Dear Pneuma,

Glass fills my thoughts this week.  Glass is hard, smooth, invisible when clean, and cuts viciously when broken.  Birds break their necks on glass panes, thinking they are spaces through which to fly, and glass allows us to see and be seen without having to trust.  I think about an aquarium that houses a giant spider, a test tube that houses a poisonous gas, a prison visitor center that allows voice contact but prohibits touch.

Glass allows me to see a view outside a flying airplane from within the airplane, without discernible distortion.  Glass distorts light and allows me to read words that my eye can no longer bring into focus.  Painted glass colors a view and frosted glass inhibits a view.  Molten glass flows quickly, cooled glass flows slowly, time runs inexorably through glass.

I take glass for granted.  I forget to look for it.  Like a wasp in the house, I get fooled into believing there is nothing between me and the light that calls.  I look down, and I can see where I have been.  I look up, and I can see where I am going.  I see people behind me.  I see people ahead of me.  I don't see the glass.  They don't see the glass.  

I forget I am standing on a barrier.  I forget I cut myself breaking the barrier to get here.  I forget there is a barrier above me, that I stand in a glass box, separated.  I reach out to touch the spider;  it tries to touch me, but we meet at the glass, each prisoned in our own environment, only knowing that we long to feel one another, taste one another, know one another, unable, truly, to see what it is that stands between us.

Love Always,

Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I just returned from a church mission trip.  This was my first such trip, and it was a lot like and a lot different from my expectations.  Our group went to "do triage" on homes.  We put up walls, insulation, sheet rock, and roofs.  We dug trenches, septic tanks, and porch pilings.  We painted, mudded, plumbed and floored for an entire week.  This was not Habitat for Humanity. This was not Extreme Home Makeover.  This was barely adequate construction and some cosmetic additions to homes that should not house people.

This was a hard week for me, Pneuma.  We witnessed rubbled lives buried in raw sewage, moldering mobile home siding, hulking car fossils and relationships stretching and pulling at every seam.  We witnessed lives lived without running water, without electricity, without enough food to eat, and without neighbors able to alleviate suffering.  We witnessed the hard lives of people.  We witnessed this in our own United States, and this week, I am having a hard time reconciling the fact that I watch the same sit-coms, read the same newspapers, and vote for the same political candidates as people who do not have the luxury of clean drinking water.

This was a hard week for me, Pneuma.  I heard church friends say things that hurt me.  I heard comments about the hygiene of people and pets.  I heard comments about home management and habits of child-rearing.  I heard peanut butter and jelly sandwiches being offered the way that someone offers crackers to animals in the zoo.  I heard judgment and disdain in the voices of my co-workers, and I felt shame.  

I grew up in a yard with junker cars.  My house had no insulation in the walls until I was fourteen. We lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while waiting on a better paycheck. We had a roof that leaked and a furnace that smoked up the house.  We ran our wash water out into the back yard, and sometimes, we didn't take showers in the winter when the pipes would freeze.  My siblings, friends and I played in dirty ditch water and ran barefoot in the yard, despite nails, sticker-weeds and black widow spiders.  I never had a spayed kitten with a license and vaccination tag.

Did church people look at me that way?  Was I dirty?  Was I uneducated?  Was I ignorant? Were my parents lazy and unskilled?  Did it come as a surprise to anyone that I knew how to laugh?  Did it come as a surprise to anyone that I worried about my clothes and hair?  Did it come as a surprise that I played with my flea-bitten cat, though I might not have let her in the house?  Is it surprising to anyone that I loved my home and I love my family?  

After the shame came anger.  How dare these people make me feel ashamed of myself and my people!  How dare these people think things that would shame the woman whose home we were trying to heal!  What right did any of us have to even be there?  If she hadn't asked, we would never have had the chance to judge her.  

That took serious courage.  That took the kind of integrity and grit that says, I cannot do this alone.  That took the kind of self knowledge that would allow strangers to see all of the cracks and vulnerabilities of a desperate life, and still offer itself in the name of love.  She needed a better roof for her children.  She wanted something bright and pretty for them.  She was using every resource she could find to provide.  I would guess she prayed for help.  I felt humbled at the poor help I was able to give.  I was humbled that God could have sent me, with my disease and my lack of construction experience as any kind of answer to those prayers.   

One night there was a picnic.  All of the families on whose homes we were working came.  The mission leaders suggested that the families line up first for food.  The mission leaders looked at that group of people and decided that some were hungrier than others, because some were poorer than others.  I was standing next to a man, and he said , "That ain't right.  Around here, young'ens eat first."  He looked at me from the corner of his eye, "That's what we call 'em.  Young'ens.  They eat first, and if there is anything left, we can eat."   That man stood right beside me, until the very end of the line, after all of the "young'ens," after all of the teenagers, and after most of the adults, before he would fill his plate.  

I have much.  I have friends and things.  I have church and a college degree.  I have connections and skills.  I have a home that stands.  I am no longer poor, but even I  forgot the kind of necessary sharing of scarcity, where one may have to sacrifice, so that others have enough.  

Pneuma, I do not feel as though I did a "good deed" this last week.  I do not feel as though I accomplished anything for the "Kingdom of God."  Instead, while taking Communion on Sunday, I heard these words, "This is my body, broken for you,"  and I thought of the homes and lives we saw.  I thought of the prejudices and fears we brought.  I thought about my physical limitations and the desperate hunger for connection that so many of us carried in our church vans.  I thought, "These are Christ's broken body."  Why?  Why was it broken for me?

Cobalt Dreams