Baptism

These are the questions that were asked at my baptism:

These are not easy questions.

Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin? 

Have you looked at your heart and considered the darkness there? Have you spent time with your spirit and seen the parts of it that you'd rather no one else saw? Have you thought back through your history and reckoned with the pain that you have brought to others, intentionally and unintentionally? Because that's the work that you need to do in order to say that you're renouncing the spiritual forces of wickedness and rejecting the evil powers of this world and repenting of your sin. You have to know and acknowledge that racism exists and that you are racist and you have to decide that you don't want to be that way anymore. You have to know and acknowledge that sexism exists and that you've been effected by it and you have to reject it. You have to know and acknowledge that homophobia exists and that you've participated in it and you have to choose to fight against it. You have to know and acknowledge all the ways that you fear people who are different from you in mind, body, and spirit, and you have to investigate all the ways that fear has harmed others and you have to put it away from yourself. You have to recognize that we have idolized money and comfort and that we have welcomed the evil, dehumanizing powers of this world into our hearts in order to obtain and maintain our money and our comfort.

Greed. Hate. Apathy. Fear. Grasping desire. Do you renounce them?

Racism. Sexism. Homophobia. Transphobia. Ableism. Ageism. Colorism. Xenophobia. Nationalism. Consumerism. Do you reject them?

And do you repent?

That's the hard one, the one that requires work from you. You probably know much of the personal pain you've caused in your life, how deep it goes, how much you meant it. Have you acknowledged it? Have you apologized for it? Have you endeavored to become someone who would never do something like that again? Have you tried to understand those who you've hurt? Have you tried to make amends? Have you done the most that you can to heal what you've broken?

And as you've done your soul-searching, you've probably become aware that the evil powers of this world have had a hold on you and that you need to turn away from them. Are you grieved by the times that you made a black joke, or a Mexican joke, or a Jewish joke? Do you mourn the times someone said something horrible and you stayed silent? Is your heart broken by the wrongs you overlooked? Are you deeply troubled by the way you've used and misused the world around you, the people, the environment? Do you actively choose to live life differently, to speak kindly and to speak out, to consume carefully and gently?

Do you, in fact, repent of your sins?

Because until you've done these things, until you have looked at the evil in your heart and the evil in the world and the evil in your history and said, "This should not be," and reject it from your heart and guard against it in your world and mourn it in your history, you carry evil with you and big or small, it will break us all into pieces. Before you claim to follow Christ, you have to hear in your spirit and enact in your life the first sermon he ever preached: Repent.

Otherwise, you will find yourself standing on stolen land, blocking the way of a peacemaker with all of the evil in your heart on your face for everyone to see. Or worse, your children will.

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves? 

Do you think we can do this? Do you think that we can actually fight this? Do you think that we can make society better for everyone who lives in it, not just for the wealthy or those in power? Do you think that we can learn to undo the damage we've done to the planet? Do you think that we can make our homes, schools, places of worship, community spaces, workspaces safe for everyone? Do you think that goodness and kindness and gentleness and love will change anything?

Or do you think that the best thing we can do is look out for us and ours just try to survive this?

I will admit that I have found the continual process of renouncing, rejecting, and repenting to be exhausting and heartbreaking. I have spent so much time and energy digging out the evil in my life that the idea of resisting it in the world around me is more than I can bear. There's too much poverty, too much pain, and too many systems set up to keep people in poverty and pain that resistance seems laughable. We are drowning under the weight of our disregard for our fellow human and our shared world. How can you resist when you can barely breathe?

This is why we need to be given freedom. This is why we need to be given power.

And honestly, at this point, I don't really care where you find freedom and power, as long as it's not in evil, injustice, or oppression. Does being in nature renew your spirit, give you life, make you feel connected to those around you, create a tenderness in your heart that fuels the fire in your protest? That's beautiful. Come join us.

Have you found deep meaning in your encounters with the people around you and the people who life has given the least to? Does joy shared between people bring light to your darkness and energy to your work against injustice? God, I'm so glad. Let's do this.

Do you gather in community with other people who understand the spiritual world the same way you do and do your prayers bring peace to your heart and enliven your soul? Do you sing songs together, or share meaningful words, or remind yourselves of who you are with rituals, and do those things renew you and prepare you for the fight ahead of us? Amen amen, my friend. May we journey together?

Have you realized how bad it's gotten? Are you tired of watching people get hurt? That's more than enough. Be free. Be strong. Come on.

As a Christian, I believe that the God of the Universe came down to Earth and lived and died so that we can be free from the evil that surrounds us. I believe that God is with us still, empowering us to fight for ourselves and to free others. I believe that we have not been abandoned, though it looks like that sometimes. Evil is great, but a light shone into the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. And so I am free from the things that have bound me, and I will be sustained in this fight, and good will endure while evil exhausts itself.

Professing that is one thing. Accepting it, believing it, bringing it into your heart and allowing it to do the work it needs to do, is another.

Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations, and races? 

Here's the thing: I couldn't care less about the church right now. It is a human organization that has failed us again and again and baptized evil and welcomed it onto the membership roles. For a group of people whose first step together should be repentance, the church is horrible at it. It is awful at accountability. The church allows us to be comfortable and cowardly, to create theological justifications for slavery and sexism and homophobia and war and the prosperity that grows out of them. The church has disgusted me and I'm perpetually one step away from walking out the door and never looking back. The church hurts people and the church is apathetic about that.

The church needs to remember its baptism.

The church needs to answer these questions again.

Because if Jesus is our savior, no one else is.

If Jesus is our Lord, no one else is.

If we put our whole trust in his grace, we cannot put our trust in anything else.

No president, no party, no slogan, is worthy of our trust and our service. Jesus is. Jesus, who told us to love our neighbors and our enemies and ourselves. Jesus, who told us to care for the least of these like our lives depended on it. Jesus, who'd rather be nailed to a cross than take a human life. Jesus, who cared for the poor and the widow and the orphan and the stranger. Jesus is the one we should be following. Jesus is the one who will change us and empower us and through us change and empower others so that the world may know peace. God, it's hard to trust that.

These are not easy questions. Reject, accept, promise. We are asked to do astounding, impossible things in these questions.

But that doesn't mean we should stop answering them.

Showers: Back in America

Cape Town just came out of a drought, but is still very much at risk of running out of water. Signs are everywhere (though not as prevalent at the V&A Waterfront or at the airport) telling people at the sink to use hand sanitizer instead of washing their hands and people in the toilets to let it mellow.

The shower where we stayed instructed us on how to do the 5 minute "Power Shower": you use the water for two minutes to rinse the dirt off, then you shut it off and lather up for a minute, then you use the water for two minutes to rinse soap off. Despite being someone who takes 15 minute showers minimum, I found it surprisingly effective.

I did the Power Shower the whole time we were in Cape Town, though it might have been 6 minutes after I took a swim in the ocean. After we left Cape Town, we spent more than a day in transport, in airplanes and airports, and most of us joked about how what we wanted most of all was to be in our own houses taking an hour-long shower in our own baths. It's a delight to "wash the people off of you," as a friend of mine puts it. A long shower is usually what's in order after having to rinse off in airport bathrooms and layer on the deodorant in order to be amenable to the abundance of humans that surround you during air travel. All that stress and recirculated air washes down the drain when you shower.

Or I thought it would, anyway. I had thought that a shower would wash away whatever stress and frustration remained from this trip and leave me ready for a new semester and the resumption of my life in DC, but standing in the shower, all I could do was look at the water spiraling down the drain and think, "Do I really need this?"

I don't intentionally walk into experiences thinking that they'll change me anymore. I had enough of that with retreats and weekends away which all left me the same, just more tired. I walked into this trip already exhausted with low expectations. I've travelled abroad before. I'm aware of how to suck the marrow out of life. I know what it's like to encounter another culture and listen instead of talk. I know how to process what I'm seeing, how to be challenged and enlivened at the same time. I've done this all enough to be something close to efficient at it. I've been on newness overload and so even profound new encounters have become a bit blasé. I feel like my friends who went to Hawaii on their honeymoon. By the end of the first week, their emotional reaction to the beauty around them was, "Oh great. Another gorgeous waterfall."

I learned so much in South Africa. There will be future posts about the scientific work that's being done at Sterkfontein and the surrounding sites, as well as with the shipwrecks off the coast of Cape Town. I'll likely reference what I've learned about nationwide forgiveness and the continued struggle against systems of oppression for the next few years of my life. I can already see the broad strokes outline of my experience taking shape as my brain does the background processing that it needs to do. I had the immersion experience I was expected by others to have.

But I didn't expect to come back much changed at all. I didn't expect to have any new discomfort at my privileges. I saw giraffes and stayed on the beach, for Pete's sake. How was this trip supposed to challenge me, except through the lens of history, with a dash of poverty tourism? Apartheid may have fallen in the 90s, but there are still large numbers of black and colored South Africans are living in unacceptable conditions in the townships apartheid created and impoverished. The question that faces the country today, especially as it aims to move itself out of the corrupt presidency of Jacob Zuma, is how to rightly govern while combating the continuing economic and land-based apartheid, without going the way of Zimbabwe. There is much to learn from all of this, of course, but I can't for the life of me understand how it impacted me so much.

I love showers and my part of the US isn't in drought. Why am I begrudging myself a shower? I need my space away from other people from time to time, otherwise I'm miserable. Why does my bedroom, my house suddenly feel much too big? I can get in my car and go anywhere I like, eat anything I like, and yet I've stayed home, away from the grocery store, because I am not ready for the overwhelming experience of the cereal aisle. Despite all my efforts in this life, I have not done enough to earn the luxury that I live in, the luxury that is, of course, slowly killing the planet and more quickly killing some of the people on it.

I wasn't prepared to come back to normal. I wasn't prepared to begin making the decisions about how I want to live again. After two weeks of going where I'm told and having the luxury of throwing around critical remarks when we made a stop I thought was unnecessary, I'm now faced with all the unnecessary things I have chosen for myself. The urge to sell everything I've ever owned and make a simple living on a farm somewhere in order to make as little environmental impact as possible is palpable. That and the urge to take a deep dive into political activism.

We have a beautiful world full of beautiful people who think up such beautiful things.

We have a dying world full of miserable people who think up deeply hurtful things.

These are both true.

The challenge of life, then, knowing that beauty and pain are laid out before us and that we do not get to choose the beauty and the pain we are born with, is to always seek beauty wherever it lives and always resist misery wherever it grows. The challenge of travel is, of course, that it makes us more aware of the misery in our own lives that we have grown comfortable with, the wells that we have drawn dry without a chance of replenishment.

So, the question that comes next, I guess, is what we should do about that.

White Guilt: Cape Town

Cape Town is beautiful. Cape Town is vibrant. Cape Town is by the ocean and gives me life.

Cape Town was built by slaves. 

Cape Town was built by enslaved people who were imported into the cape by people who looked like me. They didn't enslave the local population because they needed them for trade and local knowledge. They instead shipped human beings like so much cargo in to do their hard labor for them. Then, as the city established itself as a refueling hub, they became a part of the global economy that begat the Transatlantic Slave Trade. And as the years passed on and legalized slavery fell out of vogue, governments made of people who looked like me made laws that didn't pay people for their labor and subjected them to poor housing in segregated parts of town and forced them into the most difficult jobs as if they weren't human beings with human needs. Human trafficking today, modern-day slavery, happens under our noses and fuels our global economy and we white people turn our eyes away just as people who look like us always have.

The white guilt is strong on this trip, in case that wasn't apparent.

But you, fellow white person, can walk with me through the Slave Lodge and stand in front of story after story of what it's like to be an enslaved person, to give birth to children who will never know anything but slavery, to live a life of torture without the hope of freedom. And you can hear the stories of those whose hearts were broken when their homes were bulldozed by the apartheid government because their multicultural and multiracial neighborhood was too successful. And you can walk through Soweto or the Apartheid Museum and hear the stories of the children who died because they weren't going to stay silent in the face of the oppression they faced. You can sit and listen to the stories of those who lived through the struggle and the extraordinary lengths that people went through to gain basic equality. You can do all of these things and feel a sense of sorrow sinking into your bones for wrongs that you yourself will never be able to fix, never be able to make reparations for, even though the trauma and economic impact echo through the generations.

But let me tell you that your white guilt is not enough. My white guilt is not enough. If we let it paralyze us, we only hurt the situation more.

Because we are not powerless. We cannot change the past, this is true, but we can work to uncover it and to tell it better. This is the work that the team uncovering the São José Paquete Africa wreck is doing, so that we might better understand what those who were enslaved went through, and more fully mourn their loses. We can remember the pain that was brought to people and vow to never let it happen again. We can learn from the past to imagine a brighter future, as the District 6 Museum does. And most of all, we can put our money where our guilt is. We can invest in black businesses. We can support every educational opportunity that gives black children an advantage. We can speak out against latent racism. We can celebrate black culture. And while we're at it, we can look at the other wrongs in our history and see what responses they require from us. Better schools, better scholarships, better opportunities should around for the descendants of those who suffered because of the greed of others. 

Others who looked like me.

God, there is so much work to do.

Sometimes, Tourism is Okay: South Africa Days 6 and 7

My overarching rule for travel, under which all the previous rules fall, is: Don't be a tourist. Don't go where the tourists go, don't act like tourists act, don't buy what the tourists buy. Do your research and find local places you can eat at and buy from and support. Sure, when in Paris, go to the Champs de Mars, see the Eiffel Tower, take a picture or two. But don't let that be your only experience of Paris, hopping on and off a tour bus and buying kitsch souvenirs from vendors who set themselves up in places so that they can take advantage of loud rich lost Americans. I have found that if you travel as the tourists do, you miss everything important about being in another country.

But sometimes, it's good to be a tourist.

The Kwalata Game Lodge is on a Big 5 (elephant, lion, buffalo, rhino, leopard) game reserve where you stay in thatched roof cabins, participate in group activities, and go on game drives, which are basically what you think of when you think of a safari. We went on three of them, including one that left around 6:15 in the morning, so that we could see with our own eyes (and binoculars and cameras) free-ranging animals that in America you can only see in the zoo.

We saw cheetahs and ostrich and wildebeest and giraffes and hippos and a turtle and got caught in wicked beautiful storm, but the question is, why are we doing this astoundingly touristy things?

Well, Kwalata lodge was founded by a local teacher who took his kids out into the bush to give them a new experience and then grew from there. Kwalata helps support the local artist who owns this shop:

It supports this preschool:

They call traffic lights robots here. It's one of my favorite things. 

It supports a greenhouse and pottery shop:

It supports this dance troupe, which we saw before we ate lunch at this local restaurant, also supported by the game lodge:

And it marries together tourism with preservation, so that we can see all of these animals:

Ostrich: bigger than you think.

Giraffe: bigger than you think.

Zebra: bigger than you think.

Wildebeest: bigger than you think, but also definitely big enough to kill Mufasa.

Impala: not a car. 

Hippo: not what you want for Christmas. This one was angry at us. 

Find the Pumbaa and her babies! 

No animals, because there was a wicked storm.

There is a complicated relationship between the tourism industry and the local economy, always. If you've never thought about that connection in the US, I recommend The Florida Project for a wonderful story well told focusing around the children living in extended stay hotels outside of Disney. But South Africa has the infrastructure to bring in tourists and here at Kwalata, at least, that's feeding back into the local economy and also enabling students to imagine a different future than what they might imagine in the townships. And if they can go away and be successful, they might come back and help where they came from live better.

If tourism helps that, I guess I can be a tourist.

Church: South Africa Day 5

On Sunday, we went to church. 

Church here did not feel like church back home. Even the way people said it made it carry more weight. We went to church, with heavy emphasis on both the ch's. Our tour guides wanted to come to with us to church. Two pastors, one of them a former bishop, came with us to church. When we arrived, everyone was dressed to the nines, greeting each other, then heading in yo pack the sanctuary. Church back home is a place you go to and get your weekly worship in, like an errand. Church in Soweto is an event.

An event was made out of our presence too. The sanctuary held maybe 700 people, with plastic chairs at the end of some of the pews and extra benches and chairs that stretched back into the narthex, and still the pastor chose to seat us at the front as honored guests, introducing us at the beginning as seminarians from “the land of Trump.” And since we were here, he had assigned his seminary intern to preach so that she could preach to her peers. Two of us read scripture and at the end of the service, the professor who organized the trip was brought up to say a few words to the congregation. By that time, though, we'd been in church for three hours already, so I can't be sure anyone was really listening to Eileen. After the service, there was a meal for us and for the church leadership, and it was made clear that this was a privileged meal to partake in.

I would love to tell you about the content of the service, how glorious it was to hear what was essentially Anglican chant (this is a Methodist Church, after all) sung by their award-winning choir in African languages and African harmonies, how powerful it was to see a young black woman in a headwrap deliver a message about transformation that was deeply entrenched in the scriptures, having to pause every line for the translator and yet never losing her rhythm or her passion, how joyful the seemingly never-ending communion line was. I want to talk about the involuntary chill I got when two women of the congregation offered intercessory prayers, kneeling in the chancel and speaking with fervor, jumping between languages as they prayed. I want to describe for you the offering, how the baskets were full both time money was collected, and explain all the different uniforms that those in different societies and organizations in the church wore. It was a sea of red and blue with white highlights. I want to talk about the powerful women of the church. I want to talk about the abundance of children who all stayed for the entire three and a half hour long service. I would love to describe for you the way my heart jumped when we sang O For A Thousand as our first hymn. Even stumbling through the Xhosa, it was a wonderful moment.

It would be a delight if I could tell you more about those wonderful moments but the truth of the matter is, the moments are all that I have. My brain kept interrupting my experience of the service with a long and unkind mental argument that I won by the end. So while everyone else was talking about how powerful the Spirit had been in that place and how life-giving the worship had been, I was shutting down, trying to steal some recovery time for myself at our privileged lunch.

So let me instead tell you about what I learned about how I want to pastor from that service and from the conversations after. Because it's an interesting thing about pastors-- we are meant to be humble servants of God shepherding a congregation, but the job requires a touch of bombast from time to time and as such can attract people with big personalities looking for an audience. Of course, some congregations are looking for that kind of a pastor and that can be a feedback loop that can be dangerous if people aren't paying attention. I'm not a deeply Augustinian thinker, but I do think that pride can be a damaging thing when it's sinful.

And of course, there's that interesting phenomenon of maleness in ranks of the clergy, even though globally, and especially in Africa, the majority of church attendees are women. If you're reading this, chances are you've talked to me at least once in my life, and if you have, you've heard from me about the challenges of being a woman doing church work. The traditions and the current systems, formal and informal, of the church make it a challenge to be heard and respected as a female clergy person. The situation in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa is complicated at the moment. Last year, they passed legislation saying that until the ranks of bishops were at least 40% female, no new male candidates for bishop would be considered. Then last week, one of their former bishops made disparaging remarks about female clergy. There is pain and hurt and frustration in the church because of it.

So when this pastor brought all of us into the vestry, along with a good portion of their award-winning choir so that we could be sung to and prayed over and given the seats of honor in the sanctuary, I knew that this was not how I wanted to greet guests as a pastor. While I can't be sure of the cultural differences at play here, preferential treatment with a side of showiness is a type or posturing that I have no intention of participating in.

And while the pastor gave up his pulpit for liturgy and preaching, he never gave up his church. From his announcements at the beginning to his presentation at the end of the service, where he used our presence as an excuse to lecture his congregation on the different organizations he felt they should be involved in, he was in charge. I felt grateful for my ministry internship, where I've been entrusted with the entire service many times. When I'm a pastor, I intended to practice trust and sharing in worship. After all, it's not my church. It's God's and the community's. I want to freely give it to capable hands.

And when he introduced Themba Mntambo, the former Bishop, and his beautiful wife, and told all the future pastors in the room that they should follow Themba's example in finding such a beautiful wife, I felt confirmed in my conviction to never speak about a woman's appearance before her ability. Kedibone Mntambo is a powerful pastor in her own right, full of her own passion and strength. She is sharp and capable. In a culture where women of good behavior are expected to wear a dress and cover their heads in church, her pantsuit and lack of hat made a statement in solidarity with the other female pastors throughout the connection who had been put down by their fellow clergy's comments. If I wanted to be like any pastor in the room, I wanted to be like Kedibone, able to stand and speak for justice without having to say a word.

Now, all of this was an undercurrent in the service. Even though I noticed the awkwardness between Themba and the pastor during the introductions and paid attention to what was said when and by whom, it took some time unpacking with others to see what was going on. There were other good moments of genuine Christian affection, like during the passing of the peace, or when Themba offered words of encouragement to the preacher after the service. And, as I said, the music was glorious. Even struggling as I was, it did not feel like the service had lasted three hours. I imagine that had I been able to mentally engage in the service, I would have missed these subtle signs of strained fellowship.

We have hard work to do from Sunday to Sunday. Church may be an event, but the life of the Church continues throughout the week, and it is during those days that we are the most challenged. How do you reconcile with your brother so that the Church might be whole? How do you learn to respect your sister so that the Body of Christ might be complete? How do we do all that internal work while also feeding those who are hungry, giving water to those who are thirsty, welcoming those who have travelled far, clothing and sheltering those who lack protection from the world, and visiting and caring for those who are sick and in prison? How we do all this work while standing for justice like the prophets and like Mary? Our strength to do this work comes from our fellowship and our worship and so we need our church on Sunday. But if we aren't doing the work Sunday to Sunday, we are missing the mark.

Cultural Conversations: Soweto

Part of going on a trip that is, essentially, a two-week-long cultural exchange is, of course, interacting with the culture. You get some of that through museums and heritage sites (which was part of the impetus behind visiting the Cradle of Humanity site) but you get more of it from being in the places with the people and just living life. But if you don't have a year or two of your life to spend living abroad, and when you're travelling with a group, it's hard to organically have that kind of interaction.

And that is how I found myself sitting across from two young Sowetans, awkwardly grasping at natural conversation between practicing Zulu greetings and introductions. We were being hosted at a lady's house and we sat on plastic chairs under a tent in her front courtyard while women and men from the community gathered in their best clothes to talk with us over lunch. I'm sure we had much more in common than came out in the stilted sentences, but I struggled to hear with all the conversations around me and had to ask for things to be repeated. They waited on questions that my brain, tired and still a little jet-lagged, couldn't come up with. I was grateful for lunch and still more grateful when the small group conversation transitioned to a discussion with the entire group. In the big group, we talked politics and compared our presidents and discussed the role of remembering our history and reconciliation and community. It was fascinating and enlightening. 

But to my brain, which is rather more used to easy success, the group discussion made my earlier conversation seem like even more of a failure. The young man I was talking with wanted to travel, to eventually leave Soweto and live abroad, and had a blog and a music business. The young woman had two children, one the age of the kid I nanny, and had helped cook the meal we had. I could have asked questions about why he wanted to leave the township, especially since many of the other South Africans I've talked to take such pride in where they live and the community they have there. I could have swapped stories with her about caring for toddlers and cooking for families. I could have asked her what books she read her kids, what their favorite toys were, how much her parents help with raising the kids, what other work she did, what she studied in school. I could have asked any of the million questions I have about speaking so many different languages (even though they taught me Zulu and spoke perfect English, their primary language was Sotho). I felt like I had squandered and opportunity because I was tired and felt awkward. 

The awkwardness was, of course, not just meeting new people and not being able to hear. Soweto is a township. Well, a bunch of townships, since Soweto is actually short for Southwestern Townships. The townships were created when the apartheid government decided that black people couldn't be anywhere near white people. The houses are small and piled close together, even in the formal settlements, where we were. In the informal settlements, where the people are basically squatters, there's no running water, except from a spicket down the street, and no electricity. If you're looking to do poverty tourism, to show people “how bad it is in South Africa,” you could take them to a township like Soweto, or Alexandra, and they could snap exploitative pictures to their little misunderstanding bleeding heart's content. 

Now, I know that living in the townships is different than what people might expect. There is a deep sense of community in the townships. The people who live there are not as impoverished as you think, financially or culturally. There are vibrant art scenes and strong communities of faith. And of course, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously have houses on the same street in Soweto. Two Nobel laureates are nothing to sneeze at. I know all of this and I still struggled to form questions about life in the township. At every turn, what I wanted to ask felt rude and insensitive and laden with stereotypes and so I didn't ask. It'd be like saying, “So I understand that you're poor but you're happy? Explain that to me” or “This seems like it could be a pretty violent place. Is it violent?” or “So what's it like being black in South Africa? How do you feel about white people?” None of those are the questions I wanted to ask, but I feared that they were the questions behind the questions I wanted to ask. No matter how much I disavow blatant racism, I know that there are still racially-biased thought patterns in me and I worry that they might make their way out of the hiding places and into the world through my mouth. And so I was awkward.

It is difficult to have organic conversations about race and the challenges facing people of different racial groups with someone from another country that you just met. There's trust that must be built and if you only have a few hours, that trust must be assumed. It's a challenge to have these conversations without one person or the other feeling like they're on display at some point. I enjoy eating like the locals do. I like observing cultural celebrations. I like digging deep into conversations. This lunch in Soweto should have been for me. But as the Sowetans taught us a few dances and songs and told us to join in, I wanted to be anywhere else in the world. A tired, awkward little white girl, standing in the corner, shuffling her feet along in the middle of a complicated cultural exchange.

The Rules: South Africa Days 2 and 3

I have rules when travelling abroad. 

1. Don’t talk too much. You will inevitably sound like a loud American. 

2. Don’t dress in brand-name clothing or wear white sneakers. You will look like a rich American.

3. Pay attention to your surroundings but don’t pay too much attention to any one thing. You’re already a mark because you’re a loud rich American. 

4. Know where you’re going ahead of time and be sure of your directions. If you stop to ask, you will reveal yourself as a loud rich lost American. 

5. For God’s sake, don’t stop to take unnecessary photos with your gigantic new phone. That puts you one step closer to being a loud rich lost American who now needs to find their way to the consulate because their phone and fanny pack have just been stolen. 

I broke all these rules (well, except the clothing one) when we went to go visit the archaeological dig at Sterkfontein. You could barely keep me quiet as we explored the mouth of a cave to learn about how fossils are deposited there. The world around me ceased to exist once we were taken back to look at some of the fossils and casts—all I could focus on was the skull in front of me and the millions of questions I had about it. I had no idea where I was going through the whole day, because I was part of a tour group, and I occasionally found myself lost on the site as I went to go look at whatever interested me. And dear god, the photos. I took so many pictures. 

(There’s an upcoming fun science/science and religion post that I’ll link to here whenever I write it.)

I had completely forgotten what it was like to be struck with curiosity like that, to have your mind generate a thousand questions a minute and to begin to think through hypothesis and tests and conclusions, to use what you know to rule out answers that didn’t make sense and to watch the entire puzzle come together in front of your eyes. I dominated our guide’s time on the second half of the trip, at Maropeng, because as the evolutionary timeline was laid out in front of me, I had question after question about what caused what and how we know what we know and what we’re going to do with that information. It was like a breath of fresh air to my mind and I was so glad to have this wonderful, knowledgeable, bright woman to answer all those questions, even if I had to get her to repeat a word or two because I misunderstood her accent. It has been far too long since the wheels in my head started turning like that. 

But if I abandoned my rules for reasonable international travel at Sterkfontein, my rules abandoned me later in the evening. We had a pizza dinner at the house of a former bishop, current pastor, with another pastor and another bishop in attendance. There were preachers and teachers all around and everyone was talking and making noise and leaving everything everywhere and focusing more on the person in front of them and their conversations than anything around them and I had no idea where I was, except that I was at a parsonage near a church somewhere in Johannesburg. I saw my first glimpse of a night sky that seemed upside down to me while the people behind me chatted and made friends and shared stories and food and photos. If it had been possible for me to be a little louder, a little less worried, a little less concerned about how to avoid attention and get where I wanted to be, maybe I would have heard more of those conversations, learned more, been fed by the people around me spiritually, emotionally, and physically. That pizza wasn’t half bad.

I don’t do small talk. I don’t do well in groups. Give me a someone to sit down with who is happy to talk about more than the weather and my career path and we will find something to dig into. That’s where life is for me in a social interaction. And to ask me to meet a bunch of strangers while still jetlagged at the end of a long day, a day where my brain had felt so vibrant earlier, well, that’s a recipe for minor panic, and irritation, and a frustrated feeling that the vibrancy I had has all been sucked into not panicking in front of strangers and maintaining a semi-pleasant face.

One day, I’ll write a thoughtful post about Liliesleaf Farm, probably in comparison to the Apartheid Museum, and I’ll post it here. And maybe I’ll post about the lunch we had with people in Soweto, where I learned Zulu and ate a homemade meal with my hands and talked about all the political challenges our countries face and post it here. And maybe I’ll post about dinner and the restaurant cat and the varieties of religious conversations that pop up when you gather seminary students and bishops around a table and link to it here. But mostly, what I have been struck by in the past two days is what gives me life, and what drains it from me, and how fragile I can be. Send me out into the world, let me explore, let me think, let me wonder, give me a trusted soul to share with, and I’ll fly. Sit me down unmoored at a people with twenty new people and I will drown.

Well, at least until I learn the rules for how to swim.

Something New: South Africa Day 1

We stopped in Dakar around 2am to refuel. I stared out the plane window at the tiny crescent moon over Senegal, unable to do much else besides stare. We'd been on the plane for eight hours already and we weren't allowed to get off unless we were staying in Dakar. We spent about an hour in Senegal to switch out passengers and give the aisles a quick once-over with the vacuum. I was intensely jealous of the toddler a few rows back, fast asleep on her dad's lap. I too wanted to be asleep somewhere safe and comfortable. I wanted to be anywhere except where I was.

The sky started to lighten as we sat on the tarmac, Senegal being several time zones ahead of my body. The moon and stars faded as we began to taxi onto the runway. I watched it all go by, still envious of a two-year old, as my seat partner leaned over as I was looking out the window, pointed at the horizon, and exclaimed, "The first African sunrise!"

Now, it's the same Sun. It's the same Earth. It's the same atmosphere. I understand that changes in the air due to geographic location may change the quality of the sunrise or sunset from time to time, but really, a sunrise is a sunrise. You can take your romanticization of someone else's continent somewhere else. I ain't come on this trip for that.

See, and that's been a part of my worry for some time about this trip to South Africa. It's an immersion, a required part of seminary at Wesley, where you go to be immersed in the culture of a new place and to study how Christianity lives and breathes and moves in a different environment. You'll learn about a new place and you'll also learn about yourself. A new culture will resonate with you in ways you couldn't expect, but it'll reveal blindspots too. In order to let a new culture do this work, though, you have to be open, in a way. You have to be ready for the lessons. And it's hard to hear those lessons if all you're doing is blessing those rains down in Africa.

Could be that worry, which I've been directing at others, is ungenerous and unfounded. I've been worried a lot lately. No, I've been anxious. I've been anxious and depressed and it has been a long couple of months dealing with what's happening in my head and what's happening in my life. I wasn't ready for this trip. I'm not ready to learn. I've been running on all available cylinders for too long and I've been ready to quit more than once. I'm so, so done. I want to be safe and cared for and I want to rest.

But then, as we climbed higher into the sky, I looked out the window again and saw trees that I had only ever seen in books. I saw a landscape that was completely new to me, a whole new world that I, despite my myriad travels, had never experienced. It's the same Sun, the same Earth, the same atmosphere, but somehow, everything looked different. The first African sunrise of the trip spread out over my first real view of Africa and something wonderful happened in my heart. Something new bloomed.

And I was gloriously okay with where I was.