the rare privilege

this piece served as the theme for our MVC retreat over the summer, and has come back to my attention with the visit of my international program director and MVC's executive director last week. it has given me a lot to unpack this time around ...


we live in a time of rare privilege;
a time when new edges and new horizons and new possibilities are egging us on ...
we need the courage to leap from one edge to another
from a wall to no wall at all.
from contemplation to compassion.
from i to we.
from ladder to circle;
from climbing to dancing;
from control to celebration;
from home as nation to home as a global village.

~matthew fox

just read it one more time.
it's worth it.


this is where i was before leaving for guyana. everything was new and full of potential and possibility and growing. now that i'm here ... it's happening.

hopefully i will write a chapter about each of these lines and what they have come to mean to me sometime, but here i'll just focus briefly on the ones that are strongest for me.

from contemplation to compassion.
this is the essence of mission. this is faith lived. it is not enough to think it. it is not enough to pray it. enough requires doing what you practice in your heart. slowly, slowly, i'm developing a prayer life here. it's not anything grand, i haven't gone into any trances or spoken in tongues. that's not its aim. its aim is to center me, my life and my actions in love. easier said than done. much easier. to approach someone who is broken and suffering and sit with them, sit with their pain and fears when i am just beginning to realize how broken i am ... the connection has been alternately fulfilling and overwhelmingly painful. sometimes it is hard to remember love in those moments, and my compassionate response comes only later, in reflection or prayer. but i think the important thing is that i'm still learning from each experience, and sometimes it feels easier and even natural to respond compassionately, from the heart, instead of from the gut.

from i to we.
this has been a big challenge so far: to find the things that unite and relate me to my host culture. laughter has been a great way; song, another; and greetings, surprisingly, have been a third. greetings are important, here. i greet the same people up to five times in a day. "good morning, miss", "goodday, sir", "alright, nurse", "hello again, miss", "good afternoon, doctor" all just come rolling off my tongue now. i love them. they are familiar. they are how i say hello. they are how i say, "i see you - i care about you - you are special to me". and i feel that people are saying those same things back to me when they greet me.

that said, i am still having problems with "thewhitegirl" issue, meaning that that particular title and all that is understood by it (power, money, connections, sex, knowledge, opinions, habits) and all that is stereotyped through it is my inheritance here. i am called whitegirl when people think i am not listening. i am whitegirl to my colleagues at work, my neighbors, and the people i sit next to on the minibus. i never thought i would have a problem being just who i am, but i have felt i needed to constantly struggle to show people who i am instead of who they believe me to be. but some are learning who i am. i think it is they who have become the beginnings of my "we".

from control to celebration.
this is the hardest. to celebrate the days where not one darn thing goes according to my plans. the days when i have no plans and no expectations and still nothing seems to go right. the days where i must release and say, "clearly, none of what i intended was meant to be ... so what IS IT SUPPOSED TO BE??" and to learn to celebrate it, to sing and dance and laugh my "failures" all the way home and to share them with eileen. and remind myself that such days could have easily also happened at home, with my family around me, my car at my disposal, an easily accessible bank account, a learned map of where to go to get the services or goods i need, the knowledge of how to interact with others i meet along the way, my good friends who know what i will say before i speak, the places i'm used to getting away to when i need a minute ... not any of these things that were once normal, stable, unchanging, and comfortable could stop a bad day from happening. and i wonder if my having them made me forget to celebrate as often as i should have ...


a change in perspective. a stretching. a growing. a rare privilege.