Thoughts from Guatemala

After writing this entry, I realized that it was far more information than most anyone would want to sit down and read at once, so I split it into three parts for your convenience.

Part I
I don't feel like I have a lot to write about this week. It's been a pretty relaxing week...or pretty boring, whichever way you want to look at it. My leg is taking a ridiculously long time to heal, so I've been doing a lot of sitting around, and when I do go anywhere, it's on crutches, which significantly limits the places I can go. I've been doing a fair amount of reading, not as much as I had been doing before though. I've been playing an obscene amount of cribbage. I'll probably get bored with it at some point, but not yet. I've also been teaching some English, so I've been able to feel somewhat useful.
I did the most intense translating that I have ever done this week. One of the women who works in the kitchen here lost her husband in the violence of the civil war, so she talked (with translation) for about an hour and forty five minutes. Her husband was trying to helped the poor people in the area, and someone told the army that he had been helping the guerillas, so he had to flee the area for his safety. They never heard anything from him, and he became one of the tens of thousands of "disappeared". (During the civil war, the army killed any one who they thought was collaborating with the guerillas. They often did this secretively, so that people would just disappear and no one would know for sure what had happened to them. She also talked about Mayan culture, and how this city has changed in the past forty-two years since Father Greg came down here. She's been working for the mission for forty-one years, and she has lot of stories about the civil war and what she and Father Greg did to help people here. There were two families in a town near here with a total of eleven children age ten and younger. The parents from both of these families were killed in front of their children, and the priest from that community felt the children were in great danger so he called and asked Father Greg if he could help. Chona (the woman who I was translating for) went to this town and picked up the eleven kids and brought them back to the orphanage that was in San Lucas at that time. To get back they had to go through three military checkpoints, and she had to convince the soldiers that all eleven kids were hers (even though she was only thirty years old at that time). They made it back safely, and all eleven kids grew up in the orphanage here, and now live in different parts of Guatemala.

Part II
I'm slowly working my way through "Simply Christian" by N.T. Wright, and he has some pretty good stuff to say. For instance "It seems that we humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and our own inner lives, but in one another and in the shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a town, a nation." I guess I've been doing a lot of thinking about what it is I'm going to do with my life...where I'm going to find my purpose. Same days I want to go back to grad school so I can be a college professor. Other days I want to move to Latin America permanently and set up an organization in an area where no one else is really doing anything to help, and do things like help people get a fair price for their coffee, and find ways for people to get paid decent wages and be self-sufficient. Other days I want to get my pilot's license and use that to do some sort of relief and development. Some days I feel like I should work for a while, save up a bunch of money, and come to here to live in solidarity with the people and start small projects as they see fit. And of course, I still have a strong spirit of adventure that wants to do things like travel to exotic places, sail around South America, climb mountains, surf, sky-dive, take a motorcycle trip (and a bike trip) across the US, and the like. I realize that unless I die young, I will have time to do more than one of these options, but I still don't know where to begin or what path to take. I want to do something that is fulfilling for me, but helps bring justice and relieve poverty in the process.
NT Wright also says "Nor is Christianity about Jesus offering, demonstrating, or even accomplishing a new route by which people can 'go to heaven when they die'....That isn't to deny that our present beliefs and actions have lasting consequences. Rather it's to deny both that Jesus made this the focus of his work and that this is the 'point' of Christianity." So then, what is it all about? In a later section on prayer, Wright says that the Lord's prayer "sums up what a lot of Christianity is all about. It's a prayer for bread, for meeting the needs of every day. And it's a prayer for rescue from evil....The prayer says: I want to be part of his kingdom movement....I want to be part of his bread-for-the-world agenda, for myself and for others." Later, Wright claims that the Bible has the power to change the world.
If we believe all of these things (and I do), then we need to start living differently. We need to stop putting so much emphasis on getting people into heaven, and instead focus on bringing heaven to people-to feeding them, clothing them, freeing them from oppression, and helping them to find value and meaning in life. If someone is poor or hungry or oppressed, they will be much more interested in a gospel that feeds them and brings them justice than in a gospel that offers no immediate hope. True, many people have found hope in a gospel which only promises them heaven in the future, but how much better if they could find hope in a gospel that offers them immediate hope. Jesus' message wasn't "Someday the kingdom of God will come and everything will be ok." Jesus' message was "The kingdom of God is here-I'm going to feed you and heal you and restore your place in this world. (In Jesus' day, if someone was sick, it was assumed to be a result of sin, either the sin of that person or of that person's ancestors. These people were excluded from being a normal part of society, because they were unclean.) Jesus didn't give hope for the future, but hope for the present, that things were beginning to change, and that his followers had amazing power to change the messed up way things were if they would follow his example. It is important to note that when Jesus fed crowds, he didn't do it on the condition that they would go to synagogue or follow him or anything like that. Jesus love (and the actions that come from it) are unconditional, and so should ours be. We shouldn't feed and clothe people only if they agree to go to church or listen to the Bible being read. We should meet there needs because they are needy, without placing any conditions on it.

Part III
The other book I've been working on is "The Brother's Karamazov" by Dostoevsky. I'm only about half way through, but at this point I would say the book is phenomenal. The way he writes makes the other books I have been reading look mediocre by comparison (and I've read some very good books lately). I believe Dostoevsky could write about anything and I would find it fascinating. I've underlined so many things in this book I don't even know where to begin writing about it. I think I'm just going to list some of my favorite quotes here, and maybe comment on some of them later.

"[Hell] is the suffering of being unable to love."
"At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men's sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things and there is nothing else like it."
"Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God's creation....If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things."
"Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be feeling and meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education."
"God have mercy on all of them, have all these unhappy and turbulent souls in Thy keeping, and set them in the right path. All ways are Thine. Save them according to Thy wisdom. Thou art love. Thou wilt send joy to all."
"The science of this world, which has become a great power, has, especially in the last century, analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left that was sacred of old. But they have only analysed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous. Yet the whole world stands steadfast before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Has it not lasted nineteen centuries, is it not still a living, a moving power in the individual soul and in the masses of people? It is still as strong and living even in the souls of atheists, who have destroyed everything! For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has only been grotesque."
"Love [life], regardless of logic...and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it."

There's so much more, but I think that's all the quotes I'll put in here for now. Basically you just need to read this book. Not only is a great story (so far), but it is filled with challenging and thought provoking statements.

I love Latin America

It's been a pretty uneventful week, and everything is going well. A whole bunch of groups came in yesterday, which can be good and bad...hopefully it´s a good experience for all of them. I need to come back to Latin America at some point and be in a setting where I'm interacting with locals more and not around gringos so much...we'll see what I can come up with.
I'm trying to decide whether it would be good for me to be in latin America full-time long-term, or if I should be in the states, making money, raising awareness, and supporting projects here....thoughts?

For those of you who don't know...I arrived in Guatemala about 3.5 weeks ago, and aside from a week I'm spending in mexico, I'll be here until the end of june. I'm in San Lucas Toliman (on Lake Atitlan), volunteering with the Catholic mission here, it's going pretty well so far...

back at it...

It's been a while since I've written here, but I figured it would be a good way to share some of my thoughts and such in addition to the mass e-mails I'm sending. I'm going to try to do this about once a week, so we'll see how that goes.
This weekend I left San Lucas for a few days with some of the other volunteers, and we visited Panajachel and San Marcos, which are also on Lake Atitlan. It is super beautiful here, and if any of you want to get away for a little while, you should come down here to visit. You could work with the mission for a little while, and then we could do some sight-seeing type stuff, I guarantee that you'll enjoy it.
Things at the mission are going pretty well. Like any organization, it isn't perfect, but I think I'm learning a lot about how to do something like this on my own in the future. I've been considering that lately...moving to Central America and doing something that gives people decent pay and helps to better their lives a little.
One thing I've heard about since I've been here is that Coca-cola has apparently done some pretty bad things in Central and South America. I haven´t had the time to research it yet, but I would encourage you to do so and to start buying Pepsi products instead. I'll keep you posted when I learn more about this.
We had a group here from Loyala-Marimont (sp?) in L.A., and one of the girls asked me where my service emphasis comes from if I'm not Catholic. I didn't know that Protestants got such a bad rap...something for us to think about and keep working on I guess.
I've been doing a lot of reading here and I've finished "The Brothers K" by David James Duncan, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and "A Prayer for Owen Meany", and I would recommend all of them. David James Duncan is simply amazing...Zen and the Art is a bit different, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and Owen Meany is a quality book as well, though it didn't quite live up to the buzz that I had heard about it-definitely still worth reading though.
That's all for today.
Until next week...