November 2008

The inky black sky and stark, jagged landscape drew us into their silence as we put miles between us and Las Vegas airport’s ringing slot machines and the pyramids and pirate shows of ‘the Strip’. Even the 90 degree heat was a welcome blast of reality as we headed southwest to Boulder City, perched above Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam.

I had mentioned in church the previous Sunday that I expected the annual meeting of the Domestic Missionary Partnership to be excruciatingly boring: poring over the grant applications that had choked my email’s inbox for a week, from places like Idaho and Central New York, Western Kansas and Eastern Oregon. Instead, I found myself sometimes moved to tears as I listened to the stories of what people just like us are doing all over this country and beyond.

Deacon Steve Paterson is one of a group of Arizonans who have worked for years to help the waves of Mexican immigrants constantly crossing their state, but a few years ago he started to ask exactly where these men came from, and what would keep them at home with their families. When he learned that most came from the far south west of Mexico, near the Guatemalan border, a team from Arizona flew down. They discovered that international trading companies were offering 35 cents for a pound of locally grown coffee, the main crop, and that the number of men leaving to work in the north had created massive social problems for their families left at home. Steve and his team returned with marketing advice and contacts; they constructed a coffee roasting facility and then started digging wells, laying water pipes and building an orphanage. Coffee now fetches about $3.60 a pound, and Steve’s team want to build an Episcopal Center to provide daycare, job training, liturgy and counseling, healthcare and reliable fresh water.

Father Alex Kenyi is the rector of the largest and most vibrant Episcopal congregation in North Dakota, with services in English, Dinka and Arabic. It is also one of the poorest, its members mostly Sudanese refugees, struggling with the trauma of cultural disintegration and social upheaval. He needs reading clinics and micro-loans, leadership development courses, youth mentoring and language programs, but he says that if he were given $100, or even $1, he would be deeply grateful, because he trusts that God will provide in other ways.

We spent hours learning about a church leadership academy in Alaska, an economic development corporation in Navajoland, a yearlong live-in program for young adults in Mississippi, and Hispanic ministry in Idaho. We spent even longer trying to reduce costs, but in the end there wasn’t nearly enough money. Eau Claire withdrew their request entirely because they considered the other projects more valuable; Bishop Skip Adams of Central New York halved his diocese’s asking; Steve Paterson, too, with tears in his eyes, withdrew his Mexico project so as to assure funding for a similar community program in Arizona. When we finally balanced the budget, we sang the Doxology, but I think most of us felt something from the funeral liturgy would have been more appropriate.

It is often said that courage needs witnesses, but I learned during those days in the desert that witnesses themselves are transformed by what they are privileged to observe. I saw fine people freely relinquish their cherished dreams when they recognized greater merit in the dreams of others, and such graciousness leaves no heart unmoved. Like the women at the foot of the Cross, we are changed irrevocably by our every participation in suffering.

As the evening settles on Boulder City, flocks of quail flutter up from the valleys to feed and shelter in suburban gardens. They are, of course – like the manna in the desert – an ancient symbol of God’s providence in difficult places and trying times, and God’s inexhaustible care for a vulnerable people. Their gentle calls insisted that God was with us still – with us in our struggles, and with us in care for one another.

TPG+

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