The Beauty We Love

David sitting on the lion statue at Ijenda.



Last week, Paul mentioned that it would be me, Rebecca, writing the blog this week, and I am very happy to do it. I find I have something about permanence I really want to reflect upon and share.

As I write on Sunday evening, we have been in a swirl of comings and goings all weekend, with no fewer than 4 different individuals having spent the night at our place. On Friday, Yolanda and new team member Michael Sharp from MCC Congo came down for the weekend. Michael is in Burundi taking part in the Great Lakes Peace-building Institute, and it was my first chance to meet him. He will certainly make a fascinating contribution to the eclectic mix of people who are filling out our team. We are continuing with a process of welcome and orientation that should be complete by the end of October. Our volunteer Teri-Lynn came down from up-country today by bus to welcome her dad Doug ton Sunday. He's visiting her for a week, seeing what her situation is like in rural Burundi. It's his first time in Africa and he's excited to be here.

Jen, Yolanda, Michael with Rebecca

In between, we ourselves took a little trip 40 minutes up country to our favorite walking spot, Ijenda, in the mountains. It was great to be out in nature with our good friends Naja and Thomas and their kids, enjoying the feeling of putting on sweaters as we walked, and the pleasure of sitting around a fire after the outdoor exercise. It was also restful to leave our home responsibilities behind for just a bit.

Terri-Lynn and her dad

As a side note, Oren surprised us greatly this week. By necessity, Paul had Oren go to soccer (football) practice at the school on Wednesday afternoon. He was not great (why should he be when his lame, non-sporty parents never kick a ball around with him?) but he LOVED it! On Friday, he exclaimed that he was happy it was Friday because it was soccer day again. We were delighted to watch him do the drills with all the other kids that afternoon, seriously engaging in the sport, and not just lost in thought as we often see him. He was so thrilled that he even scored a goal “against Monsieur! And that's hard to do!” I got to watch all this as Paul started up his new season of dance classes at Ecole Belge. He'll be teaching on Friday afternoons, and he is really pleased with the number of kids and adults taking his classes this year, and the quality of their concentration. I'll let him write more about that next week.

Trip to Ijenda with Spanners

The week started with travel, too: I caught the early bus up to Kigali, Rwanda for a few days of work. I had a good chance to talk with one of our short-term volunteers, Janelle, and hear her reflections on her experience so far. We had a nice long walk together from town to an Indian restaurant for a delicious dinner, and good time to share on another day as well. I wasn't able to catch up in person with Alyssa, who needed to attend her host-father's graduation out-of-town during my visit. My Kigali agenda also included:

• sorting out a fee dispute at our bank
• training our partners in how to use MCC's new project formats
• working on details of some training to help rural community groups learn how to save money together
• hearing about the progress of MCC-supported assistance to new Congolese refugees in Rwandan refugee camps (trauma healing and conflict mediation training)
• showing an accountant how to do improved financial reporting
• discussing renovations to the house we rent for the volunteer coming in November, and preparing the house to be renovated.

Those are the facts of what happened. But my overarching feeling of the trip was deeply colored by the task of dismantling the MCC house, the place where our former volunteers Ruth and Krystan used to live. And the entire trip took place in the context of listening to the novel Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry.

Kigali with SALTers and partners

You see, the one thing that can make bus travel in Africa tolerable is an ipod and a good audiobook. (Yes, many people tolerate it without those crutches, but it really helps me to get through the long hours of winding roads). A fellow Regent grad Stephen Ney had recommended Hannah Coulter to us last year and we downloaded the audiobook (thanks, Steve!). Paul, who travels more than I do, had already listened to it, but this was my chance to finally enjoy the book.

The novel is the story of a life and a community, set in rural Kentucky right after World War II. Hannah narrates her love for her husband of 50 years, wrapped up in her love for his people, and her love for the land that is “their place.” The land itself is a constant protagonist in the story. Hannah and her husband are farmers: they work the land, and the land gives them their life and in turn the love they share is made possible by the land they live from. The land remembers them, even after they are gone. The story celebrates the possibility of being from somewhere and belonging there, with the generations after belonging and rooted to the same place. Yes, they suffer hardships and set-backs and unrealized expectations. Hannah's own children become educated and find that they are drawn off to seek “a better place,” but they are never really comfortable in their own skin after they leave. In Hannah's view, the best kind of life and the best kind of love is deeply rooted in living from the land, an earthly life that roots them to heaven, the pleasure of the “altogether given”.

Listening to this story, I found a deep sense of rightness in the book: there is no “better place” than the place that we really come from and belong to. I want that. And yet, that kind of belonging is not my heritage. There is no longer any farm handed down in my family. There is no community that we can call deeply “our place.” On both Paul's and my sides of the family, we are raising the third generation of gypsies. And all the while musing about this desire for permanence, I was slowly dismantling the “place” Ruth and Krystan had created as a home for themselves, gutting it and erasing their memory from the place.

Ruth and Krystan are artists, and their art overflowed all around them into their home, and generously out into their community. Photographs, oil paintings, sewing projects and literary/visual collages are scattered out abundantly like seeds into the community of people who knew them. For example, Oren and David each have school satchels with monster faces, sewn by Krystan, part of one year's discipline of creating and finishing a creative project on each day of Lent. They held Art Parties several times a year, when they invited friends to contribute and discuss art works according to a set theme. The couple took much of their work with them when they left Rwanda in April, but still their home was warmed by myriad decorative projects. Since the house became vacant in July, a number of remaining paintings were picked up by friends. But still, I had the task of finally dismantling the museum of Ruth and Krystan so that the house walls could be patched and painted. I was lodging in the house. So over two evenings, after long days of meetings, I meditatively detached photos from the walls and listened to Hannah Coulter's celebration of place.

If you are someone who comes from someplace, I urge you to cherish this. Give thanks to God for it, and don't take it for granted. Don't be quick to assume that there is always “some place better.” Don't run from the familiar, just because it is familiar. If you are from some place and you are committed to that place and that community, remember that you are blessed. If you can look around you and remember the parents and grandparents of your friends, and know what your neighbor's grandchildren are doing, count it a privilege. Please don't imagine that it's only the people who travel who do the things of consequence.

And what about those of us who live where we do not belong? Are we only chasing after wind? For many of us, this is our heritage: a heritage of coming from no place in particular, having nowhere to call a rooted home, belonging to no single community. Is there a hope of really belonging and deeply loving?

This is an issue for anyone who leaves home. But for those of us living as expatriates in another country, it is particularly poignant. We arrive with no past and no future. There is no one here who has ever known us before. We are two dimensional beings who have come for an assigned purpose. It's hard enough for families, but at least within a family, you have a common shared history that stretches back to another time and place. For single people, I believe it can be excruciating. I understand that there is a desperation to be known and seen with the right people, a struggle to matter, a good deal of posturing and demonstrating that “the way I came to save-the-world is particularly clever” – because there is always the suppressed knowledge that before you came, you didn't matter to anyone here, and within a few months of your departure, your presence here will be swallowed up by the oblivion of a transitory community and a place you have no claim on. And thus, I believe there is a nihilism and carelessness with others that characterizes those who must come and then go, as they realize they will go without leaving a trace.

I realize that I do not have a heritage of a place, really. But I do have a heritage that offers other gifts handed down. For example, I have watched both my mother and my mother-in-law offer blessed hospitality over many years to hundreds of people. I have seen my parents create community where they were strangers, and I have seen them offer strangers a place when they were back at home. I have witnessed Ruth and Krystan's art parties in Kigali and danced at the Walker family Christmas contradance on their farm in upstate New York. I watched my parents leave home every Sunday night for Bible study, and then as a married couple, Paul and I gathered each week with our small group in New York to share and pray. It seems that these are the fields handed down to us: the fields of hospitality, creativity, intentional community. Sometimes the fields are hard work. But these fields give us back our life and our love. If we just guarded ourselves for ourselves, we would be null. In working these fields diligently, we finally see that our lives are fruitful.

I think the secret of thriving in a place which is not “your place” lies still in giving yourself to that place and that community. There is no greater pleasure in friendship than the pleasure of commitment. We have come to love Burundi because of a choice to commit to our church community and to commit to our friends. We have been inspired by many people around us and their own ways of putting down roots and sharing of themselves. I am thankful for a poem by Rumi, which Ruth copied down and surrounded by photos of art in nature.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.

Don't open the door to the study and begin reading.

Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel

and kiss the ground.

This is my challenge – for myself, for my fellow travellers, and for my rooted friends. Every day, find a way, even one way, to kiss the ground God has given us as our home for today.