Contradictions

Traveling by Trufi

Tonight I visited with Miro, my newest amiga from "La Comunidad" -- a church recommended to me by a friend of a friend.  (As a side note, this church as a fig tree out back--heavenly.)   Miro has been an angel of hospitality since I met her.   On my first Sunday she met me at my house to personally show me how to travel to Comunidad Cristiana Cochabamba via public transportation (Cochabamba's charming, yet random, and map-less Trufi system).  She has continued to issue invitations and kindness since then -- she is a paragon of warmth and hospitality.   

Tonight she was housesitting for missionary friends who live in Cochabamba.  The house was incredible, beautiful.  Three stories high, three bathrooms, and all the charm and amenities of an american suburban home.  I didn't know what to think.  I could not help but wonder: "to whom are they missionaries?"  The wealthy in Cochabamba?  I don't technically know where their quality of living falls on the Cochabamba wealth spectrum, but it was the the richest home I'd encountered in all my time here.  Missionaries.

On the high-altitude road toward a lovely church camp in the hills--which
is uncomfortably surrounded by a very different standard of living.

I've been known to spend (what is to some) a week's wages on one bar of chocolate, so let's keep that in perspective as I liberally judge the lifestyle of others.  Wandering the missionary house's many flights of stairs I recalled the cognitive dissonance of friends who traveled the globe for 6 months (an incredible luxury in itself -- much like my own current travels) and housed often in the home of generous missionaries.  Yet amidst their gratitude for all the hospitality, they were repeatedly stunned by missionaries who lived in comparative opulence to the people around them, or by missionaries who, while living in a Muslim culture, had never visited a mosque and had no Muslim friends.  How could this be?  How the disconnect with the culture?  

Crossing the coffee-colored Rio Rocha near my house

For those of us who claim any degree of compassion or solidarity with the poor, or alliance with Jesus (who, according to Luke audaciously began his ministry with the words "The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor..."), this disonnance is unnerving.  How much can we have before we start loosing our sense of what it's like to not have?  

Jen Hatmaker, in her book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess writes of her community's tiny, four-month-old church that took in eighty strangers--evacuees of Hurricane Ike.  Her family personally housed twelve:

We moved our three kids into our bedroom, washed sheets, blew up mattresses, rolled out sleeping bags, and readied the house for an onslaught.  As carloads arrived and we welcomed them in, one ten-year-old boy walked into our home, looked around with huge eyes, and hollered:

"Dad!  This white dude is RICH!"

We are.

For years I didn't realize this because so many others had more.  We were surrounded by extreme affluence, which tricks you into thinking you're in the middle of the pack.  I mean, sure, we have twenty-four hundred square feet for only five humans to live in, but our kids have never been on an airplane, so how rich could we be?  We haven't traveled to Italy, my kids are in public schools, and we don't even own a time-share.  (Roll eyes here.)

But it gets fuzzy once you spend time with people below your rung.  I started seeing my stuff with fresh eyes, realizing we had everything.  I mean everything.

I dig this passage because Hatmaker (I just wanted to use her last name again) ends with a reflection about relationship with others.  How does our wealth enable or inhibit our ability to relate with our fellow humans on "another rung?"  In Hatmaker's case wealth was both an obstacle and a opportunity.  Their 2400 square feet became community property for one important week.  But without the open door -- including the open door of allowing her way of life to be questioned those 2400ft would have remained an obstacle.  Instead the week set in motion a lifelong change.

Colectivo Katari doesn't have quite as much choice in the matter.  These Bolivian Artists don't earn an American salary; most live on $150-300 a month, some less.  They are middle class.  However an intentionality permeates the life choices, their spending, and perhaps more than any other artists I've met, there is a conviction that their artistic presentations must be matched--even proceeded--by a change in their personal lives.

Overlooking Cochabamba from the high surrounding hills

In racial matters, Katari has chosen to show solidarity with the "lowest rung" of the racial class.  (Indigenous Bolvians are the majority here, yet racial violence and passive-agressive oppression continues as it did 500 years ago.)  Though nearly all have indigenous blood, none claim a pure indigenous heritage.  They are urban mestizos.  Aliya is a white North American.  But they know this.  They're frank about the privilege these identities entail (or don't).  

My friends at Church of All Nations in Minnesota (a church that astoundingly has no ethnic majority) talk frequently and with shocking forthrightness about the privileges of race.  Because they have to if they've any hope of their Latino parishioners relating to their white parishioners.  Church of All Nations ("CAN") Pastor Jin Kim confesses his racism as a Korean American--"at least we're not black"--and Korean Americans' contribution to the violence against Rodney King in an article in the MN Christian Examiner here.   Or, read a CAN parishioner's confession to the immigrants of their congregation published in the February edition here. 

A large plant at the park next to my house.
I don't think you can eat it.

What I'm getting at is the liberty that seeps in when we become aware of all that our color and class entails.   It begins a conversation on another plane.  I know I'm white,  which entitles me to privilege all across the globe.  I know I come from the educated middle class, which meant it was near impossible that I not attend college--a privilege that aligns me with the 7% of the world population.  I know I'm a woman, which means in many parts of the world my testimony in court is invalid.

This is not the vice of Conservatives or Liberals, Buddhists, Christians, Jews or Secularists  -- but all.  Indeed, often those of us who consider ourselves "progressive" are the most blind to our racism, classism and sexism.   I noted this in my time in San Francisco.  Tim Wise outdoes me in his article With Friends Like These Who Needs Glenn Beck.  

The Post-Performance High

Talking till 2am about the idea of ideologies

when I could've gone to bed at 7

Whether it was the wine at 9,000ft

or my delight at having this conversation in another hemisphere, another language

I told my exhausted mind to stay with it -- understanding the 75% - 55% - 80%? 

I could

Oh the day when I hear in compete clarity

(Will it come?)                  

"You're worth more than I am"

because you're estadounidense

That's the structure--the ideology--of our world

I'll give you that:   Compare dark-skinned Boliviano and middle-class american 

(even as a woman).

But we both know.

We know.  Somehow.

That it's a lie.  That we are equal.