This month I’d like to share with you a reflection by the
Rev. Grace Boyer, a PC(USA) pastor serving for one year with the
Fraternity of Costa Rican Evangelical Churches (FIEC). I had asked
all Reconciliation and Mission participants to think about how
their ideas of reconciliation are changed by and through their
experience. Here are Grace’s thoughts:
What is "Reconciliation and Mission?" the woman asked,
so I launched into an explanation in my broken Spanish of the
R&M program—the eight participants, the reversed way
of viewing missions, etc.
"No," she said, "I understand the ‘mission’
part. What I don’t understand is why ‘reconciliation?’
We aren’t at war." I explained that we were "reconciling"
different cultures, ideologies, and theologies between countries
and participants.
"But aren’t you all Presbyterians?" No. That
answered the question for her. She could understand the need
for reconciliation between denominations. If my faulty Spanish
had let me, I could have explained that we were also learning
about what other countries and churches were defining as reconciliation
work in their own context: working for human rights, doing nutrition
programs, facing social, economic and political realities. But
it made me think through again: What is reconciliation, really?
One of my first concrete experiences wrestling with the concept
of reconciliation was in the context of "war" in Israel/Palestine,
and I viewed reconciliation in terms of social systems, justice,
and injustices. I knew that the R&M program would be more
on an interpersonal level—reconciling different cultures
and religious traditions in the midst of relationships. What
I did not expect was how much reconciliation would be needed
on the internal level. I’d been warned that the R&M
experience was a deeply personal one. But how much of it would
be coming to terms with our own boundaries and barriers that
separate us as individuals from God and each other—that
surprised me.
I’m now more aware of all the levels of reconciliation:
systemic, interpersonal, personal. Part of reconciliation is
a personal learning of who you are and how you define yourself
in a new context. As you wrestle with different theologies,
how do you work at reconciliation and yet stay true to your
own religious convictions and be at peace. Reconciliation involves
not just knowing and learning and appreciating others’
views, but recognizing what is within you and reconciling yourself
to it and God. Realizing that at the heart of reconciliation
is reconciliation in the heart: Peace within before peace without.
There is a Christian song that is popular on the Christian
radio station here and in one of the churches I attended. The
chorus has the words "paz, en medio de la tormenta"
(peace in the midst of the storm). I could never catch all the
words—but those words were clear, and the emotion with
which the congregation sang it was clear. The song brings up
images for me of Christ and the disciples during a storm on
the Galilee, an important passage for me this year. Christ projected
his inner peace onto the outer storm on the waters of Galilee
and into the inner storms in the disciples’ hearts.
Part of reconciliation is being at peace within a storm, the
storm of life. I cannot speak for the Central American participants,
but at the mid-year retreat in Guatemala, it became clear that
each of the North American participants had been "wounded"
by the year in some way—blessed as well, but wounded. For
me it is the ongoing temporary loss of hearing in my left ear.
(The doctor said it’s due to stress.) My need for peace
in the middle of the storm came into clear focus for me as I
found myself one night at the beginning of my physical problems,
standing at a payphone and having to say in all vulnerability,
"I’m in pain and I need your help." Yet the irony
is that this time of "woundedness" has been when I
have found my deepest relationships with people here—you
might call it reconciliation. In Ephesians, Paul described reconciliation
through Christ with hard "wounded" painful terms:
"though the blood of Christ," "in his flesh,"
"in one body through the cross," "putting to
death that hostility through it." Paul did not shy away
from speaking the truth that reconciliation is a hard-won process.
How else has my view changed? I once said reconciliation can’t
come without justice. I was wrong. Peace/wholeness can’t
come to social systems of domination without justice. But reconciliation…reconciliation
can and often has to come without justice. It is the peace of
God to love anyway and in spite of, to forgive what should not
be forgiven, as was done on the cross and is done during the
many times when we step on each others’ toes culturally.
But I haven’t forgotten about the systemic level. Just
as individuals need to be centers of peace projecting their
peace into their relationships, the churches in the world where
globalization/capitalism is destroying the poorest of the poor
need to be centers of peace in the storm and models of an alternative
economic system in its midst. Reconciliation and transformation:
peace to those far off and near.
One of the places where I have worked for most of the year
is the encuadernación (the bookbinding project of the
women of Getsemane church in Hatillo). I have been spiritually
fed by the symbolism of how repairing broken books parallels
how God repairs the broken places of our lives. To put a book
back together—to reconcile it, so to speak—means using
a wicked-looking saw to make indentations in the spine and a
pointed needle to puncture holes in order to sew the parts back
together. Admittedly a painful symbol, like the words of Paul
in Ephesians. And as we are in the midst of Lent, I am reminded
of the nail holes in the hands and feet of Christ punctured
as God was sewing humanity and all creation back together. A
broken community sewed into one by Christ. Or, to use the image
of Communion, one loaf of bread broken and shared to make us
one again.
Last Sunday in the church where I am now attending, at the
end of the congregational meeting, the members shared Communion.
They stood in a circle and after everyone had in their hands
the bread and juice, they began to share their joys and concerns
with each other as the body of Christ. Some comments brought
laughter, others rejoicing, others tears. This is reconciliation—all
of it—the joy and the wounds. "Peace to you who were
far off and…near."
Peace…reconciliation…and a circle of centeredness
in the midst of the storm.
