Speech Points from Two Years ago...

To Know Where We Were...

John 8:31 – 36/38

- So, let's break it down again...

-Jesus says to them "you need to be set free from this "stuff" and my Word is the Way..."

-They say "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone."

- Maybe there's a little psychological reactance here~ as if to say "Don't tell us we're not free... we'll tell YOU how free we are—we're descendants of Abraham, not anyone's slaves"

- Here's the part that made me do a double-take: THEY WERE SLAVES IN EGYPT. Remember that whole Exodus thing? Apparently they don't... they also left-out the whole CAPTIVITY IN BABYLON part which is mysteriously similar...

- I don't think its that they don't remember or are lying... it's that they can't seem to reconcile it with their declaration. They can't reconcile being children of Abraham AND being slaves.

- So, when they reconstruct history in their minds, they remember where they came from and where they are but forget where they were in the middle. They skimmed over that part.

- Now, I've come as close to doing that as anyone here—it was my job to recap where we had been. I've been here five years.

- When I came to the university in August of 2004, Wesley was central to my social and spiritual life as an undergrad.

-This Foundation was a place where we could be accepted as part of a whole and nurtured as individuals. We went on mission trips and retreats: it was spectacular.

- We even had our own awesome praise-band that I got to be part of...

- ...and now, too, we have a great praise band. This year was a wonderful year—one that changed the way I'll think about this organization forever. I love these people and I love the way they love me...

- I could make things nice and neat and just sew together that first year and this last year. 04 and 09 are my favorite incarnations of the group.

-But to do that would leave too many parts missing

- this isn't the same program format that we had when I was a freshman, as many of you can testify.

-Many things have changed in the foundation since I was eighteen—we have a new campus minister (you're still new to me Tim)

-Some of you may have noticed our cool new lounge area in what used to be the Wesley office—or, more accurately, what used to be a giant cluttered mess where we stored everything.

-Yet, this organization did not become what it is over night—we had some darker places to visit first.

- Five years ago we had small groups spread throughout the week, which worked very well for the people who were in the Foundation when I got here. Here's the thing...

-It didn't work for us. We started to get fragmented— sometimes, only three people would come to a small group. We were too spread-out. That is a place where we've been—we were there.

- So, we got together and we talked it out. We worked through that and came up with a format that would bring us together better. We made it out of that valley... after a while...

Ú Now for another shocker: this organization is filled with human beings!!! People.

- Some forgettable times occurred during those transition years—many of us became slaves.

- Not slaves to Egypt or even necessarily to MSU but to some systemic interpersonal problems

--there was a time in this Foundation when some people were so afraid of the gossip chain that they held their experiences deep inside themselves. We were held captive—because self-disclosure is a key to relational development and it takes time and hard work to get there as a total group.

--In fact there was a time in this Foundation when we seemed to be developing nebulous factions of people. I've spent the past three years studying interpersonal communication... I STILL have no idea where that came from... except that we were more fragmented then.

--It was really difficult to tell what boundaries were social and which ones were purely psychological—at least not until we sat down as a group and talked about it.

-That was a place where we were. It wasn't anyone's fault—in fact I would say it was a giant misunderstanding. Members of the Foundation had to learn to be open again... to be vulnerable to each other and to God's purpose rather than staying slaves.

--It goes without saying that I don't like remembering some of these times.

- If people weren't getting hurt by each other, they were hurting themselves by staying isolated.

- These are places that we've been – but no matter what challenge we needed to overcome or mis-steps that were made or even successes we enjoyed—throughout that time, we never stopped being children of Abraham. AND we never stopped being part of this group's heart.

- The mistake was not being slaves because that can and does happen to us all the time, for this reason or that... the mistake is to forget that by Faith and the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ we are always children of Abraham.

--The Jews Jesus spoke to were just as much children of Abraham as Isaac and Jacob but they weren't any more children of Abraham than their ancestors who were slaves in Egypt or captives in Babylon.

- In one of my favorite Bible stories, those captives come back and rebuild a destroyed Jerusalem, you can find it in the book of Nehemiah.

- We're children of Abraham too, as Wesleyans, and we never stopped. There is no reason not to remember the difficult places we have been because we've been delivered by Love from above and by one another. Hard times will come again and they will pass again—but we're always brothers and sisters in Christ.

-And I'd also like to point out that we're here now because we wanted to be together in the end—and we are together in the end.

- It's a lesson I needed for myself when I was feeling like a fragment.

*pause*

-I wondered this afternoon what it would be like to finish my freshman year and then wake-up one August morning, years later, a twenty-two year-old man: older, wiser, still unemployed. What would it be like to wake-up as if nothing in the middle had happened... good or bad. Major or minor.

-What a terrible empty story that would be—to not have spent every one of those years with these people and remember it for the powerful experience it has been.

--We made this group work in the midst of changes that we could not help and in spite of our human nature we see flashes of God in one-another.

-I would never want us to forget the story of how we got to where we are today—

--because that journey was worth whatever life threw at us--- and I still love the Wesley Foundation.

Prayer Candle

Prayer Candle

I strike a half-chewed match,

to light my meditation candle. I watch

the yellow fish with the vermillion slipstream

dig,

with acid blue lips

into voiceless wax cylinders.

They were green or violet, to begin with, then white

and now red. They make scents for a while,

bleeding into skewbald reefs between sand-grains

every day,

and sweating into smoke. I watch this naked

ichthyologic archetype of everything that is

flames insist with undulant fluke strokes

to dive

past the waxy crater’s pastel depression

into viscous and deepening seas.

I burrow this abyssal column, probing

in my little faux comet’s wake:

When will I?

Where will I?

With whom will I?

What will we?

How will we?

God, will we?

With each whispered word

the fish flicks its fluke, too cutely, shimmying

shimmering muscles of molten brass.

I relent, then

sigh and blow the light away most nights,

wondering if what I search for is not

dark matter, a denizen of unfathomed space:

a dusky octopus inking, ghostly. Smoke wisps

rise into the wind and escape. I want to

see a flame turn on its wick

and unmoor

and leap

and unfurl its latent incendiary plumage.

I want to see the fire that flies

out of curtained, upstairs rooms

and alights upon entire communities,

gingerly setting its talons on olive trees

like a phoenix that wants to be a dove.

Lions' Den

Writer’s block can be as much a disease of too much as too little, especially when you are the Mission Intern in Palestine during the statehood bid. There is a traffic jam at the front of my mind; as narrow as the streets are here, you cannot unjam without someone going in reverse. So I am backing away from President Abbas’s triumphant return to Ramallah and what it means in the occupied territories so I can return to Hebron. Zoughbi took Gabby and me to the bus station that morning to meet with Usama, the citizen diplomacy coordinator. Citizen diplomacy, in a nutshell, is converting well-meaning tourists into viable activists in their countries of origin.

“John Daniel,” said Zoughbi, “you know what means Daniel? He is the one who fights with lions!” I smiled. “And you know what means Usama? Forget about Osama Bin Laden...”

“I already have—what does Usama mean?”

“It means lion; so, you are fighting with him, right?” I laughed but I got to thinking. My understanding of Daniel in the lions’ den has changed, now that I work with two lions (yes, we have another Usama at Wi’am): it was the Babylonian occupiers who penned the lions. Perhaps Daniel joined the lions in solidarity or the lions were not savage, as they were billed. I’m sure Daniel’s family was really worried, though, after hearing about lions on the news...

Of course, Daniel does not mean “fights with lions”; it means “God is my judge”.

Usama narrated our journey across the West Bank. Bethlehem is area A, under the Palestinian Authority, but we had to take an Israeli by-pass road through area C. To review, area C is under the complete control of the neo-Israel state, so people from places like Walajah cannot build houses or dig wells without having them demolished. This is also where most illegal settler development takes place but I will leave that topic for a post about the protest in Walaja. What I want you to picture is the sublime beauty and simultaneous emptiness of area C. Confined in Bethlehem, people must build vertically, stacking family units like legos on top of their relatives. The landscape between checkpoints is rippled with rocky hills so that, if it would just rain more and more trees grew, it would look just like Kentucky. Instead, the hills were studded with shrubs, grasses and the occasional field of crops. Oh, and the settler shopping-center (We didn’t visit)

The bus dropped us on a traffic island in Hebron, next to a pedestrians-only street. Hebron is the largest Palestinian urban center in the West Bank*. The whole place was teeming with people and smelled of falafel and hubz~ I wanted to eat the entire contents of that street*. Instead, we burrowed South into the ‘old city’ with our pod of British students. I took many pictures from my hip that day. What I adored most and wanted to capture was the sense of passage, as through a tunnel. Many times, we literally did pass under an arch into the dark space beneath solid buildings while at other times the space between buildings was little more than a fissure. Coming from the ‘New World’, there is something I cannot quite ingest about stone edifices that are over a thousand years old but used normally. It is the same in the monolithic storefront by King David’s well, where you can enter a store built before the inquisition and buy an iPod shuffle. Yet in Hebron there is a sense of being submerged, as if diving along a reef. The colors support the metaphor: jewelry, candies, handmade dresses and all manner of dazzling wares line the narrows of the Hebron market.

Unfortunately, a wire mesh is all that shelters it from trash, feces, urine, and insults. About four-hundred settlers injected themselves into the old-city and began waging psychological warfare. Internationals are not allowed to see, of course. A solid, metal gate sets the settler section of the old city apart and hides their streets from view; the soldier in the adjacent tower warned us not to take any pictures. Evil finds ways to blur its outline. It’s like an infestation and I cannot help but notice the irony: Nazi anti-Semitic posters featured rats with the Star of David on their haunches and here are these people, throwing shit and scurrying back into their holes. That does not seem like the conscientious Jewish lady who vaccinated me in New York or my colleague from student government. Race cannot diminish anyone’s humanity but a racist heart makes people sub-human the more they dehumanize others. Behavior, not blood, makes someone a rat.

Only a starving lion wants to eat a rat. So the rats starve the lions? ...I don’t get it...

Abraham’s tomb is at the end of the Hebron market place, beyond its own small check-point. The Church over the tomb became a mosque, then a church, then a mosque again before the occupation turned more than half of it into a Synagogue. It’s a form of collective punishment: rather than turn it entirely to Synagogue, they make Muslims who worship there remember that more than half of it is off-limits. In fact, tourists of all different shades are allowed into the Synagogue, so long as they are not Arab—even Arab Christians, like my co-worker. That’s racist. Just racist.

So, I lived up to my name and sat with Usama and the Brits while Gabby (who is Muslim) snuck into the Synagogue (by pretending to be Chicana—sock it to them!) We had mint tea with some shop-keepers and relaxed away from the sun, trading stories. On the way out, Usama took us up a narrow set of stairs, up onto a roof-top for a geography lesson. The day before, he did the same thing from a housetop in the refugee camp that overlooks the apartheid wall. There [in greater Bethlehem], the ‘dangerous’ lion Usama reflected on the occupation and how it had affected his life. The house where he spend childhood, his grandparent’s farm and the fields he grew-up playing in were engulfed when the wall was erected.

“Are you looking forward to a two state solution?” one of our tourists asked him.

“I hoped for a one-state solution... where we could all be equal citizens and co-exist but...”

So savage, huh? The guy who told the Israeli guard to “have a nice day”? Maybe not savage but definitely fierce for going in there, time after time~ I want to fight with the lions. Mission with.

Daniel: God is my judge. Elijah: My God is the Lord. A young man named Elijah, appropriately, prophesied over me about a year ago. He told me to take care of the little things, that God was going to do something great that would blow my mind. Now, I am in Palestine and still learning, still growing. I have a long way to go, yet. Elijah also told me that there was meaning in names and to pay attention to that. I always considered my name rather simple and arbitrary, something to distinguish me from my father and grandfather.

But I would not be here if God were not my judge. Do you know why?

John: God is gracious. My judge is gracious.

*Later, I had the best falafel sandwich ever for only 3 shekels. WIN. 

*Nablus is actually the largest, though Hebron is larger than Bethlehem [10/30/2017]

Mother Knows Best

Dear Ma,

You know that the feminists love it when I call you ‘Ma’. I am speaking to the God who appeared to me in the vision just before my grandmother died, the woman who plucked me onto her magic carpet from the blackness of space when I floated too far. That was one year ago today. I can hardly absorb that You may have known my path then. The way I saw You holding my sister reminded me of what Jesus said just as he entered Jerusalem: “Jerusalem! Jerusalem! How I long to gather you under me like a mother hen gathers her chicks...” I’m almost there.

But I still don’t "get" You all the time. As I was settling down to write about the challenge of thinking in shekels instead of dollars, I scanned my iTunes list for some groove-support. I had the urge to listen to a song I would not normally, “One More Day” by Diamond Rio. It has the familiar warmth of sing-able love songs and okay instrumentation: guitar, piano, mandolin, soft percussion.

The day the person who gave me that track left, I was so far into her black & white world that I couldn’t help but be Rick Blaine in her “Casa Blanca” moment, telling her to go as she disappeared. There could not be even one more day. I loved that film. I also loved “The Wedding Singer”, where Robby Hart jumps on the plane and steals Julia from her douche-bag fiancé. When I have the choice, I want to be Robby Hart. This time, the woman drove into the sunset and disappeared (many know this story~ it's a really great ending!)

What felt like an amputation was actually a final cadence—resolved, poetically. I’m happier in this life. Why would you draw my attention there, when I am past regret? Yet, there is something resonant in the chorus: “One more day. One more time. One more sunset, maybe I’d be satisfied... but then again, I know what it would do: leave me wishing, still, for one more day with you.”

...but I had no time to contemplate sunsets. It was night in Bethlehem, just then, when Mr. Zoughbi called and invited me to join him at a wedding reception. Just as a reminder, You had sent me to Palestine. Ten minutes later, I was walking into a ballroom at the community center. A multitude of Arab people were clapping their hands, dancing and raising the roof in celebration. The guys basket-tossed the groom and then the couple more or less crowd surfed. In the background, a Palestinian DJ rotated through an endless collection of songs with heavy back-beats beneath traditional Arab vocals, pipes and strings. It was overwhelming...

“This is Arab music!” said Zoughbi with pride, “You can dance, if you want!”

I watched for what felt like a long time, trying to decipher the cultural secret to not embarrassing myself. I love dancing the same way I love soccer—I do what comes naturally and have little technical training. Here, I would also be the strange white person who showed-up in jeans. Then that voice started talking to me—the one that says things like:

“If you don’t improvise something, then you have nothing to play at all...”

“Look at the male Israeli guard—he doesn’t want to be here any more than you do...”

“At worst, everybody will think you love gay-people and, c’mon, you do love gay people...”

“Shake the meth-head’s hand and introduce yourself~ that will disarm him.”

This time it said “You’re a token white-guy sitting at the table, too; your soul will be better for dancing.” I continued to watch for a few minutes longer, remembering how disappointed I had been at cousin Beth’s wedding because there had been no dancing at the reception. Even more, I hated to miss Pat’s wedding~ my ‘twin’ cousin, born the day before me.

“I love weddings,” I said to Zoughbi, “I had to miss my cousin’s wedding...”

I finished my beer and headed to the dance floor. I forgot all my ‘moves’ from high school... thank goodness! I watched the people around me, in ties and dresses like any other wedding, moving to this strange, catchy music. I felt a tingle come over me—I liked the music. Even better, they seemed to dance on the same principles I did—just move with the beats and don't worry! One young fella looked like he was trying to make headway with a girl. Little children were bouncing on their parents’ shoulders. People were joining hands and going in circles, or clapping and stamping their feet. Ma, that’s when I think You whispered to me, “Taste and see all the parts of you I made for other places and people...”

You had taken me back to that state of mind, when I just wanted a little certainty—just one more day like ‘those days’. It was like running into a wraith of myself, some version that was never meant to be—living alone in Grand Rapids, slowly metabolizing inertia. As I joined the celebration of lives coming together, I came into myself again in the uncanniness: strobe lights, photographers, kids running around tables and... Arab techno, people smoking apples through water-pipes and a cake-cutting ceremony that involved a sword (sword!). I was full of good food and I could hardly stop laughing and smiling at all the people ‘getting down’ to the music. I don’t know how the Muslim residents do weddings but the Christians know how to party.

“You will see many more weddings like this, in my family,” said Zoughbi, when I returned again. It was so wonderful, Ma, to be in the midst of people who relish life lived with the throttle up.

When I thought I was ready to just watch again, a lyric grabbed my attention—in English:

“I had... the time of my li-ife... and I owe it all to you-uuuuu.”

It was a cheesy techno version of the song but I danced as I have not in years; I really was having the time of my life and I owe it all to You. Like I told Plainfield and Constantine United Methodist Churches, “There is something greater than believing in yourself—which is believing in God’s vision for you!”

The temptation is to say that I have left Diamond Rio and the warmth of love songs behind. Ma, I give you more credit than that. Nothing will be wasted. You would not let me settle and miss the possibilities that were here for me. I wanted so badly to create what my parents never had that I was in a hurry to put together that life of contentment before You had given me all of these new gifts. As I said when I retitled this blog, You are a God who sees in Rainbow colors, who wouldn’t leave me saying “play it again Sam” but saying “I just want to grow old with you.”

The biggest difference of all, though, is that You have become the number one woman in my life. And I have to say, You are one hell of a woman to make so many women that I admire—like my Grandmother who passed away or
...someone else, out there.