Why take a rest?

Once a week I  leave the slum to take a day of rest—I usually am welcomed by friends who live in homes with more amenities and conveniences that I even have at home in the US. In the morning, I leave the slum with my overnight bag, and realize: My friends do not have a break from this life. They don’t have a “rest”. They don’t take a break from the fecal matter and refuse on the streets. They don’t “get away” from this. 

Talking to one 17 year old friend—she doesn’t have any safe place outside of her Mom’s shack on the tracks.  She doesn’t have any positive role model. No friend to offer consolation or hope. Not even one who will listen. When she and her Mom don't get along, she gets mad, as teenagers do, but in a rage that she describes as "It's me, but it's not me." Her Mom tells her to just go sell her body. Our friend comes to us with her body racking in sobs--she doesn't ever want to do that! Especially not with her memories of being raped and abused. We offer her to come to our house, take a shower, put on clean clothes and rest. She is scared her brother will send his friends to take her home where he will beat her.

This life is violent. It is not just that the streets stick and are trashed—some are actually quite lovely. It’s not that the houses are shacks—some are newly redone. Sometimes I walk home forgetting that this is a “slum”. But the violence in the families, often hidden behind the front door—I hear it in the language of the children. It is in the voices and actions of mothers and fathers. It is visible in bruises and scarred skin from wounds or needles. It is deeply hidden in the sad and angry, disconnected look of the eyes. Brokenness. Loss of any self-worth. A sense of despair. It seeps in. 

I can deal with cold showers, squat toilets, and eating rice every day. I get used to the smells and the ugliness. I learn how to hiss the cats away from my window.

Just one day when I really enter the life of a friend—I see her fragility. I see this violence of life for the first time. I cannot imagine being a teenager already so hardened, so lost, and so alone.

Why take a day of rest? I know this isn’t my life forever. I’m not even going to really “solve” or “cure” problems.  But to regain a sense of vision—to digest these realities. To see again, with new eyes, the poverty, the despair. To regain my own hope, my own sense of self. Without a rest, I get accustomed to the poverty and can remove myself from it. Every time I leave, I find myself returning to enter the poverty with a new depth. It’s good to be reminded that the world is bigger. That I am small.

"Jesus Loves Me"

Cradle-Catholic

I grew up reading the picture Bible and going to church on Sundays. I scorned the 'watered down theology' of "Jesus Loves Me" and I focused in studying correct teaching. 

(granted that coloring pictures of a happy Jesus and

 looking at candles at Sunday school doesn't quite nourish a hungry soul), 

My experience of "church", of faith, has always been with Jesus. I spend my time in prayer and study of faith often wanting to know the details, the semantics, the "right" theology. There is an immense amount of theology in this world--there are those in the Church that we say are "liberal" and "conservative"... What we often miss is how the "Church" doesn't really fall into a category (especially one which we think of in political terms). I am quite a perfectionist and also sort of a linguist--I get really into semantics. If someone says something, I may find better words to fit. If I don't understand something, it's often because the words seem to say something else as I think of the literal meaning versus the modern/cultural/contextual meaning...

The part I missed is the foundation of any teaching. I missed it because it is something we have to have eyes open to see. We must experience it to really know it.

 What is it that I have missed?

In Gregory Boyle's book, "Tattoos on the Heart", he shares his experiences as a Catholic priest in Los Angeles, at Dolores Mission--the poorest parish in the widest gang area of the country. He founded Homeboy Ministries, an outreach that hires and trains homies for jobs. 
The biggest outreach: to Love. 
Yes, to Love the drug-addicted-tattooed-hardened-by-life gang members... probably the most well known hardened group of sinners we could label in our society.

"'Behold the One beholding you and smiling.' It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God's DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment...." 

(Tattoos on the Heart, p 28).

Now that's something I never thought of! God is never disappointed? 

He made me for way more than what I live, for more beauty, more dignity, more happiness--and I fail to live it... But He is there, "beholding me and smiling"?!... Just loving me? 
When I mess up, I almost expect something like a heated meeting in the principal's office, or an icy silence to communicate disappointment, or the constant resurfacing of my failure--to be reminded all the time that I suck. 

..."Homies seem to live in the zip code of the eternally disappointing, and need a change of address. To this end, one hopes (against all human inclination) to model not the "one false move" God but the "no matter whatness" of God. You seek to imitate the kind of God you believe in, where disappointment is, well, Greek to Him. You strive to live in the black spiritual that says, "God looks beyond our fault and sees our need." (Tattoos on the Heart, p 52)

I suppose this is why we can say that God is too busy loving us to be disappointed--

He looks beyond our fault and sees our need. 

When we fall we don't need someone to stand with their arms folded 

and look at us on the ground--

we don't need the one to stare at us, making us feel guilty for failing--

The old fable of the North Wind and the Son--

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveller came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the first one to succeed in making the traveller take off his cloak should be stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew, the closer did the traveller fold his cloak around him, and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveller took off his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

We need the One who will "Love us" off the ground. 

We need the same Father who welcomes his son home after 

spending allllll his inheritance on gambling and fun.

We need the one who loves us pass all understanding. 

Does Jesus Love Me? 

I can say: Yea. He does.
I experience the love of God in my life. My eyes are newly opened--to the love I am given immeasurably every day--
the eyes, the gestures, the words of each encounter with each person I meet. 


...And marinating in this new perspective of who my God is, and how He loves me...

I know it is far more honest for me to live my life well in return for an immense Love that I don't deserve, than out of fear or shame that compels me to "earn" my way to Eternal Life.  


...I know that I am called to love you too.