srce moje...tracing the journey.

my beloved is in the process of leaving the Balkans, where he has made his home for the past three years. where I made my home for one glorious, complicated year.  and so my heart is in the process of reminiscing, looking back and letting go of the comfort of having that intimate link to a place i came to love so much, even though it broke my heart sometimes.

thinking of when i first arrived in Sarajevo in the middle of August and was instantly in love with the [wordiness alert, this is from my journal:] "clear sweet sunny days backdropping the gorgeous colorful mountainous landscape and the beautiful multicultural milieu of people in the cafes and goods in the markets and church bells ringing and minarets lighting up at night and imams intoning calls to prayer and the river flowing on and on under many bridges through the middle of it all..."

and the day i made to the journey from Sarajevo to Belgrade, reassuring myself that "as i leave this beautiful scarred city, i know i will survive and maybe even learn to thrive in the one i will soon arrive in... i think i am already growing in my ability to recognize the cyrillic letters and sound things out correctly when i see it.  bouncing inside the bus, through tunnels, alongside rock faces, past pine forests and fern patches, we have now come down from the high hills to a more rolling landscape of fields and small towns. hello hay bales and humble houses and huts. the little trickle that started hugging the road's curves in a shallow ditch a while back has since gradually widened into a lively stream and then a broad channel in a gorge below us - and oh - now we have crossed over it on a bridge and i can no longer see it from my side of the bus, but i know it is still there, feeding this land, quenching the thirst of people and creatures, carving its cool, calm power ever deeper and wider, branching off into new waterways, to spread the gift, the youth, the life."

i didn't always feel very youthful or lively for my first few months there. despite some wonderful moments, overall i felt more like this:

i struggled under some shadows of uncertain expectations and rocky living situations and frequent colds and sickness and feeling like a failure a lot of the time.

sure, i smiled in the sunshiny joy of my language lessons, my daily work of caring for little children with special needs, my mini-adventures of walking and navigating public transportation around the city, and texts like this from my coworkers when i was too sick to go to work: "ok dont vory bi god love you"

but it wasn't until, oh, about November that i finally started feeling comfortable in my skin and surroundings again.  i realize this is fairly typical cross-cultural transition timing, but there were also a few real changes that made a big difference.  i moved to a new apartment and "woke up under the skylight, blue sky with wisps of clouds floating by, the sound of the streets being washed and the pigeons flapping about. i tiptoed to look out to the adjacent rooftops where they perch and greeted them this morning...i went to the pijaca/market and had friendly exchanges with the people from whom i bought: a chunk of pumpkin, a bunch of paradajz i luk (tomatoes and onions), some mandarin oranges, pola kila pečurka (half a kilo of mushrooms), i 250g brusnica (dried cranberries)...and trudged delightedly back up the hill...passing Everest Kafe, and the Crna Kornjača, and a Zdrava Hrana (health food) shop, and some creative graffiti...i LOVE MY NEIGHBORHOOD!"

i started having more opportunities to travel around the region...to hike to a waterfall and play in the fall leaves or the snow or the spring flowers in Kosovo/Kosova...to go to concerts in Novi Sad...to spend time with MCC partners and regional directors in Sarajevo, and go hiking in the hills there...

life really blossomed.  blooming and growing, like edelweiss, the hills are alive, with the sound of music... :)

and i had awesome Canadian neighbors who moved in to the apartment below mine, and who invited me to share in their weekly crepes and their city-exploring adventures and their Christmas and Easter celebrations just like another daughter/sister...(and who dressed up as this endearing totem pole for the kindergarten's multicultural dress-up day!)

and i had a gig with a choir, a gospel choir! the only gospel choir in Serbia! who were the warmest, loudest, lovingest :) spiritual community i could possibly have been welcomed into. we sang all over Beograd, and in a few other cities, too.  music. friendship. joy.

and i had, unexpectedly, a boy, who tenderly cared for me when i was sick...who encouraged me to be gentle with myself and see the beauty in my role with the children...who traveled with me all throughout that "land of raspberries and honey-bees, hills and haystacks, abandoned houses and bullet holes, churches and mosques" ...who held me and helped me poetry-slam a bob dylan ballad when my grandpa and another dear friend in the U.S. died on the same day in May...who asked me if he could ask me to marry him yet, and then saw me off on the plane back to the States in July without a definite answer...who said YES YES YES YES YES when I asked him over Skype a couple months later!  who put the perfect eco-friendly vine-shaped ring on my finger this past December...who returned to the Balkans in January and has persevered through these final months of his term there... and who is coming home to me SOON.  srce moje...now we'll journey together for the rest of our lives.  God.es.good.

all.the.arms.we.need.

i promised more information about the peace and justice gathering last month at Sacred Heart church, so here it is: a day of thinking/learning/praying about 'all the arms we need'.

the keynote speaker was Frida Berrigan, peace activist and Senior Program Associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. she spoke about the 'global arms trade', which is all a euphemism except for the 'global' part, which is pretty accurate. 'arms' is a blatant euphemism that really refers to advanced technology designed to kill and maim people and destroy property. 'trade' is something of a misnomer because it's not an equal playing field of exchange between countries; in reality, out of the $55 billion of weapons that are exchanged worldwide each year, the United States supplies 70% of those, and its closest competitor is Italy with a 3.7% share in that market. so, there's mostly one seller and lots of buyers. Frida had many more eye-opening things to say about the 'arms' and the 'trade', but mostly encouraged us to be curious about what's going on, and what is the difference between the arms that the nations think they need to design and produce and stockpile, vs. the kind of strong, true peacemaking arms we need way more of in this world.

the first workshop i went to was about women's spirituality and peacemaking. there was time and creative space for sharing how we as women have been negated by society, told we're not enough and we should be thinner.sexier.quieter.more modest.more shapely.more achievement-oriented.more practical.etc. then we joined in a ritual of remembering times when we have felt powerful as women. the session came from a small-group curriculum called 'Traveling with the Turtle' published by Pace e Bene, a Catholic peace and justice publishing company. we ended with a communal body-sculpture of ourselves in powerful positions, most with arms raised or arms around each other. all the arms we need.

there were images of turtles all over the room, in honor of this small group. i love turtles. my ideal style of living resonates with the intentional taking-time, the purposeful slowness, leading to wisdom because of the space for reflection in the midst of that life-giving pace of activity. also, one image in the room made me think of how turtles have to adapt to different environments. they have to learn to live and move and breathe and navigate equally well on land and in water. they spend their whole lives transitioning between these two, never fully belonging in either. like me! like all third culture kids!

the lunchtime literature tables included a local poetry and painting community, a conscientious objectors league, a campaign for establishing a 'department of peace' in the government, a used book sale, and author/Sacred Heart parishioner/Camden dweller Chris Haw selling and signing his book Jesus for President (co-written with friend Shane Claiborne)

the second session i chose was about the myth of redemptive violence, with stories and reflection questions interwoven with material from Walter Wink's theology of nonviolence shown in Jesus of the gospels. this workshop was led by Fr. Gerard Marable, an African American priest who has had several young male family members shot and killed in Camden, who is a prominent leader in CCOP, who is trying to merge his own parish with a primarily Hispanic parish, and is on the journey of discovering what it means to practice, promote, and pursue peace starting within his own inner violence and his relationships and his community and the world. he brought up an interesting question we have to ask ourselves, to test our cultural competence when we have these kinds of conversations - "who is in the room? and who is not in the room?" for example - he was one of the only black people at the entire gathering. most Sacred Heart members are aging middle class white people from the suburbs who come into the heart of Camden, the middle of a majorly black and hispanic neighborhood, and they do helpful work to serve in the community but not much success involving the community in taking over the work of serving within itself. some folks at this workshop came from a church in Philadelphia where the congregation appears to be 'very integrated', mostly black, some hispanic and some white, and very vibrant and inclusive worship times. but still, this elderly gentleman said, when they have their meetings of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, it's just a few white people who show up, and they're wondering why don't the black parishioners care about these issues. why, Father, when we were behind them in all the civil rights marches and struggles for equality in this country, why won't they stand with us in the justice issues of the world today? why?

my impulse was to ask, well, what are you doing that is somehow not inviting to them? fortunately Fr. Gerard was able to bring this realization to the table very diplomatically, that when we notice certain groups of people whose voices are not in the room, the first thing to do is examine ourselves and what it might be about us that is not inviting them into the room, not making it feel safe or meaningful to them to join in those conversations and efforts.

i wondered to what extent, too, it has to do simply with the life situations of the majority of the black parishioners as opposed to the relatively more affluent and comfortable white parishioners who freely choose to come in from the suburbs to attend these 'integrated' churches in impoverished neighborhoods. can you imagine what it feels like, when you're just trying to survive, just trying to meet the bottom-of-the-psychological-pyramid needs for food security, job security, and emotional security, trying to find support in your immediately-surrounding relationships. all of those issues of nuclear disarmament and fair wages for farm workers in Florida and stopping the far-away war in Afghanistan...seem so distant, so luxurious to worry about when all you can do is work to survive and provide for your family. not that people in poverty are not capable of thinking compassionately and acting to help others beyond their immediate surroundings - they absolutely are capable! and often when issues are presented in a meaningful way, with a deserved sense of urgency and magnitude of need, people who have very little themselves may very well be, proportionately, the more generous to the causes. but if you're talking about bi-monthly meetings with agendas and assignments and action steps toward the distant and relatively abstract goals of ending a war or making peace in the middle east or gaining justice for immigrants or even registering people as conscientious objectors...that may just not seem to matter as much as getting food on the table so that your child is not crying with hunger pains that night or getting frostbite from lack of gloves or boots you couldn't buy that month. what do you think? am i being too simplistic or stereotypical here? there's the people who feel like they don't have all the arms they need to just get through each day, and then there's the people who have arms to spare to lift up all these worthy causes in the world, but not enough to just walk arm in arm alongside their neighbors, their brothers and sisters they clamor to see and embrace in church but turn a blind eye to the kind of homes and jobs and financial situations they go back to after mass. and there's all kinds of others in between and even further extremes. and yet we mostly all have good intentions, we all want to care, we all want to share our arms with somebody, somehow...

and the day concluded with a prayer service honoring a variety of our brothers and sisters in history who have given their arms, their hearts and minds and ears and voices, and even their lives given up in the process of making peace and working for justice, in the hopes that we may do the same, in our own ways, times, and places.

amen.

poets.of.poverty.and.peace.

yesterday i went to the 7th annual gathering on peace and justice, hosted by the peace community that lives around the Sacred Heart parish in south Camden. in between sessions, i wandered a bit through the cracks and crevices and passageways of the church and up and down the dirty-snow-lined streets of row houses around it. my camera's eyes were captured by some stunning works of art done by parishioners - some vibrant iconic paintings hung in frames on walls in sacred spaces in the church, and some guerrilla poetry slammed gracefully on sheets of wood and nailed to the windows and doors of abandoned houses and storefronts in the neighborhood. here is a little video giving glimpses of these bursts of beauty and light in the 'dark' of a city many assume to be as good as dead or dying. the song is from the Taize community, saying "La tenebre n'est point tenebre devant toi; la nuit comme le jour est lumiere" / Our darkness is never darkness in your sight; the deepest night is clear as the daylight. [amen]

momma.kolkata.says.

[she was born on August 26, 1910 in what is now Skopje, Macedonia. she always celebrated her birthday on August 27, though, because that was the day of her baptism. she died on September 5, 1997. happy birthday, Mother Teresa. and happy going-to-be-with-Jesus day, too.]

by Arabinda Aich

by Maqbool Fida Husain

Love has a hem to her garment that reaches the very dust. It sweeps the stains from the streets and lanes, and because it can, it must. - Agnesë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, aka: Mother Teresa

by Quiccs on deviantart

[may i be a stitch in that hem, not afraid to brush the dust and be soaked in the sweat and tears of the world. and may that hem sweep inroads into me, 'come be my light'. bolomde]

hello.mr.president.

so much art has been inspired by this man over the past two years, though it probably comes more from the hype of presidential campaigning and the symbolism of the collective possibilites of achievement for Americans of all skin colors than from any personal achievement to bring justice or any commitment to King.dom values of peace and nonviolent resistance like the artistic tributes to MLK i posted on his Day. i don't yet see anywhere near the same radical convictions against militarism that King professed, which are still urgently applicable today, while the U.S. continues to amass and research and develop WMDs even though we already have more than the other top 20 countries combined. like a sick, sick bully stockpiling mountains of rocks for his slingshot when all the other kids have only a handful of stones, or no slingshot at all. so sick. i guess encouraging Americans to humble ourselves and serve each other and care for the world is a step in the right direction, a message thankfully a little different from "keep shopping, people". anyway, i put some pieces below that i thought were interesting. or that i just liked the colors. ;-)

i hope that he, who has been blessed with a cross-cultural upbringing, an illustrious education, secure financial situation, loyal wife and daughters, and now with this powerful political and global position, will now work to be a blessing. i hope that he whose given name is Barack will do everything he possibly can to be a 'baraka'.

i love what Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery prayed in his benediction, his closing prayer of blessing, at the inauguration: "With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors" [!amen!], "when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right" [i,for one, need to work on that.don't you?and i have read about and been part of maybe a few communities where this is done as a way of life,living the process of true reconciliation, true justice, but...too few, too few.and on a global scale...oh goodness don't get me started on MNCs and economic imperialism...wow.we have a long ways to go]. "Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. say Amen! say Amen."

amen = let it be so. let the hope continue beyond the hype. let him and everyone in positions of power choose to do justice and love mercy and wage peace, not just halt war. por favor. amen.

rev.dr.m.l.k.jr.day.