I'm really enjoying the opportunities to speak at churches; it has given me the chance and motivation to face this reverse culture shock head on, and also a starting point in order to begin reconstructing the relationships I had before I left. Here's the gist of what I said at CPPC this past Sunday.
Wow. What a
strange, wonderful, and curious feeling to be standing here in front of all of
you today. Life changes and works in
wonderful, confusing, and beautiful ways.
When I last stood here in front of all of you, I was
finishing four wonderful years of working with the youth, children, and family
at this church. I knew God was calling
me for a new adventure. I had agreed to
go to Guatemala with our denomination, the PCUSA, as a young adult
volunteer. I knew that it would be an
adventure that was life-changing, but in hindsight, I knew these things with my
head and my mouth, but my heart and body had no idea. The 15 months I was gone were more
life-changing and adventurous than I could have imagined – no question about
that.
I left Walla Walla and CPPC on June 1, 2010, ready for
an adventure. One of my closest friends
and I had a long-standing dream of a road trip and, as we found ourselves both graduating,
me from Seminary and my job here at CPPC, and her from her undergrad at WSU, we
decided it would be as good a time as ever to go for our dream. We dreamed of hitting all 50 States. After a reality check of how boring driving
through Kansas would be, we stuck with the West. But a month-straight of camping around the
West was phenomenal - so great that I then set out on my own mini-roadtrips for
the next month and a half until I left the country.
This trip was amazing – not only because of the great
sights and friends I got to see along the way and the insane stories I
acquired, but also because of the identity crisis I allowed myself to have. I was able to begin the process of defining
myself by who I am, not what I did. This
was counter to my family and upbringing, and most of the US population, and it
was hard. I had to begin figuring out who Katharine is, not who Katharine the
student is, not who Katharine the swim coach is, not Katharine the church
employee, or Katharine the athlete, or Katharine the ____ whatever else I used
to define myself, just Katharine.
Because when you’re driving by yourself through North Dakota after your
friend flies out of Minneapolis and you see one car in the entire day, you
begin realizing that you don’t really know the person you’re in the car with. Even though that person is the only physical
person who has been with you every day since you were born, and it strikes you
that it’s time to start defining who that person is.
And that process that began during the road trip,
continued at great lengths in Guatemala, and is continuing now that I’m back
here, in my former setting, but with a new self-definition and new occupational
roles.
While working on defining who I was and who I want to
be, I remembered my seminary classmate who said that the best sermon ever
written was the Sermon on the Mount, and if he could convince his church of it,
he would just read that in its entirety every Sunday for a month, serving as a
sermon series. This sermon, he said,
tackles almost all of the biggest issues we preach about and debate about, and
if we were to just follow it, we would begin having this Christianity/Jesus
thing figured out a whole lot more. After
remembering his statement, The Beatitudes, the introduction to the Sermon on
the Mount, began to fascinate me, and they became a theme that came up again
and again during my year in Guatemala.
Therefore, when Doug and Skip asked if I wanted to preach as a part of
this sermon series, I was more than happy to say yes. God knows.
Yes, He knows.
Today, we’re going to focus on the third and fourth
Beatitudes, Matthew 5:5 and 6. They say,
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they will be filled.”
I learned so much about these two beatitudes this past
year. The first one, I learned
firsthand. The second, by watching and
living with people who really did hunger and thirst for righteousness, and many
who were filled.
Guatemala has the highest malnutrition rate in Latin
America with nearly half of the children in the country being malnourished, and
nearly 70% in the indigenous communities.
That means that there are a lot of people who are going around hungry
and thirsty. For many of the people who
lived around me, a standard breakfast or dinner is a corn tortilla with some
salt and maybe butter and lime juice complimented with a cup of instant coffee
because by boiling the water, they will hopefully have less critters living in
their belly making them sick.
Clean water costs a lot of money, thus many in the
working or agricultural class don’t have any.
When I translated for a medical jornada, one of the most surprising
things for our US doctors was how little water the Guatemalans drank. For us from the US, the concept of paying 2
bucks for 5 gallons of clean water, getting stomach animals from tap water, or
not having any running water to start with is so foreign. For them, it’s life. And the life of thirst
is hard.
I had two students, Isaac and Katerin, who were both
in first grade. Katerin was nine and
Isaac, 7. They began the school year as
great students. They were bright,
motivated, confident, and funny. However,
about a month and a half into the year, they changed. Katerin began stealing things, stopped
talking, and her facial bone structure got increasingly more defined. Isaac began failing all his subjects and
crying every time he had to go to the library where they took their shoes off. We
realized that his tears were because he only had one pair of socks, and he
wasn’t big enough to reach the pila to get them clean. We also learned that
Katerin’s silence and newly defined facial structure was due to hunger. The mother of the kids had been murdered by
the narco-trafficers and they were put under the charge of an aunt who then
left for the States in hopes of an income for their family to keep them alive,
so the two kids were living in the care of a 15 year-old cousin. They hungered – hungered for food, hungered
for love, and hungered for stability.
And their hunger took charge of their lives, causing the rest of life:
the dignity of not crying, relationships, social norms, studies, and physical
appearance to crumble.
Every time I go back to the beatitudes, I think of the
intense hunger I saw with these two kids.
When Jesus said, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, he wasn’t meaning that blessed are those who want righteousness,
he means, blessed are those who are screaming for righteousness, having their
desire for righteousness take charge of every other aspect of their lives.
But what is righteousness – this thing that blessed
are those who crave, seek, and will lose everything to gain?
I took this question to my good friend, the New Bible
Dictionary. It says that the Bible “uses
righteousness in the sense of conformity to the demands and obligations of the
will of God.” Between men, it is the
action which conforms to the requirements of a relationship and promotes the
well-being and peace of the community.
My favorite way of explaining Righteousness is that it is coming closer
to God – taking the things that separate us from Him away so we can fully focus
on Him. We’re human, and therefore can
never be fully righteous, but we can surely hunger and thirst, desiring from
the deepest depths of our being, to become so.
In addition to being a poor, hungry nation, Guatemala
is also a rather violent nation. Every
day, about two dozen murders happen in the country. The majority of them will go unsolved. Thus, the murderer will be running free to
strike again. The New Yorker opened an
article on Guatemala by saying, “if you’re going to commit a murder, Guatemala
is the place to do so…”. Sadly, that’s
true.
But, there are people who want, with all their being,
to change that. These are the people who
hunger and thirst for righteousness. One
of these people was the director of my school, Jorge. Jorge was one of the demonstrators during the
country’s 30 year civil war. After
waking up to a dead body and death threat on his lawn, he left the country to
seek asylum in Mexico. There, he studied
and got the goal and vision of a new school.
He wanted to build a school that could give private school educations to
poor families, as well as teaching them social lessons that could maybe begin
to overturn the oppression and violence in the country. Jorge has a hard job. His life is that school. But the kids are making a difference, and
they are learning the social skills they need to get out of the life their
socio-economic status has them set up for. Jorge wants righteousness for his school,
country, and students and he works 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, to make it
happen.
“And they will be filled”. What a great result. If I was allowed to have favorite students, I
would have to choose Ofelia. Ofelia was
a 6th grader who, with 3 high school aged cousin/neighbor people,
left her family in a small village, three hours away, and moved to Xela to
attend our school. She lived with the other three in a small,
one-room apartment that their families split the rent on. The kids had a rough start learning to care
for themselves, and Spanish was their second language; one that was rather new
to them. English classes were a
disaster, and the other subjects were not very pretty either. School was hard and Ofelia looked so confused
and quiet and lost in her class.
Then, as the
year went on, things began to click. She
and I hit it off and developed a pretty close relationship, her grades
improved, as did her social skills. Her
success definitely went in waves: her mom sold her as an indentured servant to
another family at our school whose dad was an abusive alcoholic, and Ofelia was
so busy that her grades began to fall, but she kept trying.
At our medical jornada, Ofelia and the other three
brought what seemed to be their entire town to come and get medical care. I was the triage translator, translating Spanish
to English for the nurse. It was
amazing, but my language skills fell short with this group. The people from Ofelia’s town didn’t speak
Spanish. Ut oh. So, we had people from her town speaking in
K’iche to Ofelia who told me in Spanish and I, in turn, told the nurse in
English. This three-way translating was
quite the adventure, even more adventurous when we had a mute person whose only
translator/person who understood her only spoke K’iche. It was incredible to see this 12 year-old
stand in front of her elders since childhood and explain in two languages
problems with their backs, stomachs, and more taboo body parts. The confidence that radiated from this
child’s face was so inspiring. She had
been filled. She’s not 100% there and life is still hard for her, but she had
taken the stand to go on her own and make the best she could with her life, and
I am thrilled for what her future holds.
Saying goodbye to her was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
So, I look at this beatitude, blessed are those who
hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled, and I realize how
powerful of a statement this really is. This
year, I saw first hand the power of hunger and thirst. They are our most
instinctual desires and will take over the rest of our lives if not met. And I saw the effects of being filled. Of having your desires filled and surpassing
your expectations. And how beautiful
that is. And I want that. As I’m continuing defining myself here in
Walla Walla, I want to be hungering and thirsting for righteousness – desiring
with every ounce of my body to be closer to the conformities and norms God
wants for me. To have that desire is my
prayer for each and every one of us.
Then, I go to Matthew 5:5 – “blessed are the meek for they
will inherit the earth”. I’ve never
really had a positive picture of the meek.
When I think of meek, my highly visual self pictures an earthworm –
gently going about doing its stuff, fertilizing the ground, secretly making our
world turn, but doing it all behind the scenes.
But earthworms are also weak; I was
responsible for many a worm’s death as a child.
Reading for this sermon, I have come to redefine meek,
but the earthworm still fits. To be meek
is a quality of the Messiah – gentle and unassuming. To be meek is to be like Moses and humbly
walk through life without imposing your greatness and privilege. To be meek is to be poor and afflicted and
react with patient submission and humility.
Meekness is an inward attitude that portrays itself outwardly through gentleness. It is not weakness.
Although I haven’t mastered meekness, and coming from
a human, US background, probably never will, I did get a glimpse of it this
year. For Katharine Curles, to be meek
is to go to a foreign country and not speak a word of their language. To be
meek, is to lose all the traits and skills you value and pride yourself on and
become “useless”, at least by your definitions.
To be meek is to have an unprecedentedly high incident of host familial
crises that causes you to move from house to house and go through it without
being too bitter – although at times, I was.
To be meek was to have my body completely rebel for the entire 11½ months
I was in the country, including having appendicitis and a resulting appendectomy. To be meek was to fight through it all,
realizing my weakness and dependency, and to allow myself to, for once, define
myself as a member of a community and accept the love of that community.
My New Bible Dictionary friend says, “The meek do not
resent adversity because they accept everything as being the effect of God’s
wise and loving purpose for them, so that they accept injuries from men also
knowing that these are permitted by God for their ultimate good.”
Although I did not do it well all the time, I did
begin to embrace this definition of meekness.
I began to see being meek as being a lamb – thus the bulletin cover for
today. This sculpture was at both
entrances to my favorite town in Guatemala – San Juan La Laguna. I went there monthly the first 5 months of
2011. It was my happy place – where I could take the time to hike, be with
Guatemalan friends who live there, sit in a hammock, kayak the beautiful lake,
cliff jump, and just find God so I could sit in his lap and cry, yell and
scream at him, or anything in between.
When I was in Guatemala, many of my lessons in
meekness came from my family life. Our
program usually has us live with a total of 3 families – two for language
school and one for the other 10 months.
I lived with 7. I haven’t every
thought of myself as a “familially gifted” person – I love working with them,
but not so good at living with them. I’m
too independent. I set out to Guatemala
on a secret quest to change that. When
that didn’t happen and I lived with 7 families, it was really, really
hard. Although all of my family moves
were due to issues, outside my control, I spent many nights lying in bed
feeling as though I had been slapped across the face.
One day, after one of my most miserable moves, I wrote
in my journal, “On a scale of 1-10, today
was a negative 100. I think life is a
lot like learning how to ride a bike.
Sometimes you are riding and all is great. Other times you live in a country without
helmets and therefore are destined to be hurt.
And still others, you only have one training wheel, one peddle, and one
brake. The latter is Yajaira’s bike and
also was me today. … I moved out, the
girls sobbed, I cried, and then I went to the doctor to find out that I have a
parasite, amoebas, and staph infection… on top of my normal fleas.”
That was becoming meek – and weak. But, through that experience, I slowly began
learning how to meet the poor and afflicted side of meekness with patient
submission and humility. Once we can do
that, then we’re able to begin learning how to put God first enough so we can
inherit the earth.
And, inherit the earth, experience heaven and know
that I wasn’t forgotten, I did. Well,
not completely, but I got a glimpse of what it could look like. My seventh and final house was amazing. I lived with a woman and her two children and
two parents. The abuelo, grandpa, was 84
and taught me so much about life. The
abuela, grandma, was 77, and she was on a quest to try to teach me to cook….
That always ended in shock at how poor my skills really are. My housing situation at their house was by
far the shabbiest. My bedroom was also
the storage closest/entry way to the house.
Therefore, I had daily buckets of pigslop coming through, the old drunk
farmhand knocking on my door with his machete at 6am, goats coming to be milked
(a whole new definition to fresh milk!), and I had a roommate for quite a while
of a duck who actually lived outside but seemed to have a fascination with
being in my room whenever I wasn’t around.
Despite the awkwardness and the necessity of an umbrella to go to the
bathroom during the rain, this experience was amazing.
One day, shortly after I
moved in, my host siblings, Marie and Porfi, ages 24 and
22, took me up the highest mountain in our pueblo for a mass, a service
dedicated to praying for rain for the upcoming crops. We began the adventure at 6am, leaving our
house to go climb up the mountain. After
a few rendezvous points, we summited around 10 to meet around 1000 people at
the top of this mountain, almost all in their traditional clothes, skirts, and
many without shoes. They were scattered
through the trees, ready to worship and expectant of God’s blessings.
This service was
my turnaround point. I finally went from
having my pity party of isolation to a land and community of hope. I went from the poor side of meek to the
patient submission and humility that allowed me to see the truth in the
beatiduinal promise, “blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth”. I wrote, I
finally see why I’m here and why I’ve been everywhere I’ve been. This house and family show me what my future
could be. Experiencing a life of
simplicity, health, and community both within a greater family structure and
among peers. It gives me hope for the
church – and my life no matter where I go next.
Blessed are the meek, for
they shall inherit the earth. That is a
true promise of God’s.
But even though I have had a
taste of experiencing it, it’s hard to remember. This week has been a rough
week for me personally. My family found
out that my mom has a rare type of breast cancer. They’re running tests Monday and then my
parents leave for their dream trip to Peru on Tuesday. When they get back in early October, they’ll
meet with the radiologist, oncologist, and surgeon to figure out what the next
stage of attack is. We’re going to have
some scary times coming up. I spent a
lot of this week freaking out – and therefore procrastinating on what this sermon
will look like.
But then I realized that
this is just another test – can I stay fighting to live in these
beatitudes? Can I see this new adversity
without contempt and instead gently tackle it with the inward attitude of
meekness knowing that God has a purpose in it somewhere? This situation, like so many hard situations
in our lives, is an opportunity for us to choose how we will react. This time, unlike Guatemala, I have an option
of if I will react with meekness or the independent strength that we normally
value in our society. It’s my own
culture where I can speak the language, pretend that I’m strong, and revert
back to my ways when I was “above being meek” – it is my decision… am I going
to face this by playing strong or am I going to play it meek? I hope that I play it meek. I’d appreciate your prayers as we sort it all
out.
“Blessed are the meek for
they will inherit the earth. Blessed are
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled.” In other words, blessed are those who portray
gentleness and faithfulness in times of trial and blessed are those who desire with
the deepest depths of their being for closeness and authenticity with God and
justice with others. They will come to
know God and be filled more than we can ever imagine.
Thank you for your prayers
and support this past year and throughout the years. I am so grateful for you all!
College Place Presbyterian was kind enough to allow me to go on a mission trip with them and the blending of two of my most formative adult life experiences (my time at CPPC and my time in Guatemala) was incredibly healthy and revitalizing. 
After our time in Guatemala City, we headed for Antigua for a day. It was great to give the kids a chance to relax, see the country in a different light, and just be a tourist for the day. I ended up hanging out with the boys and a few of the girls, targeted on bootleg DVDs and tops from the locals market. We had a blast, but I gave my camera to some of the girls who took pictures that have brought a whole different perspective to a town that I have begun to call one of my homes.
Finally, on day 6, we headed to Lago Atitlan. The lake was one of my favorite places while living in Xela. It was a happy, gorgeous place with a culture of people who stay true to their culture, are hospitable, loving, and forgiving. I love my friends there and loved all the time that I could spend. However, I had only been on the Santiago/Pana/San Pedro half of the lake, where the public boats went to. San Lucas Toliman, on the east half, was my uncharted lake territory and exactly where our group was going. And it was just as gorgeous with people and a culture just as phenomenal as the side that I already knew and loved.
The other neat thing that Terry does to protect her projects and create ownership is to require the recipients to be a part of the building, feeding the volunteers and assisting on site, to own the land, and to install their own windows and doors. This ownership really works to make the house their own.
Eagles Nest:This is actually the orphanage where the Agrellus' son, Zach came from. After adoption closed, they lost the majority of their income but was still determined to stay open. The family who runs it is from the States and has begun using their grounds as almost a retreat center, separate from serving at the Orphanage. We visited the kids, who are extraordinarily cared for, enjoyed the amazing views, and debriefed our time in the country thus far. We also set off 5 meters of fireworks for Jojo's birthday. That was awesome! If you're ever in the area, I highly recommend staying there. It supports their ministry, gets you out of Pana, and is just amazing. You can play soccer too!
