Pull Out the Crayons

Last night I started a 4-week learning lab on creativity with ReIMAGINE. Creativity is one of the 7 vows that we take together to live out the teachings of Jesus. We believe that living artfully helps us to live out God's unfolding story in our cultural time and place, and that when we exercise creativity we are reflecting the Creator.

The particular team who put the creativity learning lab together decided to roll with creativity as "child-like wonder, creativity, and faith". So we are doing kid things. For example, during our lab time last night dozens of grown-ups could be found sprawled out on the sidewalks and in Dolores Park doing "rubbings" where you place your paper over objects of different textures, then "rub" the crayon over it so you get that shape on your paper.

We are all keeping a daily journal for the duration of the learning lab-- but not an ordinary grown up journal. It is a "doodle pad" (mine has a happy turtle on the cover) and we have agreed to use only crayons in our journaling. I happened to have a mega-box of crayons in my closet, so I enthusiastically got them out and dove right into crayon journaling this morning.

Crayons don't flow like a nice Bic rollerball pen does. Crayons are chunky and imprecise and wrapped in paper that you have to keep peeling off. But on the other hand, they smell like childhood, and I have 64 colors to choose from with names like "spring green" and "mulberry". Bics come in red, black, and blue. Period.

Jesus said "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Will journaling with crayons help me live my life more like Jesus? That remains to be seen. But in the meantime, I did catch myself sticking my tongue out in child-like concentration a couple of times.

The Ass of Grace

Prologue
My friends Ed and vicki!—in moment so silly I can’t even tell you how it came about—challenged me to write a blog post called “The Ass of Grace.” “The phrase doesn’t even make sense” I protested, but in an optimistic act of bravado they upped the ante by promising to donate $100 each to my travel fund if I end up going to Haiti. So here goes….

The Ass of Grace
My friends use the word “ass” a lot. There are the common phrases having to do with ass, such as:
“Nice ass”
“Move your ass”
“Kick ass”
“Haul ass”

But my friends have come up with some hybrid ass-phrasing that is a regular part of our conversations and I’ve come to realize that many of them are strongly related to the concept of grace.

If we define “grace” as receiving favor that you don’t deserve or haven’t earned, then many of the ass phrases embraced by my friends have grace-full meanings.

We’ll start with an easy one. If someone looks at another person and says “what an ass!” (but not in the good way like they have junk in their trunk and look good in their jeans) and this person is shaking their head and casting a disapproving look, they mean the person has misbehaved in some way. Who needs grace—free favor—more than someone who is misbehaving?

When someone “falls on her ass” it is quite literally and figuratively a grace issue. If she literally fell on her ass—say whilst skating at a roller rink listening to "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees—then this illustrates lack of grace in the sense of ease of movement. But if someone “falls on her ass” in the figurative sense, it is rather about failure or being unsuccessful, as in “she blew that presentation and fell on her ass”. Who needs grace—free favor—more than someone who has failed miserably at something?

My friend vicki! uses the term “show your ass” quite often, as in “he went ballistic when we broke up, and really showed his ass”. When you “show your ass” you are unveiling the undesirable things about yourself; there are no pretences, no hiding, just the reality of who and what you are. Who needs grace—free favor—more than someone who has hung their worst bits out there for everyone to freely see and judge?

When referring to someone’s “sorry ass” it means that something pathetic has inadvertently been revealed about you, and someone is calling out your “sorry ass” with a tinge of disdain in their voice, as in “take a shower and get your sorry ass over here”. Who needs grace—free favor—more than someone who is acting pathetic?

Last but not least, my friends frequently use the term “foot up your ass” which means to strongly motivate someone. For example, when my friends vicki! and Ed set up a date to meet with me to follow-up on my desire to travel to Haiti, they threatened me that “these two Filipinos will have our feet so far up your ass that you will burp adobo!” This is how my friends talk. I don’t make this stuff up. Anyway, who needs grace—free favor—more than someone who has another person following up with them when they may or may not have finished or carried out the thing that the person is following up with them about in the first place?


Now I ask you….do Ed and vicki! both owe me $100 for my Haiti trip? You bet your ass.

Mom's Mispronunciation Disorder

My mom: "So when are you going to Tahiti?"
Me: "What? Tahiti? When did I say I was going to Tahiti?"
My mom: "You know, in October."
Me: "Oh. You mean Haiti, not Tahiti."

Five minutes later.

My mom: "How far away is Hades?"
Me: "Haiti, mom. Hades is hell and I'm not going to hell."
My mom: "Well how far away is it?"
Me: "Haiti is below Florida".
My mom: "Oh, so it isn't too far away."
Me: "No, but these conversations will drive me to Hades."

The Push and Pull of Haiti

A week ago I got an email that froze the blood in my veins like water pipes in Antarctica. It was an email informing me that my October teaching trip to Oregon had been canceled. The reason I reacted so strongly was because I knew there was a trip to Haiti planned for the same week, and the only thing that had kept me from signing up for Haiti was this other commitment.

Knowing that I was now available to go to Haiti, the first thing I did was to quiet myself in my big easy chair, and pray about it. I felt a strong inclination to go. So I emailed Beyond Borders, to see if they were still planning a trip for October, and they said that they were not going to offer the trip in October, but there is a possibility of one in November, and probably another in late December. There are a lot of extraneous details about specific travel dates and people going to and from Haiti, but that is not what I want to write about.

What I want to write about it the push and pull of Haiti.

The Pull of Haiti
One of the biggest things pulling me to Haiti is that I want to say “yes” as an act of obedience to the Voice that has been calling me to go to Haiti. I don’t know why I have Haiti in heart. It’s just there. As I’ve written before, my interest was roused when I read about Haitians making dirt cakes to fill their bellies, and my sense of sadness and outrage has continued. But unless I actually get on a plane and GO, I am never going to know what the heck that Voice was all about.

The Push of Haiti
Haiti is a developing country that struggled through hard times long before January’s earthquake made things even more difficult to live and survive there. In my past travels to developing countries I’ve paid a high emotional toll-- and perhaps spiritual toll— equal to at least one million trips across the Golden Gate of my heart and spirit. It’s hard to be around the poverty, the crime, the dirtiness, the weariness from being on guard against being hustled, scammed, cheated, and stolen from. I hate walking around developing countries imagining locals looking at me like a walking ATM machine.

The Pull of Haiti
Through the Transformational Travel program, it’s kind of Beyond Borders’ job to make Haiti and the Haitians more approachable and welcoming to the people going on these trips. Traveling with a program like this would be a much different experience than my usual method of showing up somewhere alone with my backpack and passport saying “here I am!” In this rare case, am drawn to the facilitated approach where I can meet and make friends with locals and be exposed to the amazing work being done in collaboration with Haitians.

The Push of Haiti
Parting with $2,000 for program fees and flights is a terrible idea at a time when I am underemployed and my current consulting opportunities are scarce at best. Not only is my financial budget going to suffer, but my time budget will also take a hit. Since September/October is the start up time for a lot of the programs that I work with, Fall is a awful time for me to go running off for 1-2 weeks. I’ll be scrambling to catch up when I get back.

The Pull of Haiti
There is something to be said about the appeal of saying YES to an adventure in the midst of countless unknowns and fears. At my age most people have families, jobs, and mortgages, and they have defaulted to a safety zone that they call their life. To drop everything and go to Haiti is adventurous, hard core, crazy, exhilarating. This is the way I want to live.

I believe I’m called to go, so I will go. The details of when, what, who, and how will be revealed in their time.

Book Reflection: On That Day Everybody Ate

On that Day Everybody Ate, by Margaret Trost.

Ms. Trost’s story begins with a “reverse mission” trip to Haiti in which the goal of the hosting organization is for the participants to be transformed. She volunteered in a hospital and orphanage and observed first-hand the physical hunger that the Haitian people suffer and the spiritual satiety they posses. She returned to the U.S. so transformed that she recognized a series of events for what they were—a personal call to help feed the hungry children and adults in Haiti.

Partnering with a local Haitian Catholic church, she raised the money to start a feeding program that provided one hardy meal a week to 500 children—some of whom walked 5 miles to get that meal. Donations kept rolling in so she started a non profit—the What If? Foundation, based in Berkeley-- and they were soon feeding 1,000 people five days a week, as well as running a summer camp and sending some kids to school with scholarships.

All of this happened before this year’s earthquake in Haiti. Their kitchens in Haiti were miraculously spared severe earthquake damage, so in the aftermath of the disaster they are now serving about 2,000 meals a day.

All right then. Ever since 2008 when I read about Haitians eating “mud cookies” (made out of lard, salt, and dirt), Haiti has been in the back of my mind nagging at me like an item on my grocery list that I just can’t recollect. A logical next step would have been to go to Haiti earlier this year after the January 15th earthquake, but I feared that there was so much chaos in Haiti at that time that my trip and intentions would be wasted. I’m still waiting for my call to Haiti and it feels like I’m revving my engine at the red light, waiting for it to turn green so that I can peel out over the starting line.

Until I get that green light, I’m pondering some of the lessons from this book.

1) The reason Margaret Trost was on the original trip to Haiti in the first place was because her husband had unexpectedly died 18 months earlier. Her life as she knew it had ended, and she was ripe for a new beginning. Oftentimes something new doesn’t begin until we have experienced and honored an ending. I’m on the watch for endings in my life (jobs, relationships, interests, etc).

2) The Haitian women who partnered with Ms. Trost in the original once-a-week feeding were women who worked full-time jobs in addition to caring for their children. However, they still carved out time to go to the farmer’s market every Saturday morning, buying sackfuls of rice, beans and vegetables, then cooking all day and night Saturday, then serving 500 meals, and then finally cleaning up on Sunday after church. The author describes their joy as they sat in a circle peeling carrots, picking bugs and rocks out of the rice, cooking the meal with love and care. Where, oh where is my heart for service like that? I considered it a monumental sacrifice to dedicate two nights in a row recently to cooking a meal for the homeless one night, and serving it the next night.

3) I’m still trying to figure out what to do with mathematical and ethical incongruencies like that the money I spent on organic strawberries at the farmer’s market yesterday could feed 24 Haitian children their one meal of the week. Or that I have a cupboard full of pasta, beans, and sauces, and Haitian mothers are baking “mud cookies” in the sun to give their children something to fill their tummies.

Drive Slowly

She snuck into the quiet chapel about 10 minutes after the liturgy had begun. Jingling her keys restlessly in her left hand, she plunked down on the bench beside me, exuding a nervous energy. The liturgy rolled on. She shifted her feet. Choruses were chanted. She stretched her arms. Scriptures were read. She inspected the ceiling. Prayers were spoken. She blurted out call and response one beat ahead of everyone else. I started thinking of her as the Frenzied Female.

Officiating monk: “The Lord be with you”.
Frenzied Female: “Andalsowithyou”.

At the appropriate time in the liturgy the monks formed an inner circle around the altar and the retreatants stood as an outside circle along the walls. Frenzied Female stood next to me. More Scripture readings, more prayers, and then the passing of the peace. Hesitant retreatants received robust hugs from grinning monks.

Retreatants and monks: “Peace to you.”
Frenzied Female: “Peace to you father, brother—WHATEVER IT IS!”
The kindly monk graciously smiled and nodded.

The elements of wine and bread were ceremoniously served up. I waited patiently for the monks to go through the line first, and the Frenzied Female kept inching toward me, trying to get me to cut in their line.

Hissing Frenzied Female: “Areyougoingtogo?”
Me: “Yes, I’m going to go…”

After the Eucharist service my 5 day retreat was over, so with great regret I got in my car and started down the two mile road to coastal Highway 1. About a third of the way down, I glimpsed a car in my rear view mirror and within seconds it bore down on me. “Who would be tailgating me from a monastery?” I thought. I felt an immediate sense of urgency and an annoyance at being shaken out of my peacefulness during my first five minutes off the mountain. It was rude, obtrusive, and incongruous.

Nevertheless, the driver of the Volvo Stationwagon didn’t back off from tailgating me. As soon as I could, I pulled over at a turnoff and the Volvo whizzed past me. The driver wore dark sunglasses, she stared straight ahead, and she didn’t give me a glance or a wave of “thanks” for letting her pass me. The driver was the Frenzied Female.

Car idling, I stared in disbelief at the dust her car was churning up down the road. Easing my car into gear, I looked up through my windshield at a hand-painted sign the monks had posted by the road.

Mustangs Roaming the American West

I spotted a wild herd of at least 25 Mustangs roaming the California coast between Santa Cruz and Hearst Castle. Clustering at the best vista points, they cling to the cliffs overlooking spectacular bridges constructed in the 1950’s. They are playful and beautiful-- their bodies gleaming in the California sun. Symbols of freedom and adventure, the Mustangs roam unfettered throughout the American west, wind blowing past them as they race up and down the coast. They travel to isolated areas, embracing the wonders of the natural world and invoking the pioneer spirit. Mustangs are slightly domesticated and are one of the most splendid means of transportation known to man.

I speak, of course, of the Ford Mustang convertible. Highway 1 is rife with them. Blue ones, yellow ones, black ones, red ones. And there are only two combinations of people riding in them:
1) middle-aged man/woman couples indulging in a mid-life crisis
2) four or five screeching young women indulging in a weekend bachelorette party

A Ford Mustang convertible can be rented from rental car companies for the reasonable cost of $85.46 per day—which is a small price to pay for roaming the coast looking like the coolest cat in town.