April 2008 REFLECTION FROM THE RECTOR Flying into Honduras, our plane skimmed plantain and coffee plantations, pine forests and pineapple fields; we then drove from the airport through choking dust and exhaust fumes, trash lining the streets, tattered shreds of plastic bags flapping from trees and barbed wire. The garden of our guest house in Tegucigalpa was a gentler introduction to the wrenching contrasts of Honduras, clouds of magenta, white, purple and tangerine bougainvillea swathing the high fence’s rolls of razor wire; hummingbirds rested on its branches while vultures wheeled overhead. As we drove up into the mountains each day, lavender-lilac jacaranda trees and scarlet poincianas gave way to prickly pear and thorn trees; on the hillsides, citron, rose, and lime-colored stucco townhouses were interspersed by grey concrete shanty towns in scarred and smoke-filled valleys; we passed army checkpoints, armed guards and machete-wielding civilians, while skeletal guard dogs lay in the exotic fragrance of Angel’s Trumpet, and chickens scratched in the dust. But perhaps the most puzzling of contrasts: this most warm and affectionate and faith-filled of cultures, so shot through with violence and injustice and neglect. At church on our first Sunday, a woman ‘witnessed’ to what God had done in her life. Her story involved breaking the law, evading authorities and raising bribe money: in her eyes, this was a revelation of God’s grace and God’s mercy and God’s protection. Unemployment, poverty, hopelessness, and desperation have moved all society’s markers, so that the meaning of words like truthfulness and justice and mercy begins to morph. The next day I read the lament of the psalmist differently: You have noted my cries; put my tears into your bottle; are they not recorded in your book? A month later, I still cannot put the pieces together. I look at the photographs of the children I carried in my arms and on my shoulders, and don’t know what the right question is, let alone the answer. No wonder that the most creative and controversial theology in recent years has come out of Latin America and India and Asia, where believers are confronted every day with these enormous chasms and questions, have to struggle to imagine God in this milieu, to understand what justice and grace and truth might mean in this reality. And so, for now, Honduras remains unresolved, and I remain with the questions, knowing that the wisdom of our tradition counsels pausing and waiting, even sitting in the dust and ruins for a while. Israel had to, over and over again, the physical destruction of temple and homeland mirroring the annihilation of an older understanding of God and the world. And for the disciples, this time after Easter was spent piecing together what had been shattered by Holy Week, as Jesus explained the meaning of everything that had happened, on the road to Emmaus and on the shores of Galilee . Like children, we all want to turn the page, bypass the sifting and weighing, and learn how the story ends, particularly when it’s our own, but the Gospels teach us the risen One emerges in the dark, long before we are aware of his presence among us. The risen life has already begun, but its reality only dawns upon us slowly, rising gently like the sun – never immediately recognizable, always surprising, scarcely unimaginable. TPG+