19 February 2009

Dear Friends,

There’s a story from my childhood that comes up every once in awhile during family gatherings. I was about 6 when it happened. A friend of my mother’s was talking about a recent purchase she had made that really pleased her. “I love it,” she said. With all the self-assuredness that a 6-year-old can evoke, I attempted to correct her by proclaiming, “You can’t love things, you can only love people!”

If we had only been in Indonesia at the time, I would have avoided embarrassing my mother’s friend as well as my mother. The Indonesian language reserves the word “love” for people, and it is replete with ways of saying it: cinta, kasih, and sayang are applied exclusively to relationships between people and to the connection between human beings and God. There’s another word, suka, that is used when one speaks of appreciation for non-living things.

It’s not that surprising that they have so many words for love, because the Indonesians love love. To adhere to the standards I set as a 6-year-old, I guess I should say they “suka cinta.” When they strike up a conversation with you, they have no interest in talking about the weather, or sports, or where you work, or where you live. They want to know how much love you have in your life.

So first they ask if you are married, for they firmly believe that everyone has a soulmate, a Jodoh. To meet your life partner, whether by matchmaking or on your own, is to be “soulmated,” dijodohkan. In fact, in responding to the question of whether you are married or not, you simply cannot use the word “no.” It makes no sense from their point of view, because everyone will eventually meet their Jodoh and be married. So the only suitable answer to the question besides “yes” is a hopeful “not yet.”

There is always ongoing concern for those who are still in the “not yet” category. Recently I was asking the students in my conversational English class to answer that classic query, “What I did on my vacation,” this time in reference to their Christmas holiday.

When I opened up the discussion for them to ask questions of each other, they always posed the same question for the singles in the group: not what presents they got for Christmas (Indonesians don’t exchange Christmas gifts) but whether they spent time with their beloved over the holidays. If the person grinned shyly and whispered, “Yes,” it was met with applause and shouts of joy. The next question was inevitably, “And then? So?” as everyone was eager to know if future plans had been made. If the respondent grew even shyer, blushed more deeply and whispered even more softly, “Yes,” then the applause and shouts of joy escalated accordingly.

The next topic of conversation for Indonesians is always in regard to how many children one has, for every child born into a family is a blessing that multiplies the amount of love that abounds. They treasure children and treat them with great respect and love from the moment they are born, girls and boys alike. They don’t shower them with material goods—Indonesian children don’t play on their own with toys like Western children do.

Instead, from the beginning the child is an integral part of the family group and its various activities, always held on someone’s hip (neither cribs nor strollers are a recognizable concept in this culture) or passed from one loving embrace to another. In fact, in Balinese culture the children are not allowed to touch the ground for the first six months of their lives. It is believed that they have just arrived from heaven and are to be cherished and protected. There is a ceremony at the age of six months for their first encounter with the earth, as described by a visitor to Bali:

Then the whole family gathered by the baby, everyone seeming to hold her at the same time and—oops! there goes!—they lightly dipped the baby’s feet in this pottery bowl full of holy water, right above the magic drawing which encompassed the whole universe, and then they touched her soles to the earth for the first time. When they lifted her back up into the air, tiny damp footprints remained on the ground below her, orienting this child at last onto the great Balinese grid, establishing who she was by establishing where she was. Everyone clapped their hands, delighted. The little girl was one of us now. A human being—with all the risks and thrills which that perplexing incarnation entails.
- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

Such is the love and care with which Indonesians surround their children. But their elders also rank highly in esteem, and the third question commonly asked by Indonesians concerns one’s parents and their health and well-being. So ordinary conversation between Indonesians covers the three generations, establishing who they are by their context within a network of intergenerational love.

Manda Saroinsong, seminary student, poses in front of a board announcing the seminary's Valentine events, Jakarta, Feb 19, 2009.

Considering how important love is to Indonesians, it is not surprising to find that they have embraced Valentine’s Day as an informal national celebration. On the Jakarta Theological Seminary campus, our students arranged a number of events around February 14, including a chocolate cooking competition, a couple’s treasure hunt on the campus grounds, and several worship services focused on love, including a Taizé service in the evening romantically illuminated by candlelight. One of my students from last semester, Sergio, requested that I surprise his new girlfriend, Siro, who is in my theology class this semester, by giving her a Valentine’s card from him during class. I managed to surprise her and the whole class as Sergio himself appeared, to whoops of delight from Siro’s classmates.

Siro Siboro and Sergio Souisa enjoy each other's company during a break between classes, seminary campus, Jakarta, Feb 19, 2009..

A few days before Valentine’s Day, a female student, Yanti, asked if she could interview me for the weekly student newspaper. The topic of the newspaper that week was of course, love. She asked me first what I thought of love and how I would define it. Then she switched to a more personal area, asking me about my past love life and what experience I had had of love. I panicked because the last thing I wanted to do was to talk about such things in front of my students. But then I realized I was being too self-conscious and imposing too narrow a definition on love.

I took a deep breath and let my thoughts go, to see where they might alight in response to the question, at what point in my life did I have a profound experience of love?

Almost immediately I knew. I remembered it. I nearly laughed with relief when I realized that I have not only had that profound experience once but many, many times over and can look forward to having many more, and I have no reason to be embarrassed about it.

For my most intense feeling of love comes when I as an ordained pastor have the incredible privilege of standing in the midst of a congregation and distributing the elements of bread and wine. In that amazingly romantic moment, I am able to experience who I am by establishing where I am, touching the ground at precisely the place where the greatest love affair of all time occurs: where God meets human beings, in the gift of Jesus’ body and blood, and in the gathering of all God’s people at one table for no other reason than for love. I am caught up in that love, overwhelmed by the realization of my identity as a member of the beloved family of God.

The Indonesians have gotten it right—we are who we love and whom we are loved by. And we as precious children are loved by God, carried on God’s hip from the moment of our birth, and included in all God’s activities. What could be more romantic than that?

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Becca

The 2009 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 113