A Prayer for Lent
Global Missions Newsletter for February by Justin Haaheim
Dear Friends and Family,
Warm and loving greetings. I hope this newsletter finds you well. It’s been a while since you last heard from me, and so much has happened since my December newsletter.
In the end of December, Dorea (my girlfriend) came down to spend Christmas and New Years here and spend a little while getting to know the places and people with whom I’ve spend almost 6 months now. Her visit was a blessing, and was a really important time for us to remember what it’s like to be together, to talk face to face, and to share experiences together. We spent Christmas with my friend and pastor Alan and did some sight-seeing around Buenos Aires (which was really interesting and fun for me. I think, being here in a kind of un-touristy capacity, I had kind of neglected the need to tour around and appreciate the sights of the place I’m living. I definitely saw a new side of BA while Dorea was here). After that we traveled to Patagonia and spent 7 days in a smallish touristy town called San MartÃn de los Andes doing some hiking and backpacking, relaxing, and walking around the town holding hands (gross, I know). A long bus ride brought us back to Buenos Aires for a final day and a half of sight-seeing, including a tango show at the famed Café Tortoni, before a sad goodbye back at Ezeiza international airport. Though it was only two weeks, I’m really grateful that she was able to come and connect with the people and places here that I find sometimes so unconveyable.
January was both a hard and easy month. As it turns out, in Argentina there’s something akin to a synchronized mass exodus in the beginning of January which they call “vacaciónes” (“vacation”), which means that just about anyone you might possibly need in order to get anything done during the month will likely be in Cordoba, Bariloche, or Mar del Plata. And even though the families of my friends from the barrio San Pablo (where I work) aren’t usually able to get out on vacations as extravagant as those, even some of them left for relatives’ houses out in the Buenos Aires province. As a result of all of this, the volunteer work that my coordinator and I had talked about for the month was largely un-doable. This ended up being a mixed blessing, with the laid-back schedule and me participating mostly in church activities giving me plenty of time to work on applications.
“Applications?”, you ask. (I’ve enjoyed thinking about telling you all about this, because I know for some of you this will kind of make sense, and for others this will be kind of a surprise.) Yup, applications. In the end of January I finished applications to the Yale Divinity School and separately to a joint program of the Divinity School and Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, both to study theology. For those that have been closer to me during these last few years as my faith has grown, it probably won’t be much of a shock that my continuously growing interest in faith and religion has formed into a concrete interest in studying theology, in particular due to a number of the people I’ve talked with and the experiences I’ve had here in Argentina. All of this compelled me to start these application processes in early January, which themselves actually helped to deepen my interest even more in studying at divinity school. I should point out that I’ve only applied, and that I’m glad I won’t have to make a decision until April if I get accepted because studying theology is still more of an interest than a vocational conviction. I’m also not sure yet whether I’d pursue ordained ministry or instead use my education to find other ways of serving the church. We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.
The same day that I submitted my applications (all online), I hopped on a bus and headed southwest to Patagonia a few days early for our program’s mid-year retreat in Esquel. I took the bus to Bariloche — kind of a hub in northern Patagonia — and started planning a backpacking trip through the nearby stretch of the Andes mountains, which I left on a couple days later. The trip was outstanding for me. One of the most difficult hikes I’ve ever done, with some of the most beautiful and unbelievable scenery I’ve ever seen, and all the while a really thoroughly peaceful and refreshing experience. I was fortunate, too, to meet up on the second day with an Argentine named Sergio, who became my walking buddy for the rest of the day on the hardest part of the hike. It made me glad for my tendency to approach and talk with random strangers. I’ve posted pictures from the trek on my picture website, but I also wanted to point you to a few special things I put together:
-A time lapse video of the clouds over the “Cathedral Mountains” at sunset, made from about 70 individual pictures taken at 3 second intervals.
-A panorama of the view from the top of the Paso Brecha Negra (Brecha Negra mountain pass) on my second day. As you scroll from left to right on the picture, you can see the various mountain ranges and valleys that made up other parts of the trek, and in the distance just to the left of the rock pile in the middle you can see “Volcán LanÃn” (Volcano Lanin) almost 200 miles away.
I made it back safe (and exceedingly sore) from the hike, and then the next day took the bus the rest of the way south to Esquel for the mid-year retreat with our coordinator, her husband, their two (adorable) kids, and the other volunteers. The retreat was good and another source of refreshment for me, but also challenging in a number of ways. Questions filled my journaling during those days, asking What does my time here in Argentina mean? What will this time mean for my life when I return? What would a ‘successful’ year be, if I can even think about it that way? What am I giving? How am I giving, and am I giving enough? Whom am I serving? Am I serving myself?
These questions have continued with me during this month, pushing me to wonder about if my work here is enough. I’m tempted at first to answer myself and say to not worry: that “enough” is an arbitrary term, and what’s important is that I’m here and *being* with the people whom I seek to serve. But when it comes to a very personal level, I think “enough” is more about honesty than anything else. It’s about being with God in the quiet places of my mind and confessing my sin, and about taking strength from his quieting answer of grace. In the freedom of his grace I must find myself each day and ask myself who is seeing the light of God working through me. “Enough” for me isn’t about reaching some arbitrary point, nor is it about a dichotomy between good and bad where doing enough is good. Enough is something I can know according to the gifts I know I have, and in these last weeks I know I haven’t been giving enough.
Ash Wednesday and the beginning of lent hit me really hard this year. It was in this feeling of knowing that I’m not giving enough here that I listened to Claudio’s “Miércoles de Cenizas” (Ash Wednesday) sermon as he talked about fasting, about taking things out of our life, and about preparing in a deeply personal and spiritual way for the celebration of Christ’s resurrection on Easter. I’m never sure how much I believe that God answers us in concrete, tangible ways, but the “Miércoles de Cenizas” service at Martin Lutero hit me like an answer to a question that I hadn’t asked anyone yet — like a light shone on my thoughts illuminating both the rest of the question and at least some of the answer for me.
It sounds simple, maybe, to say that I think I was serving myself, and that the answer I’ve found has been to let go of things in my life and focus myself on God. I don’t think it’s as simple as it seems though, both because seeing ourselves as too self-focused is always more complex than just that, and because the answer is one that takes lifetimes to figure out. Nevertheless, I was left Wednesday night with a sense of comfort (which for me is sometimes the most powerful sign that God has acted in my life), and a conviction to reorient myself both spiritually and in my work so that God’s work can take the place of the deceptively similar “my work”.
For me, Lent symbolizes a time of fasting — a concept that has taken on an important meaning for me beyond literal understandings of not eating meat or chocolate (or whatever) for 40 days. My reorientation and preparation during lent was inspired by Pastor Claudio’s message that lent is a time to live in God’s grace, and to remember the message of Ash Wednesday reminding us: “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It’s a message of emptiness, but in that emptiness in which we’re left we see all the beautiful ways that God fills us, or really all the ways that God was already in those spaces.
Last Friday I was robbed at knife-point outside the Retiro train station in the capital. I was surrounded as I waited for the bus to go home by three kids about my same age who grabbed me and bit by bit took almost everything I had. Some part of me would like to make this into something other than a terrible experience, but I can’t. It was a terrible experience. I was scared, and later I was either intensely sad or intensely angry.
I’m sad for having lost a notebook with journal entries, my “Gracias” book with lots of notes in the margins, a jacket, a camera, my wallet, my glasses, and among other things a new mate, a bombilla and a prayer candle I got on my day trip to Uruguay to renew my visa. In spite of my sadness, though, this “experience” has put me in a place where I’m very conscious about what I have and don’t have — something that, in the context of the beginning of Lent and God’s call to empty ourselves, I’m in a strange way thankful for. I don’t really believe being robbed was an act of God to set me on the right track, but there’s a part of me that can’t help but see this as a powerful (albeit violent) arrival into the fast of lent — a kind of mandatory renunciation of things that on some level or other tempt a distance from God. At least for now I’m not going to try to replace what I lost mostly as a symbol of the Lenten fast I aspire to continue, and of the small peace I’ve found in the space this experience has cleared.
I’m grateful today to be ok. I’m grateful that out of an act of violation and violence I’ve been able to find connectedness with God. I pray that during Lent this year you may find some measure of peace of your own in a setting-aside of things in your life, and in focusing on what you know in your heart matters most to you.
May God bless you, and may God order our days and our deeds in peace.
With much love,
Justin
Pictures from my time here in Argentina.
My newsletter Google-group website with copies of my previous newsletters.
ELCA website with information on my program.
And my new photoblog: Light-on