March 6, 2006

A Lenten Mediation: Small Spaces—Relational Spaces

I’ve been thinking about the small universe where I live and work here in Lithuania. LCC—the college where I teach—is now on spring break, a week with no classes. Spring break is a time when the ex-patriate staff at the college leaves for vacations in places like Spain and Portugal, Cyprus and Egypt. But I’m not going anywhere. I have been bemoaning my circumscribed life here in Klaipeda. It is snowing again today. I’d like to be in a warmer place for a week. I haven’t been out of the city since we arrived back in Klaipeda on New Year’s Day. Our apartment is very small, just three rooms, 54 square meters. This winter I was suddenly moved to a much smaller office, now just enough room for me and one visitor. My recent activity consists only of walking from the apartment to the office and to classes. Yet the break from daily teaching gives me the chance to think about the place I am in, the opportunity to think about Lithuania, Klaipeda, and LCC. This circumscribed life has been called the “zen of going nowhere.”

This is a good metaphor for mission. Stillness, humility, and the use of all our senses are soul-based disciplines required to find the soul of place. Stillness is not inactivity but intentional activity necessary for seeing the relationships, the connections, and the larger whole. We often miss what is at our feet because we are too concerned with movement, with getting somewhere.

Who am I in this particular setting? How do I relate to the setting? Tangible relationships in the age of Skype, MySpace.com, and instant messaging are often overlooked. I think about my relational space. Every day students come into the small space of my office with questions about assignments, papers, and readings from class. I often think of these conversations as routine questions that can be answered in a hurry. But what are these students really asking? Who do they think I am? One student is writing her senior thesis about the motivation of North American Christians who come to LCC. She wants to know, “Why have expatriates come to Lithuania, to LCC?”

I am beginning to wonder what lies behind this persistent question, imagining what this student is really asking about her faith—and my faith. Is she actually asking, “Why have you come here? And who are you?” Another student is full of disappointment because her graduate school choice has rejected her. The other day a student asked, “What do you think of me as a student?” Aren’t they really asking that I affirm their value with more than a passing nod and that I actually see them for who they are and the context in which they live? Who are these students related to?

In teaching economics, I often think I am not really having conversations with the students themselves, but with their parents at the family dinner table. A careful, patient observer—a web watcher—would say that the students are trying to understand their family experience, and their society’s experience with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onrushing of the market economy.

If I were really practicing the disciplines of spider web watching, I would be more patient, observe more carefully, use all my senses to think about how I relate to this particular setting and who I am in this particular place. Lederach says, “You cannot see or listen to what is closest to you when you are moving…. You see what is far off in the distance but you cannot see what is at your feet.”

Just what is the wellspring of my work, the source of my vocation as a mission worker? Who am I looking for? This idea of micro-spaces, of web-watching, of going nowhere for spring break, started me thinking about Jesus as a web-watcher. Two encounters come to mind. The woman with the alabaster jar of perfume who anoints Jesus’s feet is not seen as having any value or for the deeds she is performing. Jesus asks Simon, his dinner party host, “Simon, do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:44). Simon was too busy making his own points to see what was going on right at Jesus’s feet. The resurrection encounter of Mary Magdalene in the garden is another example of missing what is right in front of us. Mary is searching for some distant place where the body of Jesus has been taken; she can only ask questions of Jesus whom she mistakes for the gardener. “She turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus” (John 20:14).

In seeking answers to the questions of “Who am I?” and “Where am I?” I am trying to be attuned to what is visible and not so visible. This Lenten season I truly wish to see the place where my feet are set. T.S. Eliot, in his poem “Ash Wednesday,” says, “Teach us to sit still, Even among these rocks, Our peace His will.”

Peace.

Eric and Becky Hinderliter

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 180