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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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.

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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As we enter Advent there is much to celebrate. For example, we were in Cincinnati last week doing the Image Is Everything intensive. The movie Reparando continues to play to sold-out theaters in Guatemala City. Our cohort in Nairobi just finished another masters class. We offered another training in Haiti.

This is all great…really great, but I am aware that such reports are not without their complications. Here are two.

First, the events highlighted above mean a lot to those of us who participated in them, but they are distant realities for most of us. When is the last time you were in Cincinnati, Guatemala City, Nairobi or Port-au-Prince? We try to bridge the gap with stories, but in the end the distance remains…and this, I believe, is a good thing.

Healthy distance protects us from false intimacy. It protects us from the illusion that we actually have relationships with people we’ve never met or with places we’ve never been. False intimacy is one of the great temptations of an age that prides itself on technology that eliminates distance. It is also one of the great dangers of mission.

Our weekly reflections are not meant to deny the distance between us, creating an artificial sense of connection. That would be dangerous. Rather, we try to reflect on distant realities in ways that honor those differences. We seek to reflect in ways that invite each of us to engage more deeply in our own context, where relationships are real – sometimes all too real. Engaging stories of distant people and places is not an excuse to deny the distance. It is it an excuse to flee our own context – quite the opposite. It is an invitation to engage the relationships we do have and engage the places where we live with fresh eyes – the eyes of the other. In this way, we hope that otherness and distance are not demons to be cast out, as our technologies would suggest, but they are gifts that can help us love each other better, right where we are – at home.

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When I first saw the title of Chimamanda Adichie’s talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” I confess to assuming this was a cleverly provocative title for a well-worn observation—namely, that stories have power, and even a single story has the power to subvert the status quo in ways that might be ultimately beneficial. I was wrong, and my first mistake was assuming there is anything well-worn about Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. If you doubt that, follow the advice of my friend who said “you MUST watch this,” and strap yourself in for the considerable force of her analysis.

If you still doubt Adichie, go find a copy of her recent collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck. I was glad to discover one in a Nairobi airport bookstore before boarding a flight recently, and glad a friend had tipped me off to her with this video some time ago. According to Adichie, “single stories” are among the most fundamentally oppressive weapons we humans wield against each other. That is, allowing a single storyline or single reality to define other people. Whether in the form of a conscious, active attempt to maintain our distance and power, or a passively unconscious failure of imagination and empathy, settling for single stories reinforces the “otherness” of others in dehumanizing ways that ultimately result in violence.

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