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.

I see you: well-set and beautifully aged.

Stay strong, stay firm, stay there…

while the blizzard shakes you,

and  the cold winter hurts you,

when the fog turns you into a scary sight.

I hear you: leaves falling, twigs cracking.

Remember what you have held and supported:

the treasures of a nesting bird,

the laughter of a climbing boy,

and the wounded heart of a lonely girl.

I am with you: dry, empty and forgotten in the forest.

I can only ask you once again

to hang onto the memories

and bring with your strength,

a new landscape for spring.

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. This poem was first published on her blog on November 20 2012.

“Having the baby now…No time to get to the hospital…At the tea shop,” hollered the “Grandma” as she ran up the stairs past Iven to retrieve something from her room, looking understandably extremely anxious. We don’t know these neighbors well but have been trying to connect more, especially with the three younger children in their family of five – quickly becoming six – living in the tiny apartment that shares a wall with ours. The oldest of the kids who lives at home was nine months pregnant with her second baby and we had been greeting them with “Has the baby come yet?” for weeks already.

I took our own little baby Elian across the street to the sidewalk tea shop where the girl was laboring, in a lawn chair, just behind the tea cart. Her mom was hurriedly pacing back and forth on the street and people were yelling to get the girl in a taxi, while others hollered back, “there’s no time!”

I joined the small crowd of women gathered around her, trying not to be in the way, quietly praying and wondering if there was something I could do to help. One of my neighbors and I joked together about how little Elian had come to help encourage the baby that was getting ready to greet the world.

After just a few minutes a motorcycle pulled up with two men on it. Their police radios and first aid bag told me that they were some sort of official “first responders”. We had read a newspaper article recently (actually, on Elian’s due date) about how in Bangkok there is a special division of policemen on motorcycles that are trained and dispatched to deliver babies for women stuck in traffic. The guy they highlighted had just delivered his 42nd baby stuck in traffic.

My neighbor, however, didn’t even have time to start fighting the traffic to the hospital – less than a minute after the official looking guys arrived the girl started shrieking in a manner which told all of us that have given birth before that the baby was coming NOW. Most people started shrieking back and the men I had expected to come take control of the situation passed out two pairs of rubber gloves, said repeatedly, “better for the women to do it” and turned to walk the other way.

The woman who runs the tea cart looked at me and asked in Thai, “Tam Pben Mai? (Can you do it/Do you know how?)” I totally thought she was joking so I half laughed and responded with, “I don’t know how, but I can pray!!” She and one other girl I don’t know put on the gloves and several of us helped pull off the shorts and underwear of the laboring women, from beneath a sarong that was draped over her lap.

The girl’s shrieking made it clear that the baby’s arrival was quite imminent, and though I am sure everyone else there also recognized this, nobody did anything. Finally the younger girl with gloves picked up the sarong and sure enough revealed the head of a baby that had already emerged between his mother’s legs. She timidly put her gloved hand under the baby’s head and looked at me with terror, clearly totally overwhelmed. I thought, “this is ridiculous…someone needs to step in.” I turned to a neighbor and asked her to hold Elian, reached my hand out to motion for the tea shop lady’s gloves (who gleefully pulled them off and worked to get them onto my hands instead) and reached down to help guide the baby all the way out of his mama, and into this world.

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i like christmas.  i am not crazy about the commercialism and try to avoid stores at all costs starting from thanksgiving on, but i do love the season.  i love the story of Jesus because of its upside-downness & the wild and wacky ways he entered into the world as God-in-the-flesh.  i love the intentional focus and celebrating each week of advent.

at the same time, i deeply respect that it is a time of year where things start to go haywire for a lot of people i know.  in fact, thanksgiving begins one of our darkest seasons at the refuge.  while other churches are getting geared up for the awesome christmas service ahead, ours is feeling the reality of depression-and-loneliness-for-many to start setting in.  it’s an interesting phenomenon and in talking to others who intersect with the margins, many say the same thing.  while the rest of the world is spinning toward the holidays singing christmas carols & going to fun parties, there are a whole bunch of people hanging on by a thread.

at the same time, regardless of life-struggles-in-general, throw in spiritual shifts and “i don’t even know what to make of Jesus anymore” and it’s even more complicated.  and lonely.  and a reminder sometimes of how much we’ve changed.  when i wrote when easter is hard earlier this year i had no idea it would stir up so many feelings far & wide.  my guess is that christmas isn’t quite as hard as a holiday as easter for a lot of people in the midst of changing faith, but it still can be tricky.  at christmas we sing more songs about peace on earth and good will to men and less songs about blood and the lamb so that might make it a little easier for some.

no matter what our circumstances are–practical or faith-based– i want to honor that these times in the year can be extra hard, extra weird, extra lonely.

the christmas season can remind us that:

we aren’t where we wish we were.  we don’t have money, partners, kids, health, security, friends, community, healing, sobriety, you-name-its that we thought we would at this point and that can feel so discouraging.

we feel alone.  some of us feel lonely in the relationships we are in, while others feel lonely because we don’t have them at all.

our families are tricky (or i am guessing you might have other words for it, ha ha!) or nonexistent.   no matter how we slice it, holidays are a time where we intersect with family.  for some, it is a happy time and you are happy to see each other while for others, families bring up feelings of dread and anxiety.  for many, there’s no home to go to and we are painfully reminded of our orphanness or the harsh realities of divorce and single parent-ness.

life is flying by.  another year has come and gone and here we are, one year older and one less year left to pursue some of our dreams. and then sometimes we wonder about our dreams.

we want more connection with God but we aren’t sure how to get it anymore.  we might not have a church or community that feeds us like before or feels safe enough to even walk into.  often, we can’t seem to muster it up on our own so our connection with God just feels…empty.

we are scared of hope.  this season is a time of hope & anticipation and for a lot of us, hope feels dangerous.

i am sure there are many others, but these are some of the top of my head today.  i promise no trite answers or simple advice but i do have a hope for those who struggle with christmas–that some how, some way, more light can seep in.  i have hope that all of us experience more slivers of joy & peace & love & hope & grace over the next month.  slivers of light are sometimes small miracles in and of themselves, God’s little revelations and reminders that we’re not alone, that he is with us.

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I came across a dirty onion tossed out in the sun
Abandoned trash that could not be of use to anyone
It lay upon the filthy ground with darkened, withered skin
That did not let me scrutinize the contents held within

With curiousness, I picked it up and then began to peel
The outer layers off to see what insides might reveal
And as I went about my task reducing surface size
The onion fumes brought searing pain and tears welled in my eyes

Hardened, tainted layers were the first that I removed
But inner rings were softer and the quality improved
And when I reached the onion’s center finishing my tour
I found the core was undefiled; was tender, fresh and pure

I came across a youth in jail his body scarred, tattooed
An outcast of society his manner violent, lewd
Curious I then sought to know how was this youth inside
What was the nature of his soul what feelings did he hide

His outer shell was heartless, hard and tough to penetrate
But as I slowly gained his trust I found a different state
He shed the armor he’d built up throughout his sordid past
To guard against the threats he’d faced that left me quite aghast

Abandoned, starved, despised, abused, rejected through the years
The angst released from woes peeled off brought searing pain and tears
The surface layers of this youth were vicious, mean and wild
But in his depths I found the love and meekness of a child

How can we reach that tender heart, what ways can we devise
To break through callousness; remove what causes youths’ demise?
Not jails but God’s transforming grace should be our fervent goal
Peel off the layers, reach the core, set free their yearning soul

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* this post is part of the june synchroblog, which was focused on “what is in our invisible knapsack”–the unearned privilege that many carry and how we can participate in changing deeply grooves systems that are built on it. i wrote this post almost exactly a year ago, previously called white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, economic privilege, but thought i’d repost it as part of this conversation. other links are at the bottom of this post.  my feeling on the topic is still the same–any  hope for change starts with listening, really listening, to each other.

* * * * *

i will never know what it’s like to be a person of color.  i can only listen and learn from my friends & family who are.

i will never know what it’s like to be gay.  i can only listen and learn from my friends & family who are.

i will likely never know what it’s like to be poor and live in section 8 housing.  i can only listen and learn from my friends & family who are.

but i do know what it’s like to be a female leader in a man’s world.  what it feels like to be excluded. what it feels like see doors open & checks written & support given to men-with-the-connections while i struggle and scrape.  what it’s like to be on the underside of power and how it creates a lot of shame.

and those who are men in similar positions can never know what it’s like.  they can only listen and learn from their friends & family who are women.

white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, economic privilege are real.

i’ve heard it dismissed sometimes, heard white people talk about “the minorities get all the jobs and get to go to the top of the line now”.  heard men talk about “i don’t know what women are talking about, we ask them to be part but they always say no.“  heard straight people talk about “gay people have more rights now than i do” and economically stable people talk about “if those poor people would just work harder & smarter they wouldn’t have so many problems.”

it’s so easy to talk when we don’t know what it feels like to be another person, to walk in another person’s shoes.

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This isn’t pretty. I’m not sure there is a happy ending.

Perhaps the picture will speak for itself.

When Andrea and I had visited Banteay Srei, a temple ruin outside of Angkor Wat, three years ago that’s all it was, a ruin out in the country side. We were there alone. Now a massive entry complex and parking lot had been developed and on the day we were there, thousands of others were with us, streaming in with their cameras to capture one more historical ruin.

And there on the ground at the entrance that everyone had to walk through…

What is that? I heard someone ask.

I didn’t have an answer.

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one thing i am struck with, more than ever, is just how counter-to-the-ways-of-the-world-and-so-often-the-church, too, a life of descent really is.  it just isn’t all that popular.  it doesn’t sell.  it is hard.  it is messy.  it is costly.  it’s a sure way to shrink a church.  but in so many ways, as Jesus reminds us of in the beatitudes, we’re somehow blessed living down here. in all kinds of weird, wonderful, unexplainable ways, once we’ve tasted it, nothing else really satisfies.

some of what’s in this post is in the chapter in down we go called “we may look like losers.” it was based on this original blog post with the same title.  this past week as i’ve been reflecting on how much i love my little beautiful refuge community & all i learn through it each and every day, i have been reminded just how easy it would be to miss what’s going on if you only looked on the outside.  honestly, we look like losers.  we really do.

but when it comes to relationships & community & learning-to-live-in-the-trenches-of-real-life-together, oh, there’s a lot of beauty & healing going on!

i sometimes tell friends that i wish i had “church amnesia” so that i could erase most of what i formerly learned about “success,” “ministry,” “leadership” and what makes things “viable.” in my old circles, valid ministry means constantly “growing,” “getting financially stable,” and “building up new, stronger leaders.” when i look at the refuge against this list, i tend to get a little embarrassed. i hear the words of successful Christian leadership books and see how we are
falling short.

slowly but surely i am learning that none of the old rules apply.

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When I took up the cross, I recognized its meaning….  The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately that you die on… And that’s the way I’ve decided to go.                          

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. May 22, 1967, Penn Community Center, Frogmore, South Carolina

Robert Capon writes, “Shamelessness is the supreme virtue of the Incarnation.”  I think Capon is right.  To cave into the accusing voices of shame is to drain the Gospel of its power.  In a word, God is shameless.

Recently, a friend told me the story of when he used the “f-word” in a religious gathering. (I would spell out the word for clarity but, ironically, most internet search engines have a higher morality than I do and would block it).  He used the “f-word” to ease the shame of someone in the group who accidentally said, “damn,” and felt terrible for doing so.  Can you see the picture?  A guy of questionable moral fiber accidentally said, “damn” at a bible study and felt ashamed for doing so.  My friend, who has sworn maybe twice in his whole life, saw that the man was ashamed and immediately threw out an awkwardly placed, ill-timed, and altogether forced “f-bomb” in hopes of covering the shame of the shamed one.

Alexamenos worships his god.

One of the earliest known depictions of Jesus, is the Alexamanos Graffito, dating from c.200 AD or earlier.  It is an early parody of Christianity.  It was discovered in 1857 in Rome and is now in the Palatine Antiquarian Museum.  This wall carving is much like the graffiti we might find on a bathroom stall today.  It shows a man with an ass’s head being crucified and a youth raising his hand, as if in prayer.
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