of that good.

I recently read Nadia Bolz-Weber’s commencement address for the class of 2011 at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary (PLTS) in Berkeley. She starts off by saying this:

Perhaps you are sitting here… thinking am I now prepared?  Do you really have what it takes to serve the church as a pastor or lay leader or educator? And the answer is: don’t be silly. Of course you don’t.  If you are worried that you have weaknesses and deficiencies and short-comings or, as we recovering alcoholics call them, “defects of character,” you can stop worrying.  You’re right.  You really don’t have what it takes. 

She then goes on to talk about how our strengths and confidence can get in the way, but our failures and uncertainties, the things we don’t understand and have yet to learn, those are the things we can bring when pursuing true service and community. Thank goodness.

What I did bring – hope for a year full of surprises and faith that something will come of it – wasn’t something I could figure out how to share. As I thought about this, I found myself looking back to Passover Remembered, by Alla Bozarth-Campbell, something we read together during the large-group orientation in Chicago. For me, right now, it is a small reminder of the importance of the journey rather than the plans, the preparation, and the specifics of what we might bring.

Pack nothing.

Bring only your determination to serve

and your willingness to be free.

Don’t wait for the bread to rise.

Take nourishment for the journey, but eat standing,

be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind –

fear, silence, submission.

Only surrender to the need of the time –

to love tenderly, act justly and walk humbly with your God.

Do not take time to explain to the neighbors.

Tell only a few trusted friends and family members.

Then begin quickly, before you have time to sink

back into old slavery.

Set out in the dark.

I will send fire to warm and encourage you.

I will be with you in the fire and I will be with you in the cloud.

You will learn to eat new food and find refuge in new places.

I will give you dreams in the desert to guide you safely home to

that place you have not yet seen.

The stories you tell one another around the fires in the dark will

make you strong and wise.

Outsiders will attack you, and some will follow you,

and at times you will get weary and turn on each other

from fear and fatigue and blind forgetfulness.

You have been preparing for this for hundreds of years.

I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way

and to learn my ways more deeply.

Some of you will be so changed by weathers and wanderings

that even your closest friends will have to learn your features

as though for the first time.

Some of you will not change at all.

Some will be abandoned by your dearest loves

and misunderstood by those who have known you since birth

and feel abandoned by you.

Some will find new friendships and unlikely faces,

and old friends as faithful and true as a pillar of God’s flame.

Sing songs as you go, and hold close together.

You may at times grow confused and lose your way.

Continue to call each other by the names I’ve given you,

to help remember who you are.

Touch each other and keep telling stories.

Make maps as you go,

Remembering the way back from before you were born.

So you will be only the first of many waves of deliverance on the desert seas.

It is the first of many beginnings – your Paschaltide.

Remain true to this mystery.

Pass on the whole story. Do not go back.

I am with you now and I am waiting for you.

All my love.