The Alien

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable." - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley 

"You and the alien shall be the same before the LORD." - Numbers 15

I have just hit the halfway mark here in this land called Chile, and the experience mirrors my last ex-pat experience in one very important way: I've done very little noticing of the actual people and more noticing of the immigrant population.  Lately I've been starting to wonder why that actually is.

Just recently, I met a Colombian girl in one of my classes who was studying abroad here in Santiago.  After class, we discussed some of our culture shock and observations of Chileans.  It was pretty similar to what a Peruvian friend of mine said.  I'm no person to lump countries together, but I had always thought I had the monopoly on culture shock for being an American, yet even a next door neighbor doesnt know what to do when he steps on through the threshold  Whether Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, Mexicans in Georgia, Ethiopians in DC, or Peruvians in Chile, the familiar loneliness of migrant living is a pain that's completely universal.  Yet its a pain that many are so willing to jump into out of necessity that it becomes a universal phenomenon at the same time.

In La Paz I did a lot of walking.  Unlike Santiago, La Paz always had something happening you couldnt quite ignore; whether the calling cadences of bus caller leaning out van windows or the seasoned voice of an old Aymara woman singing to flutes and guitars.  All my life I had dreamed about what Bolivia would be like, over time constructing a carefully drawn fantasy cradled in the Andes mountains.  When I arrived, this image was gloriously shattered by a real and very complicated reality of what Bolivia actually is: not a flimsy fantasy, but a real, breathing, living entity of epic proportions with its own tastes, fears, and passions.  Its own rumba de vida that wasnt going to be like anything else in the world.  In the end this is much frightening and complicating than any mental image could construct, but more gloriously overwhelming than any fantasy could ever capture.

Walking through poor neighborhoods turning to rich neighborhoods turning back to poor, the sheer immensity of La Paz always took me by surprise.  My epiphany of being in La Paz was that I remembered what I really cared about in life:

• The very fact that every single one of those small little houses was inhabited by someone, and its possible they need your help. 
• In a world where self help books flood shelves and people linger over the topic of "learning to love myself," I wanted to truly love my neighbor, whether I'm poor or rich, crying or laughing, and maybe even teach people to do the same.  
• To foster connections between communities that would not simply give them a few extra dollars in their pocket, rather to provide a lifetime of support to the "poor and the alien" that would challenge people to realize the love of Christ as a tangible reality, not a fleeting scheme of conquest.  
• To see the Church realize its real potential in this world as the one who cares for the downtrodden and does the work no one else in this world will do, and does it in a way that's helpfully informed by economic thought and development theory.  (Microloaning in churches? Why not?)
• And finally, that I may never be calloused to the reality of suffering on earth.  Summed up, to cry when the world laughs, and to love when the world hates.

The second realization is that immigrants are very much at the center of this for me, precisely because they are such a universal reality in the world; for this reason the Torah talks so specifically about caring for both the poor and the alien.  In all senses of the word, the Israelites were aliens in their land, and were always encouraged to treat the aliens they met with the same fairness.  For this reason they are "the same" before the LORD.

Unfortunately, this is not the reality and being an immigrant is perhaps one of the hardest struggles in our globalized world; immigrating is becoming much easier to do but not any easier to handle.  As the world becomes flatter, often times attitudes become cemented, and whether or not borders are closed, the worst part is that hearts are being closed.  Please dont confuse this for a political statement.  Open border or closed border, loving the poor alien is still a great challenge for most the world, and I think its key we think about this, regardless of your view about illegal aliens.

This is what I'm thinking about lately, though I have the feeling its only sketching the surface of a much bigger issue; one that will not be solved any time soon, but one that requires the thoughts and considerations of everyone taking the title of "Christian" and anyone who claims to practice the teachings of Jesus Christ.

This is a long process, but I think I'll have to find joy in the process of figuring out what this issue is really going to mean.  I know very little now and, as a friend of mine once said, "maybe someday I'll think about the rest."

~Jared

John Steinbeck on Church and Hell

From Travels with Charley In Search of America, a good read if you a couple hundred pages to kill sometimes

"I took my seat in the rear of the spotless, polished place of worship.  The prayers were to the point, direction the attention of the Almighty to certain weaknesses and undivine tendencies I know to be mine and could only suppose were shared by others gathered there.

The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good.  It had been long since I had heard such an approach.  It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control.  There was no such nonsense in the church.  The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot.  And he was right.  We didn't amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since.

Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon.  Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn't make some basic reorganizations for which he didn't hold out much hope.  He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order.  This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me.

I began to feel good all over.  For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son.  But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me.  He put my sins in a new perspective.  Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity.  I hadnt been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left.  I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minister and as many of the congregation as I could.  It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday... All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher.  He forged a religion to last, not predigested obsolescence." 


~Jared

A Year Older, A Year Younger

random story that may or may not need be told.  trying to get better at non-fiction.

 On the cusp of a rainy Saturday night, the streets of suburban Santiago were drenched and cold, like a stray city dog.  You could hear the cars whimpering through the puddles, the bright window lights shivering up and down the cozy block, and the drops shattering in noisy protest against tin roofs in the damp twilight.  From the outside of every house, it seemed the whole street was listening to the clatter in hushed expectation, yet with subdued disappointment.  The whole world was holed up, some never intending to leave.

Inside of one house, I was at a birthday party.  Despite the sound of it, take every nostalgic image of balloons and cake out of your mind; imagine instead a twenty year old gringo in the middle of six middle aged Chileans sulking around one flickering television set in a cozy den.  The news spewed forth tragedies and the adults sat around, making sparse commentaries in the din of the TV and reclining on couches in a way that preached professionalism and apathy all at the same time.

I was too young for these people.  That became clear early on in the night, but surprisingly not so clear over the phone when I was invited earlier that day.  I had heard plenty of other Americans getting invited to random birthday parties and thought that I should try and not be rude and decline.  After exiting the metro stop and waiting for the twenty-seven year old birthday girl to pick me up, I briefly wondered why I was going but quickly gave up.  When you're huddling under a bus stop hang over in cold freezing rain in the middle of foreign suburbia, the why becomes very unhelpful.

After some more comments and some awkward hellos, the six middle aged Chileans and I adjourned to the table and began to eat dinner.  The food was delicious and the meat tender, and the group became more lively.  A thirty-year old man with light hair and a calm demeanor at my side began chatting with me about what I was doing in Chile, and I explained I was an economics major and somewhat haphazardly let slip that I was dedicating my life to helping the poor.  He mulled over this fact a bit while chewing a piece of meat as a married couple shuffled into the room and sat down next to me at the end of the table.  As we began scraping the last bits of corn into our mouths, the man next to me asked me how people are going to get out of poverty.  I responded as best as I knew with some garbled answer about attitudes and resources, while he nodded like one nods to a kid with a great imagination.  He turned to his plate, pondering my response like a less than satisfactory piece of modern art. I might has well have been in diapers.

As plates were collected by the birthday girl's mom, who I affectionately called "abuelita," tea, coffee, and mugs were passed around to everyone and the short matriarch meekly took a stool from the kitchen and sat down at the table.  As the whole table lit up with talk of adult things, I politely refused tea on account of my insomnia.  The wild eyed man who had sat down to my left looked slyly and at me and commented "I guess only old people drink tea, huh?"  The end of the table settled into chuckling while I nodded along.

Soon, the everyone at the table began talking about the country side, a foreign concept for most people in Santiago.  "I prefer to be where the people are," the wild eyed man said proudly.  "I would go crazy out there with nothing but countryside."

Suddenly, the matriarch of the household began to lift her eyes and speak in a slow, seasoned tone of voice.  As she spoke, awed silence descended on the whole table.

"I remember living in the countryside.  Everything was very spread out, and your neighbor might lie miles in another direction and information ran slow.  In fact, I remember during the earthquake, it was hard to hear about how everyone was doing, because no one had televisions and very few radios.  Might have to travel a while till you came to a place that had one.  You know that main plaza west of the center of the city?  I remember there was one television there, and the whole world gathered around it.  That was how we got information.  That's how it was."

She sipped her coffee, while all seven of the guests sat in reverent silence, pondering a thing beyond their pondering.

"I suppose nowadays we carry TV's in our pockets," I said.  The whole table nodded along, eyes grasping their dinner plates.

"Now," abuela said.  "Who wants cake?"

We sang happy birthday and ate the delicious cake.  Despite the fact that one person was getting older, everyone felt just a little bit younger.

~Jared

Rain

I saw those clouds start to creep
Behind the cordillera on a cold windy street
Their fumes bask the city in dusky gray
And the buildings shiver with the threat of rain
the Mapocho was swelling, steady and slow
While I stand small and humble below

In my room I have all to which my life has lead
My Bible, Steinbeck, a desk and bed.
On a borrowed guitar, melodies float and fade
In the hushing dance of the midnight rain
And the family I live with is joining the tune
Their chores throwing light on the window of my room

As the midnight struck, I still lay awake
With thinking of days for memories sake.
the patter of raindrops carried it away
The past is dead, or so they say.
        
I live like the stranger in this southern cone
Yet the tin roof clatter is my welcoming home
No thought of wine nor precept of yeast
Could deafen the silence in the very least
Though the rays of the day can awaken my sorrow,
The hush of the rain always hopes for tomorrow.

~Jared