September 2003

Every time I pass abuelita, little grandmother, she is spinning. Her fingers twist, thinning the strands of alpaca or llama wool, holding the wooden rueca or spindle above the floor. Her long, whitened braids hang tied behind her back as she works. Sometimes she chats to me in Aymara, even though she knows I can only catch the occasional word. Someone will translate into Spanish. We joke that the family finds her spinning in her sleep, her hands twisting imaginary thread into tighter and tighter ropes. At 72, the money she makes from her wool helps the family survive.

Not long ago I had a vivid dream where I desperately tried to communicate to some friends how different it is to read the Bible in Bolivia than in the United States. I am still learning how different it is. How different our eyes are.

My experience of church in the United States has always been comfortable: Heated or air conditioned worship halls filled with cushioned pews, soft lighting, delicate religious art, and between-service coffee. People in the congregation have their worries: Putting children through college. Caring for aging parents. Slow U.S. economy. Illness. Grief. But people know they’ll find their next meal. We ride to church in our own cars. We proclaim our faith wearing crosses of silver and gold. The gritty life of the Hebrew and New Testaments is a dim reality. But in Bolivia life isn’t so different from how it was in Biblical times.

Here, abuelita might go to church two or three times a week. Many of the Aymara women I know attend Wednesday night and Sunday morning services. And, their experience is far different than the one I had growing up in a comfortable, upper-middle-class Presbyterian church.

If you are an Aymara woman attending Light and Truth church in La Paz, Bolivia, you likely walk a dusty, unpaved road to the Sunday service. During the rainy season, the roads turn muddy and can suck your shoes off. You have no money for a bus, so you walk. You have no steady job and often your next meal is a hope, not a certainty. You work hard to survive and are constantly tense, uncertain of how you will feed your children. You live with a lot of discomfort: rotten teeth, back and leg problems.

Occasionally, you find work as a laundress or part-time empleada, a maid. If you are lucky, you have a factory job, maybe making shampoo. You may wonder if you are being tested with this constant uncertainty, and, if so, why it is so unceasing. Your neighbors may shun you for being an evangélico, a Protestant.

You have Bible study in the open yard of the pastor’s house where chickens and pigs wander through. During the rainy season you watch the pastor’s house begin to separate from the mountainside, and you worry that it will slide off.

You understand the lives of the people in the Bible. Three-month old Rebecca, whose thin mother nursed her quietly in the front row every Sunday, never grew and finally died of malnutrition. Babies die in your neighborhood all the time. A widow faces a hopeless old age, with no social safety net to help her survive.

You see injustice around you daily, but it is the norm. It’s not shocking, and only once in a while do you get angry—because what good does it do? You are poor. You often feel powerless. But, every once in a while some pastor shakes you a bit—says the church must respond to these needs, must be prophetic in this world because injustice isn’t what God wants.

Sometimes you are the one speaking. You read Jesus’ story and realize he was political— he was calling things unjust and telling stories that were threatening to those in power. Sometimes they were funny. Sometimes they were scary in their implications. It makes sense to you because your life isn’t so different from the lives of those who followed Jesus. Death and pain and oppression surround you. Community is important to you. Survival is difficult.

It makes sense, and Scripture gives you hope because it teaches you that one day all this injustice will be turned on its head. One day the oppression and suffering will end. On Earth. That's what we say. On earth as it is in heaven. And so you read the passages calling for patience in suffering, and you hold on to those because your suffering is pretty constant. But you also hold on to the passages that say God does not want this for God’s people and that God calls on average people like you to lead God’s people towards justice.

Theologian Robert McAffee Brown once said of North Americans, "Where we fit in the Exodus story is among the functionaries in Pharaoh's court rather than among the workers in the slave labor camps."

The Aymara women and men in my church are those building the pyramid. When I ask them to describe the most important message for them in the Bible, they speak of hope—hope and love, responsibility for your neighbor and God’s justice. And when they read the Bible, passages like the Beatitudes and James 5, prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah, and Jesus’ life. Those passages are not gentle metaphors for spirituality. McAffee Brown challenges us to hear the "unexpected" good news of Biblical passages read through the eyes of people living in the global south (Third World). I’ve found that here in Bolivia, I am beginning to catch glimpses of that unexpected good news.

Susan Ellison

The 2003 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, page 263

Suggestions for further reading

Brown, Robert McAfee. Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third-World Eyes. The Westminster Press, 1984.

Sider, Ronald J. Rich. Christians In An Age Of Hunger. Word Publishing; ISBN: 0849914248; 20th anniv. edition (July 23, 1997).

Sider, Ronald J. Editor. For They Shall be Fed: Scripture Readings and Prayers for a Just World. Word Publishing 1997.

Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack. Jesus Against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus. Trinity Press International, 2001.