Reverenda Rosa

All Saints and the Feast of the Faithful Departed, Discernment Part 2

When I woke up on Thursday morning, the first thing I heard was that Broward County was under a tropical storm warning.  I had been very flip earlier in the week, glib about the fact that I was just as glad that high winds and squalls would keep us from doing much trick-or-treating with LoML.  In fact, when it was time to go out to do the deed, LoML scared her own self enough, dressed up as a skeleton pirate, that we visited three houses, and gladly closed Halloween down for another year.  Now it was the day after and I lay in bed hearing that forecast, fully aware that inertia has been powerful this year and there were all manner of possible projectiles strewed across our deck and yard.  The last thing I wanted to do was yard work!

There was more though.  I could hear that LoML had that very croupy cough of hers again, the one we heard a lot after she first came to us from Mexico.  The one that goes with asthma.  At the same time, my friend, Archangel, had had another seizure at work on Wednesday, and now his boss didn't want him back on the job--too high a safety risk.  I'd promised I'd find a way to get him in to see a neurologist that day to see if he could get on anti-seizure meds and go back to work.  Hanging over all that was the awareness that our Sunday School program this Fall is a complete improvisation, a faithful effort to lead a small core of families through a process of preparation to start a new Eucharist on Sunday mornings.  This plan  attempts to explore new ways of doing "multi-generational liturgy"  The work of Caroline Fairless at Children at Worship has been great for helping me distill and then articulate what was once a vague and largely intuitive sense that our traditional liturgies at All Saints, lovely as they are, leave a lot of folks out.  I still needed to get this week's lesson plan firmed up and start making plans for next week when I will be out of town--all of that while still honoring my commitment to take Friday off.

Oh...and Happy Birthday to me!  Thank God we had nothing planned for this, my 48th birthday...

I had a big knot inside me all day.  I got my friend to the neurologist and in the process also got some important information about a clinic that offers very reasonably-priced primary care to Latinos.  My child got back on asthma meds and even got a flu shot.  The lesson plans came together, at least for this week, and some new ideas for next week began percolating.  I even got to have a lovely meal at our favorite special restaurant in town.  But the knot was still there.

You see, at CREDO, the conference I attended three weeks ago, the time I had for silence and sorting, I was reminded of a wonderful little maxim from Colombia:  "the person who tries to hug too much squeezes too little".  Here I am, trying to do new church development along two different lines, with two very different sets of people, all at once.  I love both sets of challenges.  But I am also the mother of a child with significant special needs, and a husband who has worked incredibly hard as a priest for over 20 years and is tired.  And, much as I try not to think about it these days since things have sort-of stabilized, I am the daughter of a person dying of cancer. 

The knot I had been carrying all week, the one that manifested itself as a muscle spasm along my shoulder blade, would just not go away.  The fibers of my being all tangled and knotted and tight kept trying to speak and I kept getting busier and busier and busier instead.

Early on Friday, I prayed and reflected on my week.  When I was away, at a healthy distance from my life, when I spoke Spanish for almost the entire time, and listened to other priest's stories of doing Hispanic/Latino ministries, I was called, compelled really, to make sure that I give that ministry the nurture and tending it requires.  I came back home brimming with ideas that we've even started working on--fund raising plans and an evangelism event that I'm really excited about.  I had it all figured out, about what I need to do and be.  But more and more kept getting added on as I "re-entered" my life.  I could not sift fast enough to keep things sorted and in their proper perspective. I'm glad I did stop for that short time of quiet on Friday.  I know now that I won't get there all at once, but I am determined that the work I need to do with the new liturgy on Sundays is one of calling and empowering others to bring this new ministry to fulfillment so I can respond faithfully to the sense of call to the Centro.

On Friday afternoon, Spouseman had a meeting with a member of the parish who we have hoped could make a contribution to the capital fund for the new buildings at All Saints. As he was preparing for that meeting, I finished taking care of the last details for the liturgies of this weekend.  All Saints Day and the Feast of the Faithful Departed are very important in the Latino culture.  At least this year, I am finding that death and transformation in faith--the essence of vocation--are inextricably linked. I found a piece to sing after communion called "Into Your Hands" that includes the phrase, "if we would live, we must be willing to die, into your hands I commend my life."  Sifting, discernment, sometimes feels like dying to me, and all my instincts for survival kick into highest gear, making me more truculent, less open to light and hope and love.  That piece nudged me further into trust.

Then I  went off to my Pilates class, at peace with the fact that I had not had the day off that I had wanted but had experienced some renewal, nonetheless.  The stretching and strength exercises I did really helped and for the first time in days, I could turn my head without pain.  When I got home I found out two things.  The donor made a hugely generous commitment to the new building fund.  She also wrote a check for $50,000 for me to use in support of the ministries at the Centro. 

Megayachts and Mattresses

Fort Lauderdale has long been touted as the "yachting capital" of the world.  This weekend, the city is hosting the "International Boat Show".  This year, the mega-yachts, yachts, boats and boating equipment on display are valued at over 2 billion dollars.  When I first moved to Fort Lauderdale, the boat show was dazzling. What was on display 10 years ago pales into insignificance now.   

Today, Spouseman, Light of My Life and I were headed on our boat just to ride by the main staging area on the water. I got a call from one of my Mexican brothers.  He was sobbing.  Last night he was on the phone with his father back in the village he comes from.  They talked about the fact that F. will be home around the 20th of December.  They laughed a lot.  His father ended the conversation telling his son how much he loved him.  Sometime later in the night, the father's body, worn out by dialysis and diabetes, finally gave out.  His wife realized he was dead early, early this morning.  F. got the call as dawn broke.

My brother and friend barely managed to choke out these words:  "As I was preparing to come to the United States last April, I had promised my father that I would send him money to buy a new mattress for their bed.  The one they had was in such bad shape.  But all I have managed to do is send money for my wife and daughter to eat, to pay the bills.  I never could send mi papa the money to buy a new mattress."

Bible Study Gone Alive: My soul magnifies the Lord

If you keep up with this blog, you know that a big part of my life right now is the small storefront ministry to Latinos in my community that I am a part of.  Here's how tonight went.

Just as I was arriving at the Centro, a jeep pulled in behind my car and two rather stout and formidable looking women got out.  They were headed to get takeout from Shanghai, the Chinese restaurant right next door to us.  I finished opening up and our small ragtag bunch began to gather.  Soon, the takeout ladies were standing looking at our window with some curiosity.  Along with our logo, we have a small rainbow flag on a corner of the window.  D, the chief evangelist among us, a lovely young laywoman, had decided months ago that we needed to make it clear to our Latino brothers and sisters in the neighborhood that everyone is welcome at the table.  Americans both of them, and partnered to each other, the two women had never come across a church that welcomed gay and lesbian people.  They don't speak Spanish but were thrilled to find out that they are welcome at the "mother ship"--the parish the Centro ministry is a part of.  We sent them off with their takeout and an invitation to participate in the main service on Sunday at All Saints.

Soon, A and M arrived with a Mexican feast: tongue tacos, chili sauce that would burn the taste buds off your tongue and other good eats.  Many of our guys are Mexican and have been desperate for home-tasting food. Some had come ahead of time and set a really formal table in preparation for the feast.  Quick prayers and the eating began.  And more guys arrived, and then some more.  Two of them are our well-loved drunks--men with truly serious drinking problems who come as often as the bottle allows them.  One of them had another pal with him.  A table meant to accommodate 10 was found to be big enough to seat 15 of us, and the tacos multiplied.

After dinner, we began our study of the sixth chapter of the book of Acts: the call and ordination of Stephen and the others, the emergence of the order of deacons.  I asked, "do any of you know any deacons."  After some thought, one of the guys said, "Ah, si...there's one that comes to see me in jail."  Another one said, "Oh--those men that come see us in the slammer are deacons?  Sure, I know one.  Real nice guy."  And another member of the study group acknowledged that he too had received more than one visit from a deacon while  in jail. 

Somehow, that gave the first man who'd spoken permission to tell us that he's only out of jail temporarily.  He told us how much he appreciated sitting at table and breaking bread with us in this in-between time.  He asked us to pray for him because he's going back to jail real soon and may not be back to the Centro for a while.  But he promised if he got out, he'd be back.  Then we went back to our conversation about deacons and then read about Stephen. We'll discuss his martyrdom next week.

When we finished, I got into my car feeling like I was having an out of body experience.  The Word has never been more alive, or vivid, in all the absurdity, impossibility and joy of hope, than with this gathering of broken, marginalized folks.  This is It.  Ecclesia. Kairos. The Whole Enchilada.  And by God's grace, I have been invited to the table.  Proclama mi alma la grandeza del Señor.

Quick Quick

• Small sources of joy:  a new linoleum floor in the Centro.  A parishioner offered to have the floor installed for us.  We'd been planning to do it, though none of us really knew how to do it.  The installer was this amazing, sweet guy who actually does most of his work on yachts and mansions, laying down marble.  He did it so beautifully.  The space is now light, and airy and joyful.  All we have left to do is put back the baseboards and the transformation will be complete. 
• How we are all connected:  When you've lived long enough in hurricane country, you become more aware of what happens to the weather when a big one is churning out there.  All these many miles away from Dean, clouds racing past us, gusty breezes, the soupy humidity--they all make me uneasy, even knowing I'm safe because they are part of the hurricane system. 
• Once a year, cute is great.  We started VBS this Sunday.  We're using Great Bible Reef so we've made this cool mural of a reef that's pasted up on a bay window.  The window seat is covered with cellophane and crepe streamers to look like water and populated with small stuffed and plastic sea critters.  We decorated cookies in the shape of fish, octopi(??) and crabs, and offered them at coffee hour.  As a I said, one a year, I love cute.
• School morning heaven:  Sitting with a good cup of coffee, Light of My Life on my lap, letting me love on her and comb and fix her hair.  Taking her to school, past the canals and the New River, where the sunlight is dancing and the breeze is just barely rippling over the water.  Singing together at the top of our lungs, "Before the beginning, before there was time, God loved you and me."  Feeling her butterfly touch on my arm as she gets out of the car and hearing her say, "thanks for the ride mom" sounding so mature that it makes my heart scrunch up and puff out all at once.  She's growing up...

Man, I love my life...

Bible Study Gone Astray

There were 10 of us last night.  We've been working on Acts since June, slowly.  After our meal, we decided we'd rehearse a piece that we will be performing at a celebratory Eucharist at the end of the month. 

We agreed: just one quick song.  Then it's time to get back to our study.  But it had been a hard day.  Several of the Mexican men share one room in a duplex up the street from the Centro.  Last week, the owner rented the other room to a young American couple who either fight or have sex in the kitchen, in the living room, in all the common spaces of the small duplex with no regard for their house-mates.  They regularly steal the food the Mexican men buy.  Like my brothers can afford that.  Another participant who thought she was on the verge of getting her residency documents has suffered a very major setback.  She's scared.  Yet another one got some bad news about a process of certification she's been going through and spent a lot of time and energy towards. The list goes on but I get depressed just writing these few bits down.

So we rehearsed the piece, one person playing the guitar, everybody else singing, quite a few voices not quite on key.  It sounded so good we practiced again, and then one more time.  Someone asked that we sing another hymn.  Then another. And we kept going. Light of my Life, who was with us since school has not started yet and she can stay up late, was radiant.    Some of the hymns we sang had that undertone of eschatological yearning that makes me want to cry.  But mostly, they were hymns of praise and joy.  Our little worship space is in a bay of a larger building.  We share the building with a  Pentecostal faith community that has a lot more members and makes a very loud and joyful noise unto the Lord sometimes driving us to distraction.  At one point someone in our small space said, "they're going to knock on our door at any moment and ask if we've converted!"  We dissolved into laughter.  And then sang some more.   We stopped singing when we started getting hoarse.  We never made it back to the Good Book.  We had, however, found a voice to sing the Lord's song in a foreign land. 

Of Angels and Archangels

One of my recent posts was about a member of the Centro Hispano de Todos los Santos who needed to have dental work and none was available except at full price.  Well...there aren't only Archangels (or at least folks named after Archangels) in our midst.  There are also angels.  Yesterday, a pair of them dropped a very handsome check in the collection plate to help cover the unexpected dental expenses I had written about.  How blessed we are...and how grateful.   

Stumbling for Words

These past few days I've been at a loss for words.  The ministry I am involved in at the Centro confronts me more and more with suffering and hardship -- not theoretical and abstract.  Suffering that ravages faces I've come to know so well and love.  Fear that dulls what were once dancing black eyes.  Hardship that seems to have no bottom.  I feel so presumptuous standing up to preach to my brothers and sisters.  I see how easily the Gospel can be used to keep folks in their place, to provide just enough comfort to dampen the fires of anger that should be raging.  I squirm faced with the uncomfortable insight that religion can so easily be the "opium of the masses." 

I am Martha enough to have launched into this work convinced that there were things we (I) could do to make life more bearable for Latinos in our community.  Today, the only part of my work that feels truly faithful comes each Saturday evening when I get to retell the story of our faith, retell it in our language. The Eucharistic Prayer we use draws from the imagery of the beloved geography of our distant homeland as well as the migrant experience that binds us together. 

I try to be more like Elizabeth. The image in our lectionary reading of last week is so seductive: I want to see it as a call to spiritual retreat, to solitude and contemplation--like maybe one day I too could be like that lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love and go to India to learn from a guru.  What I am slamming into is very different.  I had never understood until now that accepting Jesus' call for us to be like Elizabeth sometimes means sitting at the feet of Jesus on the cross.  Bleeding.  Sometimes listening means listening to the silence of agony. 

When I was a very little girl, TV programming in Colombia ended at 9:00 PM each night.  If I had gotten to stay up late to watch TV (a rare occasion), I got to see the final sign off.  El Padre Uribe (fr. Uribe) a very well known priest from Bogota, would come on the air and give a brief homily.  Then he would say the following:  "My God, into your hands we entrust the  day that has passed--and the night that is coming."  Words became white noise and the image on TV became snow.  Nothingness.

As I sit here, my prayer is this:  "My God, into your hands I entrust the light I know still shines, and the darkness that surrounds me."

Ministry in Dead End Places

I started this blog intent on capturing something essential about "ministry at the margins" --the work I am doing to nurture a Hispanic ministry program in Ft. Lauderdale.  The early days of this adventure were heady--the community grew exponentially at first, simply because it was so small.  There were many milestones that gave me a sense of accomplishment.  An upholstery shop was turned into holy space where we worship each Saturday evening.  Just standing outside the door, starting to recognize and be recognized by the folks that walked by regularly allowed me to start gaining a sense of being settled, becoming a part of things--it was easy to see ourselves as blessing and being blessed.

The days and months of this work are now starting to blur together and I see in new ways now.  I am left speechless by the hardship each and every one of my brothers and sisters in this small, fragile community faces.  The immigration issues in the country are horribly complex and I refuse to indulge in demonizing or minimizing the people and arguments on either side of this issue.  I just happen to be in a position to see the cost that individual people, my people, pay because there are no easy answers. 

When I left Colombia in 1978, I left for many reasons, some of them very selfish, some of them deeply faithful to Jesus Christ's call to "come and see", even though I didn't know that's what I was doing.  I was dazzled by the possibilities that this country represented for a young woman like me.  I remember one small detail in particular.  My dad was the Swedish consul in the city where I grew up.  As a European in a semi-diplomatic position, he was a target for kidnapping by the M-19--the leftist guerrilla group that was particularly active in our region at the time.  Several of our friends were actually kidnapped, some were killed.  As a result, I was shaped by a bunker mentality--the steps we took to try to feel safe were sometimes absurd.  I never remember a time when we didn't have an alarm system in our house, a system that was upgraded regularly.

When I came to this country, I was amazed that no one had alarm systems.  I didn't have to lock my car.  I could fall asleep in my apartment with the door unlocked.  I had never known that kind of sense of safety and security in my life.  It was such a liberating experience that to this day, I refuse to have an alarm system in my house.  Isn't it sad that this now makes me the exception, not the norm, in many parts of the USA?  For an immigrant like me, possibilities I had dreamed about were realized--not just realized either--they were exceeded beyond my wildest dreams.

The immigrant's story of hope and possibility does not change that radically from one generation to the next.  I listen to my young brothers and sisters at the Centro and their story is mine.  They too were forced to seek hope in a foreign land.  I suspect that if each of you who read this blog were able to go back in time to talk to your people who came here from distant places, your people's story would be my friends'.  But for this little community that I am with now, it is turning out that hope cannot be found here, and if it cannot be found in the United States then where, where can we go?  Right now, there is only silence in response to that question.

I wish I could convey the goodness, the work ethic, the determination to contribute and not just leach off this country's goodness that comes through as my friends talk about their desire to remain in this country.  There aren't enough words to tell you about the fear, the despair and the stress they live with.  I had hoped that this ministry would be about walking with new immigrants on the path to that "City Shining on a Hill."  I am coming to terms with the reality that we are walking together, probably for only a brief time, in the midst of darkness, with no clear destination.  My faith is that it is in those kinds of places where Jesus comes forward to meet us.  These are not easy things to think about though, much less write about.

Beginning

Last May, I was ordained as an Episcopal priest.  The night before my ordination, I was busy preparing for all the guests who would start arriving in the morning, when I got a phone call from a friend. The call was one of those strange, providential moments when suddenly, so much is defined in ways we could never have expected or imagined.  A moment that, in hindsight, makes perfect sense.

You may have heard about one of those horrible, absurd events that make Southeast Florida a bizarre place to live in.  A young woman was out for an evening jog alongside a canal in the suburbs of Broward County.  She was attacked by a 12-foot alligator and dragged to her death in the canal.  Now, her family was trying to find a "protestant minister who speaks Spanish" to do the funeral service on the following Monday.  I was from Colombia, Episcopalian is close enough to Protestant, I’d be ordained by then.  My friend, whose partner is a funeral director, wanted to know if I'd be willing to officiate.

The funeral and everything leading up to it was surreal.  The young woman was from Colombia, my country of birth.  Her family was simply shattered.  Our minds cannot bear to go near the horror and violence of such a death, yet her body, lying in an open casket, insisted this had really happened.  Fairly recent immigrants, spiritual folks but not churched, in a twilight of intense grief and trauma, her family gave new meaning to the word "lost."  Together we found our way through to laying her to rest.  There were a few moments of sheer grace and hope, but mainly we just got through it.

When I drove away from the cemetery, the family was still gathered.  What they said and how they said it, how they were dressed, the perfume they wore, the makeup they used, their hairdo’s, the music, the way they reached out to touch their dead, everything about these folks was deeply familiar.  But familiar mainly as a distant memory recovered by chance. 

I had built my life as an immigrant as close to the heart of the Anglo world as I could get: Anglo husband, Anglo friends, Anglo clothes, Anglo everything.  In one sense, my ordination 3 days earlier was the culmination of an effort to re-create myself in a new image.  How astounding then, to find myself deeply moved, called back to who I had once and always been, whether I accepted that or not.   This is how my ministry in the Latino community of Broward County began--and this blog is an effort to record my return to the border places, the marginal spaces of pain and enormous creative energy and hope where immigrants live.