Conference

Going back to organized religion was a decision I've gradually made this year, without really realizing it. I gravitate towards Methodism because it is the faith that was ingrained in me since childhood, and because it has been this very community that has believed in my parents' vision for the children in Anapra. Methodism has nurtured me, my family, and my family's mission for many years.
And yet I cannot help the feeling of skepticism and suspicion that all powerful structures inspire in me. I cannot help but realize that the political and business nature is still necessarily present –because of obvious and understandable reasons, but still there. I have so far fared well in this world of networking and structures, mainly because of the many who love and respect my parents, but I am always a bit lost in it. What's worst, I am always afraid that my idealism will betray me, as it invariably does, even if to a small extent.

The president of my high school is a non-Methodist person who was hired (I've always wonder by whom) to be an administrator –and a darned good one she is. She raised over a million dollars in scholarships this year, and though she is a somewhat extravagant person, she has not to my knowledge had a reprehensible behavior as far as her financial administration goes. Though she had nothing to do with the Harvard scholarship, and though my parents had to go through many sacrifices so that I could be where I am, she did speak to the LLUMC about me and got me that internship that paid for ..hmm.. 70% of SMU. And yet her drive escapes me. She seems to leave the educational, spiritual, and social leaderships to others (to the vice-president, the chaplain, and the principal) and concentrates on scholarships and PR. She does not show an interest on the kids at the school, though I suppose she has to keep tabs on them or have someone else do it for scholarship selection purposes, until they are about to graduate. To students and their parents, she is not approachable, nor is she necessarily friendly, and her directness can at times be too harsh. So what compels her, as she goes about her busy schedule? I am not sure that I want to know. And still, I can't help but feel for her, and love her somehow, and be glad that she is doing what she is doing, because I really want to think she wants to help, even if she is not aware that she ought to be a full leader or a spiritual example. Right now I only hope that Abi will be able to go to Baker. And I am praying and hoping for whatever networking skills we might possibly need ---I am STILL not working and my siblings will both soon be in college. My goodness, we do need that scholarship.
Conference was not all political and ideological stress, though. Diana, the Todds, and lay ministers from Emporia and FUMC in KC were there. Rev. Reed (retired now) and Pastor Maria (pastor of the church Q and I are going to) were also there. It was very good to see them, and their presence kept my head where it ought to be -on my shoulders, aware that I am loved and respected, and not somewhere else in a perfect world that does not exist. A very nice lady from the one small group we had last year also introduced me to the director of a Hispanic Community Center that is about to open in a town somewhat close to Lawrence. It does not look like it will be a full time job, and it is about a 40-50 min commute, but it is an option, and it seems the type of church-based outreach that attracts my professional interests like a magnet. We'll see how that goes.

Q wrote a wonderful list of things he wants to be doing this summer. I am personally unsure of what goals I have. I have been doing many of the things that had been items in an old, continually growing to do list, though. And I am grateful to be here, and to have been given the chance to spend this time at home with my husband, as he says, playing house. It has been a whole lot of fun, and I know that in these times of workaholism and private accomplishment, women seldom have an excuse as good as mine to enjoy the wonders of being a stay at home wife – yay for extended honeymoons and no children! LoL. Ay Dios. It is late.

Carta Eulogía

Dedicada al Reverendo Jones - Pastor, hermano en Cristo, amado abuelo.

El camino es árido.
El aire sucio y metálico pesa en mis pulmones
Como pesaba en el suyo,
Hermano.
Pesa la noticia, tardía, interrumpida
Es el trabajo, hermano.
La obra suya parecía liviana, oportuna
Y la mía,
Me enfrenta, recordándome a usted,

Como meta
A los brazos tatuados de experiencia
Los ojos cansados de faena

El saber
Que la sonrisa esforzada es verdadera.
Hermano, sea mi trabajo de hoy en vano.
Para extrañarlo.
Y el de mañana sea árido,
Como el suyo, pesado, pero adecuado.
Sea mi desierto a mi pensamiento liviano.

Mi corazón, como el suyo,
Ufano,
No deje espacio para el pasado.
Mi servicio sea nuevo, a diario.

Y sépase usted amado,
Mi reverendo, mi hermano.

-AIBC

Can't Sleep

Writing a post for my blog will forever remind me of the first week I spent with my husband to be… back in Dallas, when I would write in the wee hours of the night simply because it was the only time I could do it. And I HAD to do it, of course, because I knew he’d be reading it soon. Just knowing that he would was enough of a booster to keep me up for hours, writing away, making sure to include the most interesting things in my crazy busy life to entertain and impress him.

Well, it’s sort of like that still… except this time around he is somewhere in the US and Im down here in Mexico. It’s past midnight for me, and I haven’t been able to go to sleep yet, because I have way too many things in my head. The anticipation doesn’t let me sleep. Forgive me if for a moment I write like no one else will read this… Q, Ry bear… I miss you.

Home will always be home. There’s the expected and familiar.. and I’m grateful for that. I am grateful to be here. But there are a lot of things I just didn’t expect.. the busy-ness and messiness of it all, for one thing, disorients me once in a while (and don’t get me wrong, it was busy and messy enough with just me, but now it’s 9 of us!) I expected this time to be a bit more laid back.. a time to enjoy my family leisurely. Strange that I expected that, knowing how crazy my parents’ schedule is –and I want to be of as much help as I can be. This is my very last year at home, and at home we all eat from the same pot. All for one, and one for all! I’m learning to re-embrace it.

So I am once again a “teenager,” a Sunday-school teacher, a school secretary, an active member of a youth group.. and of course a sister/daughter, a wedding planner and an ESL teacher, which were the three main goals for the year.

It’s been a busy month for me… emotionally and otherwise. Busy, busy. It’s been a strangely overwhelming AND fun month. Both hectic and exciting, tiring and rewarding….

School is going amazingly well, despite the expected bumpy start. Office paperwork is as complicated as I knew it’d be… and teaching 1^st through 6^th grade ESL is no easy feat, especially while the classroom is under construction and still lacks a blackboard. But I do have plenty of space, seats, and a computer (my laptop) and a projector. And Dad bought me a Disney interactive program, which the kids LOVED. I also have a whole lot of Power Points, flashcards, and other didactic materials. I think the kids and I are all having a lot of fun, and they are learning fairly quickly. In a month (2 classes a week) most of the grades have learned school vocabulary, the pronouns, the verb to be, this/these, that/those, the, my, a… the family, the house, the numbers, the calendar… my goodness.. I’m going fast. But that’s how smart they are. I’m very proud of them.

Hard things? Learning names, keeping the noise level down, and grading so much homework! But I refuse to lower the hw load.. they need it.

Fun things? Games and crafts with the kids. I had the 1^st grade kiddos make cubes with the names of the months, and they loved it. The cubes came out surprisingly well, given the age of the kids. They are all cute and colorful, and I intend on hanging them to the paper tree Im building in one of the corners of the classroom…Getting little notes and drawings is also a lot of fun too :)

So that’s been the start of the year for me.. I love teaching :) The kiddos make me happy .. jejejeje…

Alrights… Im going to sleep now.. Im finally starting to fade.

Ecclesiology and the Anti-Praxis of Liberation Theology

Speaking of post-Enlightenment responses (such as modern cosmopolitanism, liberation theology, and even that new trend that they call reconciliation theology) made me think of Schleiermacher, “the father of modern protestant theology,” whose Ecclesiological a priori principles could be very briefly listed. He strongly advocates a type of Church theory that emphasizes communion to such an extent that some believe him to have been anti-institutional (thus my mental link to liberation theology…):

1. The Church is first and foremost a fellowship or communion with God through Jesus and the Spirit that is shared among Christians.

2. The Church is the corporate life brought about by Jesus; its origins must be grasped historically and dynamically. Its foundation lies in a religious intimacy between Jesus and his followers that grows organically through the spread of like relationships. Schleiermacher identified religious self-consciousness, which is also a consciousness of God, as the basis of religion. This consciousness or piety leads naturally to fellowship or communion which in the case of Christianity is the Church. In On Religion Schleiermacher lingered on the topic of intimacy, discussing how religious consciousness dissolves the artificial boundaries of our personalities and immerses ourselves within the feeling of comradeship. In The Christian Faith he described Christian redemption as arising through fellowship with Jesus, and the emergence of the Church as a necessary extension of such fellowship.

3. The Church is an intrinsic dimension of revelation and not an added extra. Schleiermacher argued that whether in the modern era or in the time of Christ, Christian redemption takes place always and necessarily within the context of a fellowship. It is not enough to say only that individuals first have their own personal transforming experiences and then come together to form a fellowship. Christ's ministry took place within a context in which a collective need for redemption and its expectation already existed. Moreover, each personal Christian experience takes place within and is conditioned by a fellowship that took form with Christ's first public appearance. The resulting organization finds its roots in this initial self-organizing principle.

4. The Lord's Supper is the highest representation of church unity, achieving fellowship with Christ and fellowship among believers. The most apt image for describing the Church is that of the body of Christ. Although he explicitly rejected the Roman Catholic view that stresses transubstantiation, Schleiermacher also rejected views that characterize the Lord's Supper as merely figurative. He saw the Lord's Supper as the primary way of maintaining the living fellowship with Christ, so that all other forms of "enjoyment" of Christ are either an approximation to it or a prolongation of it. I would not necessarily agree with this last point, but I find his acceptance of the Holy Communion as more than simple symbolism refreshing and true.

5. The unity present in Christian fellowship requires certain essential elements. Schleiermacher held that since Christian fellowship must exist alongside the world, it will possess organizational elements such as laws and structures of authority. Most of these elements are historically variable, but there must be certain essential elements that account for continuity in self-identity. Schleiermacher identified these elements as Holy Scripture, ministry of the Word of God, baptism, the Lord's Supper, the power of the keys, and prayer in the name of Jesus. He links these six elements with the threefold ministry of Christ as prophet, priest, and king, and thus considers them to be the continuation of the activities of Christ himself.

6. Historical manifestations of the Church will legitimately be diverse. Church unity is not narrow uniformity but a reality that exists amid the dynamic interplay of many diverse elements; unity and diversity are complementary rather than contradictory. The main purpose of church authority is to counter those who insist on making their own mode of thinking obligatory, as the only expression of the common spirit. Because it exists in the world, the visible Church has many mutable and corruptible elements. It is subject to error and division. Only the invisible Church is infallible and unified. Each part of the visible Church should be aware of its own incompleteness, and open to fellowship with other parts. It could be argued, then that he believed that Protestantism and Roman Catholicism can be viewed as incomplete mediations of Christianity. “Religion is but a human attempt to reach God,” my dad once told me.

7. Church unity requires some normativity in its basic expressions of revelation. Scripture is the most basic norm of revelation; Protestants are bound also by Evangelical confessional documents; dogmas are necessary but provisional. Sources of dogma such as the witness of the patristic writers and the decrees of early church councils can be valuable but are not binding.

8. The Church is trinitarian.

All of this to go back to one main, ever-important argument that Christianity is not an ideology nor a juridical institution, but an event that has individual and communal dimensions and that spreads organically.

I believe it is this basic concept of the organically spiritual structure of the church that I did not have on the surface of my consciousness when I had a troubling discussion with the head of an important alliance that promotes the rights and welfare of immigrants in MA ---a lady whose work I deeply admire, but whose ideology I almost immediately found to be disconcertingly incorrect…

I met her at the Solutions Conference at HDS, where she and a colleague spoke about their work as an umbrella structure for different organizations… I had a word with her about my personal work aspirations, and about my interest in grass-roots activism, a short little spiel which of course she gladly absorbed. It was when I spoke of the possibility of communal work between the churches, of the collaboration between organizations, the government, and the church, that her semblance changed.

“I met a wonderful group of people in Puebla,” she said. (She’s not Mexican, so my mind went directly to the late 1970’s CELAM conference in Puebla, during the height of liberation theology within the Catholic and Orthodox Churches) “That once told me this… La Iglesia y la Politica son tiburones. Con los tiburones, tienes tres opciones: Una, nadar a la par. Dos, nadar contra ellos y atacarlos. Tres, ignorarlos.” She paused for a moment. “Ellos me dieron una gran leccion, la gente de Puebla. Yo estaba intentando nadar en contra de los tiburones. Hay que ignorarlos. Hay que hacer lo que tenemos que hacer, y dar en cuenta que no deben tener el poder que tienen. Si nadamos en contra de ellos, les damos el poder.”

She proceeded to draw a circle and a triangle. “La politica y la iglesia, ambas tienen estructura de piramide” And she went on to explain that what we should structure our society not in a manner that gives the power to one person (the president, the pope) but to all (and she re-traced her circle). It was quite an impressive little homily. The only issue I had was, what do you do about leadership? It will always exist; it will always be needed. That is the problem with liberation theology. They go on and on about the liberation of the poor, and their so called "preferential option for the poor," and they let their socialist tendencies go overboard. This is not a circular, all-encompassing order. As a matter of fact, they do not offer an alternate order. “So if democracy is a pyramid, then what structure can be placed that will resemble the circular graph of power?” I didn’t say it, but God, I was dying to ask, “Socialism? Marxism? Communism??” I did ask, though what she thought would be an alternate way of structuring our society and the Church. No answer. She very gallantly left that up to me to figure out. She advocated the destruction, through the simple “ley del hielo,” as we call the systematic, childish ignoring of people we’re mad at in Northern Mexico, of our present political and religious system. Destruction without any hope for reconstruction.

What I figured out, (lol.. even if entirely too late), is that the Church, as it is structured today, accepts leadership, but is ultimately not a pyramid (nor is it a damned polarized shark), but a communal organization. And perhaps now would my previous statement make more sense: “All of this to go back to one main, ever-important argument that Christianity is not an ideology nor a juridical institution, but an event that has individual and communal dimensions and that spreads organically. I believe it is this basic concept of the organically spiritual structure of the church that I did not have on the surface of my consciousness when I had a troubling discussion with the head of an important alliance that promotes the rights and welfare of immigrants in MA…”

An organic structure. Not a circle, not a pyramid, but a body. A tree. A living organism. A much more realistic, much more complex approach. Christianity as an organic event. Cosmopolitanism, the ideal of global justice according to which, in some fundamental respects, all individual human beings matter, and matter equally. Democracy, which renders power, though not incautiously, to the people, and still allows for the fair structuring of leadership. I cannot believe how much this small triumph excites me. The triumph over the simplistic symbolism behind a circle and a triangle! This lady… she shall remain unnamed, but for all the mental tribulation her simple conversation with me set off, she still needs to take a philosophy course or two. And that, querida familia mia, was my little ideological triumph of the month.

False models of dichotomous identity

Met up with Cemelli de Aztlán today. She introduced me to the man who owns the house. Nice guy.

She and I went to lunch afterwards. Had one of those remarkable, stirring conversations that leave you… well, I’ll get my thoughts on that organized later on. But what started as a conversation about the politics of relationships ended up as a theological- political- cultural- sociological verbal examination of the Juarez girls controversy. Did it originate in the culture? Does the culture justify, maintain and prolong the problem? Or do the rapes have their origins, as the FBI/ Mexican police explain(s), in the initial crime of American citizens and their impunity?

I am more concerned with the prolongation and justification of the crimes than I am with their origin. Quite admittedly, I am starting my research on this issue with the (arguable) insider’s perspective that culture does contribute to the problem and that something should be done about it.

To give an example of culture’s role in prolonging a problem, I am concerned that we need to use the politics of storytelling as a false bridge between identities and actions: we, as a society (Mexican and American!), have continuously felt the need to tell ourselves that the girls raped in Cd. Juarez were “decent” hard-working, maquiladora employees –morally righteous women, good mothers and daughters-- and not licentious party-girls who were “looking for it” or quite simply “had it coming.” [As a footnote, only 128 of the girls are thought or have been proven to be maquiladora workers. But that is not what worries me.] What concerns me is that in order to defend the cause of raped and murdered girls, we incongruously necessitate a redemptive myth! The effect of this situation is more than just a high level of cultural absurdity. It endangers the few, already inefficient actions taken to solve the crime problem.

Redemptive myths such as these, as dangerous as they might be, are mechanisms of healing. Prof. Jackson, I’m sure, would agree. But I believe they are an obvious reaction to a basic problem: the false models of dichotomous identity we have built. The academic world has already reacted to these dichotomies by theorizing alternate models of identity: intersubjectivity, transnationality, diasporic and borderland identities, etc., but how can the academia help translate these theories into action? The act of storytelling, as I’ve already argued, is flawed in that it derives from the very problem and can prolong it. This specific redemptive myth, for example, comes hand in hand with another (also erroneously dichotomous) myth of justification: if the woman is a “whore,” the rapist is justified. Because the woman is a “saint” according to this myth, then the rapist is far from justified. But what of the many victims in Juarez that do not in reality have this socio-political and moral identity?

To expand on the notion of false models of dichotomous identity:

I’ve been struggling intellectually with the black and white mentality of our society for some time now. More specifically, with the mentality that classifies identity within the scheme of dichotomies. The basic idea is that we’ve constructed models of identity that have only one alternate other –an often absolute converse option. I’m talking about bipolar, dichotomous modes of identity. False structural models that dictate that a woman is either a whore or a saint; a person is either one nationality or the other; a citizen belongs to one culture or the other –and these cultures are surely absolute opposites, etc.

The result, I argued, is a mentality that promotes a socio-political problematic that can only be solved if we somehow build bridges of identity. Bridges that might have been built through the already growing academia of trans-identity. How, then, can we build on it towards action? Did the original moral dichotomy arise from the religious notions of good and evil? What can we do to correct our dichotomies without compromising our religious beliefs? And most importantly, what can the academy do that will directly, positively affect the situation of the women of Cd. Juarez?

big and ugly

Affiliate organizations, general boards, national associations and such…
UGH! I’ve been reading.. or.. well, semi-memorizing the United Methodist Church website for clues of what is out there that I would like to be a part of. I don’t understand why, if I absolutely crave planning and organization, can the mere mention of vaguely political labels and structures give me such an ugly feeling of nausea. Maybe it’s the memory of my heart broken parents leaving the politics of Methodism behind… sort of behind. Or that ugly stomach discomfort I used to get during conferences when we were all waiting to see if it’d be time to pack and say goodbye to everyone again. Maybe I just quite honestly don’t like that tricky, deceptive side that politics will always have –I don’t know if I’m sharp enough to keep up without some disregard of my own personal values. That last sentence alone sounds ugly enough.
Whatever it is, how does one get rid of it? This… thing… that is … so ugly sometimes but also very often necessary, and so useful, and SO beneficial? How can I be a part of that “Church and Society” tab without going crazy (--er)? Will I make a difference in the kind of small organization I prefer? Maybe it is a big fat lie that revolutionary changes can only be made through the masses. Wesley might have disagreed with me, though! Maybe my “preferences” will only get me stuck in an unproductive, mediocre hole of contentment. Or maybe I am altogether too problematical. Maybe I am missing the beauty of the simple life. Of making a true and lasting difference, one life at a time.
Why do I feel like I have to do everything? Sometimes it is so overwhelming that I feel I have done nothing in comparison to that gigantic original goal… If I didn’t think like this, though, what would keep me on check? What is it that drives great leaders, if it isn’t the fear that things could remain the same? If a great leader needs a great label, though, and colossal structures, and ridiculous amounts of attention… then maybe I can remain an ordinary person doing… um.. random acts of crazy greatness.

Your Eyes on a Window

When Time stops
And you know not your own name
When Silence is too intoxicating
You dangle your eyes from the window rim

Can’t drop a dime on Truth
The keyboard might Reply
So you just hang your eyes on a window
And watch the rain fall again

While each drop dies on your glass
A firefly might bite the salt
Sneak through the window screen
Daze a buzz into your sight

There’s an old crying cloud outside
But I want your wet feet to swirl
Green with roaming grass
The screen ajar

My eyes sitting on your windowsill.