Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Reflecting, floundering, searching.

Hello Friends,

It has been a while since I updated you on Africa and my journeying there. Mostly cause I got back, so my journeying has taken a different form. Today, however, I got to pause for a few moments and words flowed out. I wrote them down (luckily) and would like to share them with you all. If you weren't a part of USP then some of this won't make sense, for which I apologize, but I didn't want to get to bogged down in explanations.

Today my eye doctor, after learning I went to Africa, asked me if I had heard about the slaughtering in Nigeria that happened yesterday. 500 people hacked by machetes. I think he even used the word hacked. He looked at me, waiting for my response but I didn’t have one. He then talked about meeting Africans and said they were always the nicest people, but apparently they aren’t that way to each other.

My full reaction didn’t come until later as it hit me that 500 people were slaughtered with machetes. I know what those machetes look like, my Uganda brother chopped wood with one every day and my house mom, Irene, cut banana leaves with them. I also know Africans. Though Nigeria and Uganda are entirely different places, the continent of Africa still has something common woven through it. I think even African’s would agree with this.

Then there is Rwanda. I do not often think about what I experienced in Rwanda, nor the things I saw. I don’t often want to return to those feelings of shock and overwhelming sadness and anger. Today I did, though. Drew’s song, Sula Bulungi, played through my head, “I have seen children’s clothes lying bloody next to broken skulls… all these things must come to pass, all these things will happen again.” I have seen skulls with cracks from machetes and I have seen piles and piles of bloody, rotting cloths once hung on the bodies of Rwandan’s now dead. It has happened again in Nigeria between Christian’s and Muslims. Children’s skulls have been hacked by machetes, pools of blood next to broken bodies with missing limbs. It has happened again.

The eye doctor seemed to have many opinions about the condition of Africa. His first question about Uganda was, “How’s the government there? Pretty unstable?” As if he could assume everything in Africa is unstable and chaotic. Then it seemed like he expected a huge emotional reaction from me upon hearing about the killings in Nigeria.

I didn’t have a huge emotional reaction, though. I got very quiet, feeling as though I had no right to speak or give my own reaction to what I had just learned. What could I say after spending a week in Rwanda and four months in Uganda? What does it matter that I am sad about what happened in Nigeria? What does it matter that I feel a deep connection to what happened though I have never met a Nigerian? What does it matter? What can I say or do that would actually be meaningful?

The truth is I am so full of emotions about these killings in Nigeria that I don’t know what to do with them. My heart is heavy, and something very close to the Rwanda shock is near the surface of my heart again. What do I do with it all? Why I am so upset over this? Why isn’t everyone else upset about this? 500 people were hacked to death with machetes. Brother killed brother. I sit in my kitchen, smelling cookies baking in the oven, stressing about papers that need to be written. I am speechless at the disconnect between what I feel and what I do; people were murdered and I am eating cookies.

Probably a lot of these emotions are leftover from Rwanda. I was there in September, 6 months ago, and then emotions feel just as fresh and shocking as they did there. I am still speechless at what happened there and what my life is. I have no idea how to take that I experienced and integrate it into my life. It feels like I have only two options: become paralyzed by it all, or forget about it in order to live. However, we learned in Uganda that Jesus proved there is always a creative third option. Do I know what it is? No, I have no idea what the third option is here. I am searching for it, though, always searching for it.

Today the third option was teaching myself Sula Bulungi by watching the Teahouse movie. Playing that song connected me to USP friends, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, and Seattle. I was able to hold it all in my heart as my fingers held chords, my hand strummed gently, and my voice reverberated off the kitchen cupboards. I don’t know if I will find the third option tomorrow, or if it will even cross my mind to look for one. Hopefully it will, though, because I think the more I am conscious of finding a way to hold that part of my heart with all the other parts of my heart the more I will find myself connected to people, places and myself.

Love to all,
Joy

4 comments:

  1. Naked evil has no place in our world, but it is there nonetheless. I get angry when confronted with it. Then I think about good things. I adhere to the principle a life lived well is a life lived on the full side of the glass. I refuse to let the reality of evil push me to the empty side. Hopefully, you will with time be able to make a similar accommodation for yourself.

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  2. Joy. This made me weep...per usual. I constantly struggle to reconcile evil in this world. I don't know what the third option is either, except to live as Ben suggests doing the best we can to be a light to the world.
    Notice what Kathryn said..."I didn't know this happened."
    God has given you a gift and a heart of compassion to share with the world. I think that may be the point...that we continue to love and forgive even in the face of evil. Not to give it too much attention. Not to dwell in it and be brought down by it...which is what I allow sometimes. It's a constant balancing act for me...to feel the compassion, to want to make a difference, but not be brought down, except to my knees.
    Love you

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  3. Joy. Was reading last night and this is what I read. It touched me. Hope it speaks to you too.
    The setting. A former Trappist monk, James Finley, was a guest speaker at a conference. The seminar took place shortly after a horrible event in Baghdad when two handicapped women were forced to be suicide bombers.
    "How could any God allow such things to happen?" the woman asked Finley. "How are we supposed to make sense of that?
    ....
    He replied, "We can't make sense of events such as that--nor should we. We can never reason away the reality of evil and it is a mistake to try. Evil exists. Unreasonable cruelties happen and some may happen to you."
    He paused, ... then he continued. "The next level of that answer is that you take what cannot be changed on the outside and you transcend it on the inside. You use the external crisis to transform you, past the point at which crises of evil, despair, or destruction can destroy you. You must become stronger within by building a capacity inside of you that can respond to the world around you with a much greater power, the power of love."

    I thought that described what you are doing. It is a very high calling.

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  4. 1. I love you.
    2. The 3rd Way...I needed to be reminded of this. Thank you.
    3. What to do with our heavy hearts is hard.
    4. I love your heart.

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