Some of My Dad's El Sal Pics

Click on the picture of Alejandra to see some of the pics my dad took while visiting. Feel free to ask questions about what is in them. Enjoy!

Specifity

Ohioans, I'm first addressing you. While you're in the midst of one of the harshest winters in years (a great reason to teach English for 3 months in El Salvador), I would like to remind you of summer rain. Ya know how on those hot, humid, mid-July days you can feel the coming rain in the air? How your body anticipates the soothing sound of the rain fall and the cool aftermath of the newly bathed world? Well, on Tuesday while my dad and I watched dark clouds roll of the mountains, we felt exactly that. The Salvadorans I asked said, "No, its not going to rain. It's still February!" I'm prone to trusting my body, but when a community of people in a foreign land tell me its not going to rain, I generally trust their bodies. Well, lets just say Ohioans 1 - Salvadorans 0. It rained through the night! Can you believe it? We even lost power. It was great. My dad was so happy for the rain that he laid in a hammock until late that night listening to its relaxing patter on the metal roof.

* * * * *

After finishing with their studies two young monks discussed their hopes after leaving the monastery. They both eagerly agreed that they wanted to experience the world. (One can't blame them after years of silence and meditation!) As they parted ways they vowed to return at the end of their lives to that very same village to share what they had learned.

The first traveled the world by foot, boat, and horseback. He saw many things and met many people, but rarely traveled with any of them for long. His life was filled with beautiful images of the earth's bounty.

The second, notably clumsy, twisted his ankle just a mile from town. A kind young woman found him, cared for him, and, even though he kept talking about leaving on his great adventure, married him. They rarely left the village (she feared he'd wander), but were content with its intimacy and the life they shared together.

When the first grew old and weary of travel he returned to the village to meet his friend. When he arrived at the village with the caravan of things he had collected in his travels he was created by a large group of people, at the center of which was his friend. After the traveler told of his many journeys and showed off his numerous collections, he asked what his friend had seen and done. The second monk told the story of falling in the road, falling in love with his wife, and failing to go anywhere at all. They pondered the paths they had taken, what they had gained and lost. The first knew the whole world rather poorly, while the second knew his small village extremely intimately.

* * * * *

On Friday, my dad, Rafa, and I went to the UCA (Universidad de Central America) to visit the martyrdom site of the six Jesuits and two women killed there in the late 1980s. While there, we met up with Dean Brackley, a Jesuit and friend of Tom Schubeck, whom I worked for at John Carroll. But he wasn't the only gringo (gringo is not a derogatory word in El Salvador) we ran into.

Check this out: while taking photos of the rose garden which rests on the ground where the martyrs died, two gringas walked up to the garden. One, Elizabeth "Z" Zunicha (sp?), was an RA at John Carroll and helped lead the LGBT protests we held there last year. The other, Elisa, is a Catholic Worker from Cleveland. They both live in the Whitmer House in Cleveland, which happens to be a home that serves immigrants. It was once the home of "pre-Padre" Rafael Fuentes for over a year.

When things like this happen, people say that the world is small. They're wrong. Its frickin' huge. People also say the world has shrunk with the help of modern technology. They're closer to being right. The world is more accessible to the rich developed world. But I'm still not buying into this "shrunken world" description completely. How about this for an observation: random happenings like running into "Z" at the UCA or going to mass with Natalie Terry (another JCU grad) in Romero's crypt actually show us how specific our relationships are.

The thing about us "randomly" meeting is this:
- We both went to a Jesuit university...and we met at the most famous Jesuit university in Latin America
- We both are passionate about El Salvador and justice...we took a class together about it two years ago
- We both live in CLE+ which has many, many Salvadoran ties...blame Padre Rafa, who rightly claims to have started the Salvadoran community there
- We both had been to El Salvador in the past...and once you come, you come back
- We both recently graduated...recent graduates from Jesuit institutions have a tendency to wander
- We both visit the UCA every time we visit El Salvador...at least once per trip
- We are friends because of all these reasons and some more, but El Salvador brought us together originally

Was our meeting fate or destiny? No. Was it random? Also, no. We ran into each other because our lives and our relationships are specific. She could have been Lauren Fraser, Tom Weinandy, Andy Treras, Tom Kerrigan, H. Paul Kim, John Ropar, and so many others who names I would also misspell, but who fit most of the above description.

My next question is how specificity impacts our lives? Its not like its a new thing. 500 years ago, when most of the world never left its backyard, relationships were always specific to a place, but now we chose our own specificity. We chose our clan. Facebook friendships demonstrate this, online chatting and email reinforce it, the telephone and Skype cameras make it live action. But the real questions for me are what do we gain and what do we lose, as a people, by embracing a scattered specificity of relations?

I'd like to hear some thoughts on this. Email me, post on this blog, facebook message me, whatever works for you. These are my thoughts:

Maybe we lose:
-intimacy of place
-learning to love neighbors we can't avoid
-the importance of physical community
-time spent on our computers relating to all these people
-physicality
-?

Maybe we gain:
-freedom to chose family
-the ability to maintain friendships
-the ability to hide from our immediate reality
-?

What more?

Chele

 

I Wonder as I Wander

A pre-story note: A good homily, I was once told, is written with three specific people in the congregation in mind. If your words resonate with those three, it will be fruitful for all. Knowing my audience is smaller than a congregation, I write with one person in mind, a different person every week. Here's to hoping the theory holds.

Saturday morning at 8 am Rodrigo and I hopped on the bus to start our journey to San Salvador to retrieve my dad from the airport. The night before I had received the reassuring call from Padre Rafa that Trinidad, a friend from town who I knew to be trustworthy, would be accompanying us to San Salvador and from there drive us to the airport, back to San Salvador, and then back to Agua Caliente. But, like all things El Salvador, plans changed. Around 7:30 am, after I had picked up and fed my six-year-old companion, Rafa called to inform me that it would just be Rodrigo and I going to the airport. And, I assure you, at six Rodrigo was not going to be doing the driving.

Getting on the bus knowing I’d never alone navigated the dangerous buses of San Salvador, had never driven on its chaotic, if not anarchic, streets, and had no clue how to locate the highway to the airport, let alone follow it back to Agua Caliente, could have be described with an array of pessimistic adjectives. Ones that should have come to mind at time include: stupid, foolish, insane, irrational, idiotic, reckless, irresponsible, rash. Romantic optimists might suggest the opposite, that the action was one of trust or faith or love of my dad or some other virtuous Aristotelian thingy, but they’d be wrong too.

Here’s the secret: what put me on that bus, what brought me to El Salvador in the first place, what keeps me here, what makes discovering divinity every moment in every possible thing possible, what births love (and sustains it) in the oddest circumstances, what heals the wounds of hatred, brokenness, and loss, is the simple – and often hard to come by – ability to embrace wonder. Do you know what Rodrigo and I were doing when we got on the bus yesterday morning? We were enthralled in our ump-tienth game of “Veo algo” ("I spy"). We were in the midst of being grasped by wonder.

“Mark,” you might be saying, “you were ignorant of the danger you were putting your and Rodrigo in and that was irresponsible.” You are free to think that. And you are probably right. I'm comfortable with that, because wonder, the things that sustains me, requires ignorance. A Montanan philosopher once journaled, “that only an admission of ignorance can open us to fresh knowings. Wonder is the experience of that admission: wonder is unknowing, experienced as pleasure.”

He also wrote that “love is just wonder aimed at a beloved.” After a bit of editing (I feel at liberty to do this because I’m quoting him third-hand anyway) try on my version of his sentence: God is just wonder aimed at a beloved. For me, this fits perfectly. The ultimate-being-supreme-creator-thingy that got the ball rolling in the first place, keeps participating in Its creation like a child firmly and forever caught up in the rapturous, ignorant joy of beholding the world for the first time. God is like Rodrigo playing I spy in the face of life-threatening danger.

Imagine a God like this.

Imagine seeing the world in this way.

Imagine never letting go of the wonder.

And then, imagine how wonderful life would be if it was always, forever, wonder-filled.

Henry Bugbee (my Montanan philosopher) also said, via a joyfully recollected, but admittedly inaccurate paraphrase by David James Duncan, that “the only limit to the duration of wonder is the limit of our ability to remain open.”

May we always remain open.

(for those wondering, Rafa showed up in San Salvador to take us to the airport - danger avoided)

The Heavenly Jerusalem is a Free Woman

Warning: this has not been proofread, but I want to put it out there before midnight Ohio-time so that I stay true to my every Sunday promise.

My editing friend Dane tells me never to start a paragraph with a quote. I’m quite certain this advice does not pertain to blog posts since they’re a new sort of medium which is happily unorthodox (like most of us!). Avoiding the existential question of whether we’re a new sort of medium too, I will proceed with quoting Lief Enger from his first novel Peace Like a River:

And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my blood until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant.

While I found the book less than stirring, this passage had its desired effect. In some ways it is an adequate simile for my experience in El Salvador. Here’s my slightly altered Salvadoran version:

And now, from beneath the audible and robust menagerie of bus/car/bicycle and tricycle horns, chucho/cat /cow/pig/turkey/roster and numerous wild birds’ attempts at midnight communication, came a low reverberation, like the heavy dust-filled winds, but from below. It came up through the soles of my sandaled, tanned, closer-to-the-dirt-than-they-have-been-in-a-longtime feet. I stood still (I also ran a helluva a lot) while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my blood until I recognized it as music, although noticeably out of tune, yet fully tuned into something more essential. As language; although a language which I felt more than I understood, to which my natural, guttural, human response was always a joyful (albeit confused) smiling, head-nodding “sí”. And this language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Her; be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation while also viewing a sort of slow re-creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the mountains became what they were some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words, the logos, came clear, and I sang with them in a beautiful, curious, Span-glish chant. And their chant was this: The heavenly Jerusalem is a free woman; she is our mother.

* * * * *

Frances scares the hell out of me. Sometimes strong, beautiful women have that effect. I’ll let you analyze that all you want, but I’m not touching it. She teaches Sexto Grado (or 6th grade) and was at first a complete mystery. This is what I have slowly gathered.
• She lives in Chalatenango – at least an hour away
• She has no kids
• She has no husband
• She often stays the night at our principal's house
• She is 35
• She has been teaching for around 5 years
• She is not overtly religious, possibly not religious at all, but chooses to teaches at a Catholic school...what I’m saying is I don’t know if she chooses to teach here or if it’s the only place that would hire her
• She is a diligent note taker in my English class
• She is, be my estimation, breathtakingly beautiful in that unexpected and definitely not know by the person themselves sort of way
• She does not correct me when I pronounce her name incorrectly

Why do I write about Frances? The teachers were once talking about how many kids we wanted to have. I jokingly responded, “20, oh mi esposa, pobrecita!” but went on to tell them that it wasn’t up to me how many kids I had, it was my wife’s decision. All the women looked at me half excited and half confounded. They asked why I would say that. I started, “because my wife’s body is her body, I do not…”, but I couldn’t conjure the verb I needed. After three patient minutes of them waiting, and me wading through a dictionary, I finished “…control it.” The verb I used more likely meant “govern it” and is linked to kingship and ruling. It was the only Spanish verb I could find to describe control. That evening at dinner Frances spoke to me, possibly for the first time, about how she will never marry because she will not subject herself to someone else’s governing, someone else’s rule. In El Salvador, that is what would be expected. She would, to quote a friend of mine's retired archbishop uncle, “dooo whateeevvver HEEEEE tells you.”

* * * * *

The heavenly Jerusalem is a free woman; she is our mother.

This line from Galatians appeared in the “Liturgy of the Hours” this week. How it so precisely merges Salvadoran reality and Pauline eschatological jargon haunts me. Because the heavenly Jerusalem, the glorious city on the hill which Paul points to, is for many in El Salvador a free, liberated woman. I mean this quite literally. A woman freed to access education only available to men; a woman free to work; a woman free to not bear children if she so pleases; a woman free to share equally in her relationships; a woman free to…control her own body, destiny, home, livelihood, life, self.

And this haunts me because the opposite is here in El Salvador. Women are not free. They are expected, coerced, prohibited from not, and often physically forced into every kind of bad situation you can imagine. Call it machismo, call it genderism, call it unjust, unfair, unloving, call it whatever you want. Paul didn’t write his letter this way, but I’m shouting his line as an outraged demand: Damn it, the heavenly Jerusalem is a free woman! And she is our MOTHER! Do we know what we’re doing to our mother?

But, as Enger’s character experienced his journey to heaven, so too do I experience El Salvador: O be quick, my soul, to answer Her; be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on! For the women of El Salvador are marching on. The march is slow, its uphill, and they’re carrying a ton of unneeded baggage, but they do not march alone. I speak of this in hopes that Oscar Romero, the Jesuit martyrs, and, most of all, the beaten, raped, and murdered Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, Maura Clarke, and Ita Ford, are listening and doing something up there in heavenly Jerusalem to free the women down here.

Whether they’re responding or not, I cannot prove, but I do know that El Salvador is changing. Women are being educated, working professional jobs, and, like Frances, taking a stand against injustice. As I reflected on this change, “sure enough, my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation while also viewing a sort of slow re-creation, as the women of El Salvador became what they were some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as the voices of women lifted from a great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words, Her words, came clear, and I sang with them in a beautiful, curious, Span-glish chant. And their chant was this: The heavenly Jerusalem is a free woman; she is your mother, she is your sister, she is your daughter, build the kingdom, set her free.

"3- Mark"

In grade school there was a number evaluation system for our writing that was almost forever engraved in my self-perception. I’m not sure at what number the system started or ended, but I am confident that a 4 indicated we were writing at the level “they” wanted us to be. In fourth grade, I distinctly remember the disappointment of not getting 4s. I’d write what I was convinced were kick-ass stories about aliens on the moon with broken arms and memory altering machines who wanted to invade Earth but were stopped by some space hero, but these stories almost always received a 3, maybe a 3+ or 4- if I was lucky. This led me to believe that my writing was forever stunted. (The things that affect little kids and stay with them for decades are so mysterious, aren’t they?) By the seventh grade my self-perceived failure in writing led to such frustration that I turned in plagiarized biographies to salvage my grade. (Sorry Mrs. Loveless!) Writing so petrified me that I refused to risk it, refused to risk the failure.

In 2002, when I met Carmen Roebke and John Jerek at the Kent Newman Center, a journey in the opposite direction began. They so clearly preached the power and importance of story to faith and life. Carmen was the first to introduce me to the phrase “all stories are true and some even happened” (from Megan McKenna?) and Fr. John’s homilies weekly weaved together the mysteries of life, death, and resurrection in such a seemingly effortless manner that I could not help but be mesmerized by the power of his storytelling.

A short essay given to me by Fr. John – Credo by Brian Doyle – so deeply resonated with my experience of faith, clearly and gracefully articulating what I felt was the Truth beyond truth that I couldn’t help but desire to write like Doyle. I couldn’t help but want to express myself/my beliefs/my creed/my being, so simply and yet so profoundly. Unfortunately, “3- Mark” was still alive and well. Never, I believed, could I write like that, could I speak of such Truths.

Last August, at the same time I was embarking on the 80-page-journey that came to be my already-out-of-date thesis, I began quite a different journey in writing, what has been affectionately dubbed a “pen-pal-ship.” I am not sure how many pages Chelsey and I have exchanged, let alone written, but I am certain of what they have done to me. I am a man in love (….dramatic pause…) with writing. Our letters have made it quite clear to me that even I, “3- Mark”, can draw love from the deep well that is the human heart with a pen, paper, envelope, stamp, and cup of tea in hand. My words can do to another what Doyle’s did to me – they can help us see clearer the mystery in which we were formed, presently surrounds us, lives within us, and regularly calls more from us, beckoning us beyond a 3- evaluation system to a daily acknowledgment of the dignity we do, and will always, carry.

There were other things I was planning on writing about this week that actually had something to do with El Salvador, and I may tell those stories later in the week, but tonight is tonight and yesterday was yesterday, and yesterday I randomly happened upon (in El Salvador nonetheless!) a book edited by the my-life-changing-author-friend Brian Doyle. In the introduction he writes, among other wonderful things:

"I think about how I would be a lot less of a man if I didn’t have ways to wake up to what I can be if I harness mercy and humor and wisdom and attention and prayer and humility and courage and grace…This is what all true stories about, which is what we are, really, at our best – true stories. And true stories, stories with love and power in them, can save your life and save your soul and bring you, if only for a flickering instant, face-to-face with the unimaginable creative force that once, a very long time ago, explained itself to Moses as, simply and confusingly, I AM WHO AM. That force is in you, in every moment, in every story. Here are some of the stories…"

Many thanks to all of you who have read the stories I’ve told. To those that have commented so positively, whether on the blog or through email, with every bit of positive reinforcement you’re quickly creating a man who loves to write. I am honored you read these words, that you find them of meaning and value, and the you return to them each Sunday. Peace and grace to you.