Violence is something that a lot of people claim to understand; there are many anthropological and sociological studies about its causes. But, the truth of the matter is that violence is a mystery that comes with being human. I can’t say that I actually understand how violence works. What I can say, is that I am in search of a better understanding of violence in order to also understand peacemaking and conflict resolution. In most of the communities where we work, violence is a constant. What is interesting to me is the result of the violence I see: Internal violence usually ends in suicide and external violence usually ends in murder.

One sunny afternoon in 2005, my friend Brady (who is from Knoxville, TN) and I were hanging out with Clemente, Kevin, and other kids from a slum in zone 3, Guatemala City. Most of them teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 years old, with the exception of five-year-old Rigo and his seven-year-old brother. Rigo and his brother were playing with marbles on the floor. Chepe and I were talking with the kids, cracking some jokes and having a good time laughing at the “gringo” with the funny accent. For some reason, one of the two brothers lost his marbles and wanted the other one to give him his. I assume Rigo was the one who had the marbles, but I do not know that for sure. Out of nowhere the atmosphere filled with violence and the next thing I saw was a fight between the two little kids.

I have seen kids fighting for toys before, but this time it was just vicious. Rigo’s brother was on top, with his fists closed, beating Rigo down. I do not even know if I have the words to describe the scene, but the fight was brutal. The guys we were hanging out with were fueling the fight, cheering and yelling “Come on! Come on! Harder! Harder!” Brady and I could not intervene. We did not know what to do. I was really afraid the little kids were going to hurt themselves for real. I did not know how to react and stop the fight. Somehow, Rigo made it out of the beat-down and saw his mom walking down the street. Dropping his marbles on the floor he ran as fast as he could to embrace his mom’s legs. He was looking for protection. For a moment I thought, thank God she just showed up, now I do not have to stop the fight! Amazingly, when Rigo hugged his mom’s legs, instead of finding care, security, and love he found a kick right into his belly and an angry voice yelling, “Don’t be such a pussy! Go fight your brother like a man! That is how you learn dumb ass!” I could not believe what my eyes were witnessing. It felt like being right in the middle of an intense Flannery O’Connor story.

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Ceremonial Bronze Doors, St. James Cathedral, Seattle

Do you ever wonder
what God was thinking
God
that casual calculated maker
of us
when He made
a blind man see
Flooded his world
with vision
A new horizon
of seeing the unseen
free to know and see
how wrong he was
about how the world
looked
back at him
Once blind
now seeing
how hard it is
to see
Remembering how blind
was so safe
and so
free.

Colin McArthur lives in Seattle and thrives when he is asking questions about the true nature of God.  He can be found on Twitter @colinjmcarthur, where you can find his sarcastic quips about weather and other conversation topics usually reserved for the elderly.

As a kid I ran from brokenness. Whenever a fight broke out at school while some excitedly gravitated toward it I’d subtely turn tail and literally walk away in the opposite direction. I remember doing this often. Whenever I found myself in proximity to deep hurt, sickness, or wreckage my sensitive psyche wanted nothing to do with it so in my fear I’d flee.

The front yard acts as dinner room and homework lounge after 2pm.  The first and second grade classrooms become dorms after 7pm.  Precious Moments is the most space-efficient school I have visited in Guatemala. There is always something going on; people in the neighborhood know the school and the family running it well because of their enthusiasm, energy and faith. And their marching band.  That was where I met Danilo, playing the drums in addition to running around, coloring, doing his homework and goofing around with the other kids after school. A teenager acting like a young boy. Maybe he was trying to make up for time lost to a hard life.

Martha has a sweet heart and spirit. On a normal day she is a wife, a mom, a cook,  a counselor, a friend, a salesperson, a devoted Christian AND the school director at Precious Moments (that also includes an after-school program and foster home.)   She is also part of the CTM network in Guatemala City.   She has hosted interns, vision trips and local leaders in her ministry, and melted our hearts every time with her incredible life and devotion to the Lord, and the kids in this community in zone 13.

Danilo went to live at Precious Moments after his mom couldn’t provide for him anymore and because of the danger of the zone where they lived.  Martha took him in as her own child and raised him for almost 10 years. His mom stayed in the picture, but Martha and her family became a new concept of “family” for him.

So I went pale when I first read the short message that Danilo had been shot and killed.  I couldn’t believe it.  No way… Not him… Retaliation for something that his cousin did… Refusing to join a gang… The versions of the shooting were confusing and often incomplete, but he had died in front of the school, in the middle of the day in front of friends and family. As hard as it is, this type of death has become a new “normal” for young men that live in hard places.

After a few weeks of mourning and trying to make sense of this tragic loss, our staff suggested the Moment of Blessing Liturgy as part of our commitment to suffer alongside our friends and to join them in the midst of their pain.  I showed up for the reading and a bunch of young kids jumped around me chanting “Miss Liz! Miss Liz!”.  “Uh oh…”  – I thought to myself. “Who is going to stay with the kids while we have the liturgy?”  I was trying to come up with ideas when Martha showed up.  She instructed the kids to make a circle with chairs and seconds later we had 15 kids sitting around and paying attention. These children were going to be our Moment of Blessing participants! Five adults joined shortly after.

I wasn’t sure how to proceed.  The Moment of Blessing talks about death, about tragedy, about justice… words that are hard for adults to process, and even more for kids.  But they paid attention.  They followed the reading with their little fingers.  Their eyes opened wide when I read Danilo’s name on the page.  They started coloring and making hearts and little stars around his name on their copies of the blessing.  Talk about a precious moment.   That was the Moment of Blessing for them – a way of learning and praying in the midst of death.  A little heart by his name, a smiley sheep next to Psalm 23. They remembered a life lived with love and the Scripture reminded them not to fear in the face of the valley of death. The drawing of their brother, their friend, their teacher, connected with words and prayers of hope for a difference in their street, in their neighborhood and their lives.

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Last Advent was unlike any other Advent before. I spent it on a three week solo intensive that was isolating and illuminating. This is one of many poems birthed during that time.

And here it begins
at the end of a remote island road
lit only by dusk,
the night held close by maritime air
crisp with its watery wind.

Here is a place that holds
inspiration without art;
inhabited by tokens of the primal child
screaming and weeping towards freedom.

Gone are the church and its city lights;
gone the table of remembrance,
the chapel lit by candlelight,
the piano playing pretty songs of longing
with a key that sticks.

Gone the floor that creeks,
replaced by stone steps into a forest,
lit by leaves colored in fire,
strewn upon soil, rich and dark,
like a woman’s blood.

This too is Advent.

Filled with rudimentary paths no better than another,
lost and found like all of us;
in a forest on the edge of death,
like all of us.
Tall enduring trees,
snapping, broken, laid bare to waste;
like all of us.

Shhh.
Here he comes,
the little boy with trembling fear
and sadness runs the gully deep.
And picking up the axe he swings
at every wretched word,
at every fist to harm.
he swings to kill,
he swings for freedom.

The heavy wood breaks.
The ground is strewn with all that remains.

Now with strong relentless hands,
buried in red dust and bark,
a man is kneeling in what is left,
I am holding what is left.

With what is left I will begin.

Tad Monroe works with college students at Seattle University, he’s a pastor, poet, storyteller, and football coach.                                                                      He agrees with Thoreau, “life is for living”. More reflections can be found on his website tadmonroe.com where this was first published on December 3.

“I only need to get through the day.”  I say this every day, and so today became a long season. And the “right now” that I can’t stand, also can’t fit into a day.  Hours and minutes can’t explain this today.

Today I cried. I cried a lot.  I cried, and the more I tried to stop, I couldn’t.  And I tried to pray while crying, and wasn’t able to articulate a word.  I was angry and frustrated, and then exhausted of being angry and frustrated. And then I started crying again.  I wasn’t even weeping; I was bawling. It almost felt as it was a tantrum, on why, oh, why can’t things be a little better, just a little?

Today I fell down the stairs, and when I was writing about it, the words that came out changed ‘fell’ into ‘failed.’  Rolling down the stairs wasn’t as painful as the idea of not being able to stop at the bottom of the staircase. And I cried again.  The more I cried, the more I realized that the pain from falling and failing has become too familiar lately. And the scratches and bruises are hard to see from the inside… so I didn’t realized I was as hurt as I was.

I got lost today.  I got carried away while fighting with my thoughts and next thing I knew, I was in the middle of nowhere, not knowing where to go. This is a recurrent feeling in my life lately. I just don’t know how or where or when to take the next step.

Today I tried to read a little, but tears were wetting the pages.  Then I tried with a different book, but even just flipping the pages was painful and exacerbating.  I wanted to find some clarity, but the letters were as blurry and dark as my heart is right now.

So I tried to read a softer bible verse – just one. Maybe one that was easy to digest.  One that wouldn’t require me to hold onto something that is too far away.  I just needed something for the “right now.” Something for today.  And there it was, the one that has come over and over in the past months, from the voice of good friends, in an old bookmark and a couple of other random places. “Be still and know that I am God.”  The words said, “don’t move” as they saw me in pain.

And the irony is that “stillness” is not the word that caught my attention this time but “know.” And as I defragment this season of ‘today’s’, I can only smile and know the one thing I should know.  And maybe hope and dream a little for tomorrow, or the day after. Meanwhile today, I just sit with these thoughts.

Liz Herrera loves to learn, read, have a good cup of coffee and find creative ways to combine her passions: communications, urban ministries, social action and mixed media.  Liz is a journalist and has served alongside the team of CTM Guatemala since 2006 and worked for over 12 years among marginalized populations with churches and non-profit organizations.

Our obsession with food in this country hits a fever pitch this week as we celebrate Thanksgiving. Yet according to the National Resources Defense Council, Americans throw away $165 billion (yes with a B) worth of food every year. Sam Wells provides a thoughtful reminder that probably won’t make the gastronomic headlines this week.

Food is Politics. The food industry is the largest manufacturing industry in this country. Anyone who disputes the description of agriculture and animal farming as an industry has not been outside lately. The reality is, the old distinction between food on the one hand, which was about the country and the soil, and industry on the other, which was about the city and the factory, has broken down. We all go to the supermarket and shop for groceries. But did you know that the average item of food in a grocery store has travelled 1500 miles? This means that putting food on our dinner plates is a global project.

It has always been so. The outer reaches of Tiberius’ Roman Empire had one central purpose in the imperial economy: and that was to be a breadbasket and source of other agricultural surpluses. If you lived in an Italian villa and your taste was fish paste, olive oil, or wine, then Galilee was your key supply base. Consider the kinds of diseases carried by those drawn to Jesus. You will find that most of them are connected in some way to malnutrition. The politics of food dominates the gospels just as much as it dominates today’s global economy. When Jesus set about transforming human reality, he went to the core of the culture: the production and consumption of food.

Most of Jesus’ talking about food comes in his parables. It is often supposed that Jesus was a simple agrarian figure telling homespun yet subversive stories of small-town folk, a kind of cross between Huckleberry Finn and John Denver. But when your eyes are opened to the politics of food, the parables take on a new dimension. When we read the story of the landowner who built bigger and bigger barns, we start to ask, “Whose land had now come into his possession and why? Was he in the Romans’ pocket or simply exploiting his fellow Jews?” In other words, it is no longer just a parable about greed but also a story about the politics of food. Think again about the parable of the sower. The stony ground and the thistles are not just figures of speech. They are agronomic reasons why peasant farmers remained in grinding poverty. And when the good soil produced a hundredfold, this is not just some kind of Middle Eastern penchant for exaggeration. This is saying at last this struggling peasant famer could pay his taxes, pay his debts, and finally buy his own land and be free of bonded oppression for good. This becomes Jesus’ image of salvation, of the kingdom of God – the ability to have more than enough food in a culture of extortion and exploitation.

How might we embody a Christian politics based on food?

1. Realize that there is nothing more political than what you eat. Let us not get into a fantasy about uncontaminated food. But let us realize that the world’s economy is based on choices about agriculture. The world is what we eat.
2. Ask yourself “Who am I eating with?” Food is both need and pleasure. And when those in need and those you love come together in such a way that they get all tangled up around the meal table, we call it the kingdom of God.
3. If worship is food, could it be that food is worship? Could we imagine how good eating might become a sacrament of reconciliation between human beings and our planet?

The Revd Dr Sam Wells is the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. He has served as a parish priest for 15 years – 10 of those in urban priority areas. He also spent 7 years in North Carolina where he was Dean of Duke University Chapel.

Taken from Come to the Table: A Collection of Recipes celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Congregation at Duke University Chapel. Congregation at Duke University Chapel, Durham, NC

Once again, I closed the newspaper and tried to think of better news, instead of reading about another murder.   Once again, I passed in front of the yellow tape a policeman had put up at the scene of a crime. Once again I wanted to cry out to God on behalf of the families involved. One more death. One more kid. One more driver. One more child. One more woman. One more is too much and is one more than necessary. When a human life is lost, the feelings of powerlessness and the inability to feel comfort are natural, and lately the feeling of powerlessness has begun to feel normal. But in the last few weeks, I have also been trying to reflect on new ways to listen to the Spirit that guides us in the midst of such trying times.

“Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” – Genesis 4:10

Recently I have been reading a book called Power & Poverty by Dewe Hughes. He mentions this passage from Genesis 4:10, analyzing reactions to injustice and the incorrect use of power by certain groups. Though in and of itself it is such a powerful message in the context of the struggle for power, I realized that the very literal words have a much deeper meaning than I ever previously noticed.  Something special about this verse is that it is God himself who is talking; he recognizes what is going on. This should be enough to allow us to breathe more easily. God knows. God does not ignore what these hands are doing. But more than that, God speaks of the blood as a symbol of life and he speaks of your brother. What a great implication this has on my identity. The blood that has been shed is part of my blood! He also speaks of a cry – a voice that calls out for justice, a voice that speaks out of the ground, the lowest place on earth, the point from which the shed blood cannot be gathered again.

Every one of these words can be deeply analyzed, but I have found myself thinking over and over again of the phrase as a whole: ‘Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.’ I can almost hear it as if it were spoken to me! I ask myself, ‘Can you not hear it? Have you not realized? What are your going to do with that voice, that cry?’

In the middle of the city of Kingston, Jamaica there is a statue in memory of the children who have died in tragic circumstances. The title of the sculpture is ‘Gone too soon’. It is surrounded by the names of hundreds of children whose lives have been taken and the date of their murders. When we visited, we were told that at the unveiling of the statue, one of the hopes expressed was never having to write another name on it. This has not been the case. But despite the circumstances, the first step is being taken: the cry of the bloodshed has been heard. As symbolic as it can be, as little as one monument represents, it is doing something.  There are people who are writing down one more name, one more date. And they seek justice.

Some of us have the privilege of walking in the ‘lowest places’ and being witnesses of the tragedy, violence, and pain that exists in these communities because of injustice, death and scarcity. We also have the privilege of listening to the cry rising up from these low places – a cry that unites us. We are witnesses of a divine voice that recognizes and hears our cry, and He does not remain silent.

Liz Herrera loves to learn, read, have a good cup of coffee and find creative ways to combine her passions: communications, urban ministries, social action and mixed media.  Liz is a journalist and has served alongside the team of CTM Guatemala since 2006 and worked for over 12 years among marginalized populations with churches and non-profit organizations.

I lived in Tacoma, Washington for the last two years of my life (summer 2009-summer 2011.) I got a master’s degree in leadership (although I’m still not really sure what that means), held three teaching assistantships, and did an internship with the Center for Transforming Mission.  Now, I am back in Guatemala. I returned three months ago and I am continuing to re-enter my context and getting used to the differences in food, safety, and weather. During my time in Tacoma I became aware of the different racial, social and education dynamics surrounding me. I got used to people being scared of me (I assume because I am a 6’2” Guatemalan with long hair and a beard), people following me around the store (just in case I would break something of course), and people being surprised by my ability to speak English and play the piano. The latter, I assume, was because we Guatemalans do not have pianos and English teachers on this side of the border. I felt and dealt with what it is to be treated as a minority.

During my first week back in Guatemala, I thought things would return to normal where I was part of the majority population, a brown guy surrounded by brown people. But I was surprised.  People still follow me around the store, move to the other side of the street when they see me walking and are surprised that I speak English. What I find more interesting is the fact that being “white” is still better in a “brown” context.

Not too long ago I had a really intense experience when I went to the bank with a friend from the United States. We were in Antigua, which is a beautiful city and was originally the first capital city of Guatemala. My friend and I went to exchange some money at the bank. When we got to the front desk my friend realized he did not have his passport, so he asked me to exchange the money for him. I was getting ready to make the transaction when the bank attendant told me, “I cannot exchange the money for you.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you are Guatemalan and you do not have an account with us.” For a moment I felt really offended and discriminated against, so I did not answer immediately. After a few seconds I asked, “Are you telling me that I cannot exchange dollars in my own country because I am not white and I am Guatemalan?” “That is exactly what I am saying sir,” she replied. She looked to the security officers and in a matter of seconds both of the guards were right behind me ready to escort me out of the bank. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I have two legs and I can walk.” I talked to my friend, in English because he does not speak Spanish at all, and when they heard me speaking in English they relaxed and left me alone.

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