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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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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I grew up with a sister who was 3 years 4 months and 11 days older than me. When I was a boy there were two things I wanted more than anything else. One was to be an elephant. And the other was to be older than my sister. Maybe the two desires were really the same desire. It seemed in everything that mattered, like getting extra dessert and staying up late at weekends and becoming streetwise at primary school, I was always second. And there’s only so much coming second a man can take – especially a 7-year-old man.

What is it about siblings? We can’t live with them; we can’t live without them. If someone attacks them we’re first to step in, if they’re sick we can’t sleep for worry; but leave us alone in a room with them and in no time we find ourselves turning from wallflowers into fireworks. I once had Christmas dinner with a friend who had his 93-year-old and 91-year-old great aunts and his 89-year-old great uncle join us for the festive occasion. The great uncle said “Pass the roast potatoes, would you” – and proceeded to help himself to a generous portion. “Stop it – put those back” snapped his older sister, “Don’t be so greedy.” The younger sister pleaded, “But surely, it’s Christmas Day!” The older aunt was not to be deterred. Looking imperiously at her 89-year-old
brother, she said ‘He has to learn!”

This is the soil out of which the story of Cain and Abel becomes the story of everybody. A great many politicians and religious leaders talk about safeguarding or promoting or focusing on the family – but you wonder if these people have ever lived in one. The book of Genesis isn’t the slightest bit sentimental when it comes to the realities of growing up with a brother. Here are Cain and Abel; the first recorded sign of trouble and straightaway Abel’s blood is crying out from the ground.

Then a few chapters later we have Abraham and Lot, who were cousins but in one place are called brothers. We have this resonant sentence, “their possessions were so great that they could not live together.” Ouch. Feel the quality of that for a moment. “Their possessions were so great that they
could not live together.” My sister and I became the best of friends only when she went away to university. I didn’t realize we were living out the Abraham and Lot story.

And then there’s Isaac and Ishmael. Anyone here got a half brother? You going to tell me that’s a picnic? You’re the older one and you’re constantly told you should be nice to your little brother even though every time you look at him you think, “It was your mother that ruined my parents’ marriage.
How can I not hate you? Why should I love someone who’s taken away my dad’s attention that used to be all mine?” Or you’re the younger one and you think “I didn’t choose this domestic arrangement so why do I get blamed for it? What do I have to do to be taken seriously in this house and not treated as a toy?”

And we haven’t even spoken yet about Jacob and Esau, and what happens when one parent starts using a child in her maneuverings against the other. Boy does that make it yet more complicated, when you’re piggy in the middle between your parents! And finally there’s Joseph and his brothers, and it’s as if in that story that every element in all the previous stories comes together in a volcano of fratricide and parental favoritism and an over-inflated ego – and yet profound love. Kerboom. If there’s anyone here this morning who doesn’t recognize themselves in one of these stories I’d be mighty surprised. If your life is a chaos of thinly-veiled warfare, and a desperate struggle for recognition, and love you long for but daren’t ask for, and long-festering resentment, and freshly minted fury – welcome to Genesis. You’ll be quite at home.

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“From dust you were created; to dust you shall return.”

With those words, ashes were smeared on my forehead in the shape of a cross. For some reason the phrase startled me all over again. Maybe I just forgot exactly what gets said at the key moment this day?

The vertical thumb stroke: “From dust you were created.” The little bit of intimacy surprised me too. Brown eyes meeting mine, the press of another’s skin, the whispered voice. I felt myself flinch, before I relaxed into the word “created.” It is awkward but good, this alive created-ness, this being-touched.

Then the horizontal stroke: “To dust you shall return.” This last bit typically is the flinch-inducer. Not only the image of myself someday being sprinkled out of a tin can onto my favorite mountain meadow, but the word “shall.” That little word just kicks the phrase up a level of grave certainty. Whatever else will or will not be in store for me, my dusty endshall come.

Yes I remember this phrase well now, from many Ash Wednesdays. I didn’t grow up in a liturgical tradition, so I experienced it first as a young man in a church that nearly threw the pastor out for introducing the rite one spring. What were these dirty Catholic ashes doing in a Wesleyan church? Why this talk of death in the days leading to Easter, our great celebration of life? The scandal threw everything into a mess that spring, and some people left. It strikes me now that if liturgical folk were paying attention, the ashes of Lent might put us all into more of a scandalized mess than actually happens. We have just been told we shall die, and we file back into our chairs and fiddle with our programs? If the same message had just been delivered over the airplane intercom, would we quietly return to our seats, minds wandering to trivial stuff?

So it’s got my attention, this smear of ashes. But this spring, most surprising of all, the ashes mean for me freedom.

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A story I’ve told many times, but never written

Starts with me writing the letter K. I write it with blue ink.

It only stands for a nickname,

but it’s a glimpse of the transformation I long for.

A woven pen, with blue ink.

Simple and absolutely priceless.

From a dark corner of an infamous and forgotten prison

‘K’ spends the time of “his time” making crafts for sale.

And he wove it for me. Included my name on the weave.

Yes. My name with green thread.

They say that ink is a writer’s second blood.

And while I see the blue ink drying on the paper,

I can’t help think of the blood that covered the alleys

of his neighborhood, as I walked there so many times,

the same hands that shed so much blood,

have gifted me with one of my most valuable treasures.

A symbol that captures not only my heart for writing

but also a tool to give voice to the untold stories

that remain in the silence of those hard places.

This pen that is a constant reminder of why I do what I do.

Humbly, I hold it in my hands,

challenged by the privilege of seeing beyond.

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.

  ”All throughout the book of Mark, the disciples just don’t get it. They approach Jesus from a posture of hubris and show us that they don’t see straight. The literary counterpoint is the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, who sees rightly. Bartimaeus is blind. The disciples try to mute him. But his sense of hearing is strong.”

I may be a bit late to what’s been happening in pop music culture worldwide because of my recent transition to Duke but I am catching up on it now and I’ve been hearing a lot about “Gangnam style,” which is the title of a musical single by South Korean rapper Psy. Gangnam style is a Korean neologism that refers to the hip and trendy lifestyle of the Gangnam district of Seoul, Korea, which is supposedly the Beverly Hills of Seoul. This song was released on July 15, 2012, as the lead single of this rapper’s sixth album. Just to give you some sense of the buzz it has created—“Gangnam Style” debuted at number one on the national record chart of South Korea and as of October 23, 2012, the music video has been viewed over 530 million times on YouTube and is the site’s third most watched video and most watched Korean pop video. Guinness World Records has indicated that is the most ‘liked’ video in YouTube history.

There’ve been numerous parodies and reaction videos to Psy’s initial music video. Psy has demonstrated Gangnam style on Saturday Night Live, at Dodger Stadium, on the Ellen Degeneres show, and I’m contemplating whether to invite him here to Duke Chapel for a demonstration with the Chapel choir (I’m just kidding!) What’s drawn some of the most attention is the song’s dance moves which have been performed by different kinds of people all over the world. This musical phenomenon has been drawing and calling people to try out its dance moves. Just last weekend I saw a young man at the Duke football game against UNC doing the “Gangnam style.” I did not realize what I’ve been missing these last few months! Even Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon have been seen dancing “gangnam style”!  Who would have thought?! What we expect is not always what we get.

We expect the disciples to have their religious act together with every i dotted and every t crossed, to have every hair in place and to know the exact time to do the sign of the cross. We expect them to do what is right and what is holy and what is just and what is Christ-like. But in last week’s passage in Mark, we find something else out about the disciples. They just don’t get it. When Jesus asks James and John the same question that rolls off his lips today, “what do you want me to do for you?” we might expect them, disciples of Jesus the Christ, to ask for something admirable and deeply pietistic. Instead, they try to control the boundaries of God’s answer by telling Jesus to give them whatever they ask for and what they ask for is to sit at his right and left hand in glory. They want the Trinity to take in two more members and become a Holy Pentagon. They seemed to have been mentored by Joel Osteen’s book, Your Best Life Now. They want glitz and glamor and prestige and power. Didn’t Jesus just predict for a third time his death and resurrection? And the only thing that James and John can worry about is their own glory? Little do they know what they are asking for because as Jesus implies, the irony is that God’s glory is gory and his imminent future entails a baptism in blood. The disciples, those who are supposed to be in the know, a part of the gnostic insider clan of Jesus, are actually spiritually blind, blinded by their own ambition. All throughout the book of Mark, the disciples just don’t get it. They approach Jesus from a posture of hubris and show us that they don’t see straight.

The literary counterpoint this week is the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, who sees rightly. He approaches Jesus with a posture of humility. He asks for mercy as we do in many Sunday services in our communal prayer of confession (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy). His approach to Jesus is a correction to the distorted discipleship of James and John. Bartimaeus desires to be freed from an affliction; he’s not seeking authority or affluence. This man, an outsider in society, usually overlooked in the community of humanity, and whom people order to be quiet, like the disciples said to him, is the one who models Christian discipleship. The unlikely outsider understands over against the insider-information disciples. Two blind characters in Mark, the man on whose eyes Jesus puts saliva in Mark chapter 8 and Bartimaeus, frame the conversation about discipleship and the blindness of the disciples. These two blind men see with eyes of faith. This is the paradox of the gospel and it should always surprise us because what we expect is not always what we get.

Bartimaeus is blind. The disciples try to mute him. But his sense of hearing is strong. “When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out…” so that Jesus could hear him. I don’t know what he heard. I don’t know if someone said something to Bartimaeus. I don’t know if he heard the shuffle of Jesus’s feet or the tone of Jesus’s voice.  I don’t know if there was news coverage about Jesus. As far as I know Jesus was not one of the topics at the presidential debates. But Bartimaeus hears that it is Jesus without any mention of a sound in the biblical text. And because he knows who Jesus is, he cries out loudly for mercy on his misery.

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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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Recently Street Psalms Press announced  the arrival of our first book, Geography of Grace – Doing Theology From Below by Kris Rocke and Joel Van Dyke.

This project has been several years in the making. It has gone through five major edits, countless rewrites and a change in publishers. We are eager and a bit nervous to see it finally hit the streets. We have no illusions that this will be a New York Times best seller, but as a community, we hope it is a useful tool for those who are hungry to see God at work in hard places.

Authors and leaders like Bob Ekblad, Richard Rohr, Shane Claiborne, Phyllis Trible, Ray Bakke and others have given the book a warm reception. To see what these and other leaders are saying about Geography of Grace go click on the book highlight to the right of this page or go  here.

Fair warning:

We did not set out to write a controversial book, but this book is not without some controversy. We wrote it to honor those who work in the context of poverty and violence, which often pushes leaders to the edge of their faith, and ours as well, if we are honest. As a result, we have taken the “road less traveled,” in our book. Such a road is fraught with danger and all manner of ways to get lost, but as Robert Frost noted, taking the road less travelled “has made all the difference.” We hope it will make a difference with our readers and the communities we serve.

Several who have reviewed the book have recognized and appreciated the risky nature of our journey. One such review comes from Stephan de Beer in Pretoria, South Africa, who writes,

Grace is shared abundantly in the poetic beauty of this book: a grace located in the deepest trenches of human suffering and global urban fractures; a disarming grace, meeting you on every page, robed in profanity, steeped in the incarnation, erupting in surprising, awe-inspiring transformations.

This book offers all of us who sense an invitation to be on the urban margins, some superb handles for the journey – it is not your typical travel guide, but one written for the connoisseur of urban and human marginality, and, if we read carefully enough, a guide book for opening us up to the poetry and profanity of God’s beautiful grace, a grace more than able to make us over, and also the cities in which we live.

 Stephan de Beer, CEO, Tshwane Leadership Foundation, Pretoria, South Africa

To purchase Geography of Grace: Doing Theology From Below in either paperback or e-book format, go here. (Amazon will have the print version of the book available within the next month or so, but for now the paperback edition is available directly from Street Psalms Press in an equally safe and secure process that actually provides more income for our work.)  

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