Monday, April 14, 2014

Posta ember

Every morning around 11 the Görögszállás post man comes into the village and taps his horn a few times to announce his arrival.  In Hungary, and probably other places, people can go to the post office and pay their bills for their cell phone, utilities, house payment, TV, internet.  People end up having a lot of interaction with the post man, especially since many of them are home during the day.

The post man, though, isn't all business.  Earlier in the year I had a lot of mail requiring my signature while I was trying to get a visa.  When the post man came inside for a signature, he usually got a cup of coffee, and sometimes a typical Hungarian three-course lunch. When he stops by the Children's House he kicks the soccer ball with the kids and has such a friendly, approachable nature that they all flock to him.  
 


This is how some folks spend their day...


I found this infographic a few weeks ago which provided some interesting food for thought on my question "how does one spend the day?" - see previous post.  There's a lot of things I like about this.  For starters, there's no color code for watching Netflix or surfing facebook.  There is, however, a good chunk of most days dedicated to socializing in person and communicating with people either in person or by letter.  I especially like Ben Franklin's morning ritual of setting the day's resolution and asking "what good shall I do today."  Sleep patterns are also interesting.  It's interesting that the color gray--"making ends meet"--appears infrequently.  We know that plenty of prominent historical figures weren't always good with money.  But they did spend their days doing interesting things, things that shaped their world and the future.  

What will be your day's resolution?

Infographic from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/29/brilliant-people-schedules_n_5055953.html 
 

Friday, April 11, 2014

How does one spend the day?

This question of “how does one spend the day" is, probably, one of the most important questions that keeps coming up for me as I spend this year in a place that is so different from home.  I focused on this to some extent in my most recent newsletter.  Framing this question, which began as a collection of thoughts and observations, into words comes from two very different realms of experience.
In one realm I hear stories and see—both firsthand, and elsewhere through media--people in this world without a job and basic resources.  They spend most of their time trying to survive in their environment. Here in Gorogszallas, I see people laboring each day for things I generally take for granted: heat, water, food, shelter, clothing. Both how they spend their day, and how they think about the day is different from what I know. It becomes easy for us to fragment each day with meetings, errands, house work, projects, leisure, exercise, entertainment, study.  Let’s remember that the 40 hour workweek, perhaps with benefits and even paid time off, is a relatively recent phenomena.  
So then the other realm of experience helping me to frame this question is precisely the highly-developed, busy, connected realm that I and all of you reading this are familiar with. I recently shared a quote with a friend that helped me to frame this question about how one spends the day.  E. B. White writes, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”  The very notion that we have the opportunity to both enjoy and improve, and that it can be a choice each day, speaks to the level of privilege we come from.  Luther would add that each day we are reborn—made new—in God’s love and grace.
There is not a “right” way to spend your day. And we certainly can’t improve everything all at once. Or perhaps a less extreme way of saying this is that we can’t always do big things. This shouldn’t curb our ambition or stymy our talents, but it should let us pause and consider the time we have each day, what we’ll do with today, and remember brothers and sisters around the world who will spend their day in vastly different ways. 
Sometimes we romanticize images from developing parts of the world such as vendors selling food in a street market, or children playing soccer with a tattered ball, or families bathing in a river.  For reasons of history, religion, economics, politics, and sometimes shear fate, the way they spend their day is so different from what many of us can relate to. We like to think of not just our days, but our lives as a clear trajectory: education, then a career, raise a family, and eventually retire. This isn’t a good or normal trajectory for everyone.  I’m discovering here just how vulnerable to disruption and scarcity people’s lives can be.  
Democritus writes, “life without celebrations is like a long road without an inn.”  I like celebrations too, but now I think more about those people who can’t stop at the inn on the long road for any number of reasons. We pass people like this on the road all the time.  Why not share a story, or an idea, or a sign of kindness.
All 7 billion of us get the same 24 hour trip around the sun.  What will be your quest today?  What will you do to care for yourself and your neighbors? How will you spend the day?

Faith and Doubt

That's the title of a new column in the Sioux Falls (SD) Argus Leader written by the Rev. Dr. Anna Madsen

Her words:

I’ve always been drawn to the last few paragraphs of the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament.

The disciples — those who had been with Jesus for miracles, for teachings, for reprimands, for healings, for feedings, for deaths and for resurrections (minus Judas, but that’s another matter) — gathered at the Galilee mountain to meet with the risen Jesus.

Matthew makes a point of calling these men “disciples,” as opposed to, say, men, or followers, or friends.

And then, depending on how you read the Greek, Matthew either said that some disciples worshipped and some doubted, or he said that the disciples, all of them, worshipped and doubted.

That’s interesting.

The disciples, these men who had known Jesus for years, still weren’t quite sure what had just gone down, didn’t quite know whether they could entirely believe their eyes and ears and experiences.

Some, if not all of them, doubted.

And then Jesus said, “Go, make more disciples.”

Go make more worshippers and more doubters.

I’ve been invited to write this column, and it’s a column we’ve decided to name “Faith and Doubt.”

I like that title a lot.
My vocation is to be a theologian, and a systematic theologian at that. We systematic theologians wake up every morning and are awfully happy that we get to spend our days thinking and wondering about God.

But we not only spend our time thinking and wondering about our own notion of God; we also ponder how other people think and wonder about God. We know that there isn’t just one way, one system, of belief for God. Instead, there are closer to, well, gazillions of systems for thinking and wondering and believing in God.

And we know that how one thinks about God makes a difference: It makes a difference in terms of how people are parents and partners and citizens and voters and friends and sufferers and consolers. In short, how we believe, and in whom we believe, shapes everything about who we are.

This observation doesn’t necessarily imply a better or a worse way of being in the world. But it does imply — in fact, it straight-out means — that different beliefs make for different people.

It also means that no single person can believe that she or he has got God all sewn up.
There’s a pretty decent margin for error when we speak of God.

In my study, I have hundreds upon hundreds of books. One day, a gentleman made an appointment and brought along his Bible.

He pointed to a certain text and said, not with anger, irritation or defensiveness, but rather with conviction: “But look! This is what the Bible says and what it says is what it means!”
So I took a deep breath, and I blew it out, and I said, “Sir, I have an awful lot of books on my walls. Nope, I haven’t read them all. But I’ve read more than a few of them. There are books here from all across time and across the globe, and most of them have something to do with the Bible. If it were so simple to know what, exactly, the Bible says and means, then I wouldn’t need all these books, and I wouldn’t need all these shelves. I would need a small table, big enough to hold two books. One book would be the Bible, and the other would be a volume titled, ‘This is What the Bible Says and What It Means.’ ”
I’m afraid that Christians, anyway, believe that the Bible means only one thing, that faith only means one thing, and we sure hope (if not outright believe) that we’ve got it right. All too often, I fear, this mindset makes us afraid of wondering, afraid of learning and afraid of asking questions, because each of these habits might either hint of or lead to doubt.
As if that’s a bad thing.

Seems to me, if doubt is good enough for the disciples, it is good enough for the rest of us.
Even the word “faith” means trust in something not seen, not immediately present.

I have faith that tomorrow will come, but I’m not certain of it.

I can’t prove it.

But still and even so, my actions today are based a whole lot on the premise that tomorrow will, in fact, come.
 
To have faith means to trust, and to trust means to live and breathe out of a belief that something or someone is worthy of rearranging your life on its or their account.
I figure that such a commitment calls for an occasional look-see to check out whether what I claim to be right and true checks out against itself, and against my experience of the world.
Not only that, but although it might surprise some people, thinking about God — the act of being a theologian — is fun.

No, really, it is.

It’s fun.

There are so many quirks of history, word plays, insights and little-known facts about and in religious history that cause a person to wonder in amazement, to be utterly surprised and to totally impress family and friends at the dinner table. Some of them are worth checking out because they are simply interesting; some can change your life.

To be sure, there are some statements we can know, factually, to be true in religion.
For example, Moses came before Mozart.
We know that. We can prove that.

But there are all sorts of matters in theology that open up mystery, and questions, and probably a healthy dose of humility.

Czeslaw Milosz, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, tells of an “Old Jew of Galacia” who said:

When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Why, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug and the worse kind of rascal.

I’m hopeful that this column will err less on the rascally 75 percent to 100 percent thug side of things, and settle in more between 55 percent to 75 percent right. I’m hopeful that this column will give some room for thinking about theology, religion, worship and communities of belief in new ways, offering a little something both to the faithful and to the doubters.

Freelance theologian Anna Madsen is director of OMG: Center for Theological Conversation in Sioux Falls. Follow her writing and speaking events at Facebook, Twitter and www.omgcenter.com.

Patience

I recently wrote about the joy of sharing some of my YAGM experiences with other YAGMs around the world.  As a reminder, the Young Adults in Global Mission program has volunteers in Argentine/Uruguay, Mexico, South Africa, Madagascar, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Jerusalem/West Bank, and Hungary.  
Living in totally foreign places, speaking in a new language, navigating new communities, and implicitly representing the power and privilege of the United States present some interesting challenges, and of course a few laughs, that are nice to share with people experiencing the same things. This perspective also gives me a greater appreciation for people outside this program who are similarly working in an international context doing hands-on work.  A family friend, Mary Redlin, just finished her third entrepreneur business training for women in Uganda.  She wrote a great blog post about patience, and recognizing that sometimes it takes longer than we expect—and want—for our efforts to bear fruit.  
We want things to work now.  We want to connect with people now.  We want to bypass failure and get right to success, because, among other reasons, failure takes time.
Living in an international context means things take longer that we would like or expect to fall into place.  It takes longer to develop relationships, not to mention trust and respect. It takes longer to communicate ideas. It takes longer to get places.  It takes longer to figure out the nuances of people, communities, and social norms.  All of this extra time means many moments to practice patience, although that’s not always easy or fun when I just to mail a postcard, or get to town, or express what I’m thinking.
Ever since winter left northeast Hungary (okay, so it was a pretty easy winter) I feel like I’m finally starting to figure out the pulse of my village and the nearby city of Nyiregyhaza.  For the first time last week I had reason to navigate the bus system within the city and transfer to a new bus after the one that brought me in from Gorogszallas.  In the beginning of March I found the public library which has a great English section, and also people who are eager to practice their English with a native speaker.  I’ve gotten to know some of the teenagers better who come to the village’s after-school club.  Perhaps all of these things could have happened earlier through some stubbornness, persistence, and the simple passing of time.  But maybe patience itself can actually help expedite and even lead to a better outcome.  Maybe more mindfulness for patience and things out of our control can help us enjoy the journey and the destination.

"There's room for doubt in faith"

Living in such a foreign context and working through the Hungarian Lutheran Church lets me see and understand how culture shapes faith.  Here, in a new column in South Dakota’s Argus Leader, Rev. Dr. Anna Madsen talks about our different ideas of God.  Her words are especially worth thinking about in light of the familiar Gospel stories we’ll hear during the next week and half.  (Anna also writes a fascinating blog of her own - check it out here.)
 


I’ve always been drawn to the last few paragraphs of the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament.
  The disciples — those who had been with Jesus for miracles, for teachings, for reprimands, for healings, for feedings, for deaths and for resurrections (minus Judas, but that’s another matter) — gathered at the Galilee mountain to meet with the risen Jesus.
  Matthew makes a point of calling these men “disciples,” as opposed to, say, men, or followers, or friends.
  And then, depending on how you read the Greek, Matthew either said that some disciples worshipped and some doubted, or he said that the disciples, all of them, worshipped and doubted.
  That’s interesting.
  The disciples, these men who had known Jesus for years, still weren’t quite sure what had just gone down, didn’t quite know whether they could entirely believe their eyes and ears and experiences. Some, if not all of them, doubted. And then Jesus said, “Go, make more disciples.” Go make more worshippers and more doubters.
  I’ve been invited to write this column, and it’s a column we’ve decided to name “Faith and Doubt.”
  I like that title a lot.
  My vocation is to be a theologian, and a systematic theologian at that. We systematic theologians wake up every morning and are awfully happy that we get to spend our days thinking and wondering about God.
  But we not only spend our time thinking and wondering about our own notion of God; we also ponder how other people think and wonder about God. We know that there isn’t just one way, one system, of belief for God. Instead, there are closer to, well, gazillions of systems for thinking and wondering and believing in God.
  And we know that how one thinks about God makes a difference: It makes a difference in terms of how people are parents and partners and citizens and voters and friends and sufferers and consolers. In short, how we believe, and in whom we believe, shapes everything about who we are.  
This observation doesn’t necessarily imply a better or a worse way of being in the world. But it does imply — in fact, it straight-out means — that different beliefs make for different people.
It also means that no single person can believe that she or he has got God all sewn up. There’s a pretty decent margin for error when we speak of God.
  In my study, I have hundreds upon hundreds of books. One day, a gentleman made an appointment and brought along his Bible.
  He pointed to a certain text and said, not with anger, irritation or defensiveness, but rather with conviction: “But look! This is what the Bible says and what it says is what it means!” So I took a deep breath, and I blew it out, and I said, “Sir, I have an awful lot of books on my walls. Nope, I haven’t read them all. But I’ve read more than a few of them. There are books here from all across time and across the globe, and most of them have something to do with the Bible. If it were so simple to know what, exactly, the Bible says and means, then I wouldn’t need all these books, and I wouldn’t need all these shelves. I would need a small table, big enough to hold two books. One book would be the Bible, and the other would be a volume titled, ‘This is What the Bible Says and What It Means.’ ”
  I’m afraid that Christians, anyway, believe that the Bible means only one thing, that faith only means one thing, and we sure hope (if not outright believe) that we’ve got it right. All too often, I fear, this mindset makes us afraid of wondering, afraid of learning and afraid of asking questions, because each of these habits might either hint of or lead to doubt.
  As if that’s a bad thing.
  Seems to me, if doubt is good enough for the disciples, it is good enough for the rest of us. Even the word “faith” means trust in something not seen, not immediately present. I have faith that tomorrow will come, but I’m not certain of it. I can’t prove it. But still and even so, my actions today are based a whole lot on the premise that tomorrow will, in fact, come. To have faith means to trust, and to trust means to live and breathe out of a belief that something or someone is worthy of rearranging your life on its or their account.
I figure that such a commitment calls for an occasional look-see to check out whether what I claim to be right and true checks out against itself, and against my experience of the world. Not only that, but although it might surprise some people, thinking about God — the act of being a theologian — is fun. No, really, it is.
  It’s fun.
  There are so many quirks of history, word plays, insights and little-known facts about and in religious history that cause a person to wonder in amazement, to be utterly surprised and to totally impress family and friends at the dinner table. Some of them are worth checking out because they are simply interesting; some can change your life. To be sure, there are some statements we can know, factually, to be true in religion. For example, Moses came before Mozart. We know that. We can prove that.
  But there are all sorts of matters in theology that open up mystery, and questions, and probably a healthy dose of humility.
  Czeslaw Milosz, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, tells of an “Old Jew of Galacia” who said: When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Why, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug and the worse kind of rascal.
  I’m hopeful that this column will err less on the rascally 75 percent to 100 percent thug side of things, and settle in more between 55 percent to 75 percent right. I’m hopeful that this column will give some room for thinking about theology, religion, worship and communities of belief in new ways, offering a little something both to the faithful and to the doubters.

Back to the Blog

Just over a month ago I sent out my third newsletter updating friends, family, acquaintances, and supporters around the world about the first few months of 2014 as a YAGM volunteer in Gorogszallas, Hungary.  The newsletter is a strange animal because I find that I really have to be in the right mood to hit my stride and try and craft something that gives a few snapshots of the last two months. How do you pick what to write about, and how do you synthesize so many new, yet still very connected experiences? Once you begin settling into a place, the routine gives a sense of normalcy to the revelations I experience each day in culture, language, and people. All that is to say that I have not been good about documenting or sharing some of the smaller, but no less significant, parts of these last few months on my blog.

In late January I filled out an application to attend a conference on gender issues among Roma people.  After staring for a few minutes at two well phrased questions on the PDF and trying to articulate a good, concise answer, I became fairly convinced that I had lost my command for the English language after being immersed in Hungarian for half a year.  Even though it always takes a little while for me to hit my stride on the newsletter, I look forward to the days and weeks that follow when I hear back from some people with thoughts or even just a few words of encouragement.  Newsletter season also means I get to hear from other YAGMs around the world.  Their words remind me that although we’re in different parts of the globe we are accompanying each other with many of the same questions of faith and being.

By returning to this blog with more focus I hope to share how some of the things I’ve been thinking about over the last months are coming together as we leave winter behind and plunge into a new chapter of the year.