The Elect

Photo credit: Colin Puchala

What I hadn’t understood before is that bit about the poor - in that room full of the scent of her perfume and the sound of her gratitude weeping on your wet feet - that you said they would always be with us.
It was your hand stretching out and blessing our foolish heads with promise.

We, who see the poor as a burden, who, if we feel anything about their lives at all, flit between guilt, or anger, or shame, but only enough that we might assure ourselves of our own goodness.
“Oh, the injustice!” [shake head, sip coffee, flip to horoscope.]
Then, those cheaply bought rivers of unearned emotion flood the banks of our hearts sufficiently, and we doggy paddle in the warm glory of them. (“What’s to be done/How can God be good/It makes me so sick.”)

But blessed are the poor.
Blessed are the weak.
And the foolish things shall shame the wise.

Because the presence of the poor here yet is paid proof of your mercy upon us, (though Heaven help them bear your generosity) and they are radiant in their inheritance.
You have spent a storehouse of kindness buying us back from our drowning poverty,
And still, you wait on our turning, on the slow, white blossoming of love unravelled.

Just turn your head to the side for me, will you?

Bolivia made my head hurt. It also made me laugh my ass off.
And, also, I am obligated by my vanity to tell you that neither are my shoes usually so ugly, nor my ankles so visible below my pants.
How embarrassing.

The Undo-able Thing

Photo credit: Colin Puchala

In Llallagua, I got out of bed in the mornings, washed, dressed, ate breakfast and stepped outside to the clang and holler of the busy market across the street from our hotel. To the right of me, as I inhaled the battling scents of morning in the city, of urine and freshly baked bread, rotting garbage and frying doughnuts, was a woman who slept curled on the sidewalk and the smells coming off her were almost visible in their thick and wafting potency. She slept there like the dead every night through the cold and noise, and our first evening in the city we looked to see that she was actually breathing, still as she was. One morning, I watched her wake and rise to sit, her eyes impassive, blinking, and then she gathered her things as though she had only napped on the couch and was now about to set off to run errands, or cook lunch, or write a letter that she had been postponing. But for the grace of God she went elsewhere.

And I have been thinking about dignity, about this woman sleeping on the streets like a dog, with the dogs, and of the beauty that lay sleeping and curled inside her. Inside one of the poorest countries in one of the poorest cities, one of the poorest women slept outside our door on the ground, full of worth and goodness, and nothing she had done, and nothing the world had done could diminish the truth that rose from her: that dignity had been fused to her soul. She could not be unmade from being made in the image of God.

Try as we might in our pride and judgement, there is no undoing of worth, no undoing of the mercy of God’s goodness grafted to the roots of a heart. Because when all else is gone, left forgotten and rotting in the gutter, dignity remains immovable, inseparable, ever fixed and alive, pulsing in the dirt and lashed like an anchor to the truth that set it down.

The Land

Driving through Llallagua is what I imagine driving over lunar landscapes would be. That any life, let alone human life, exists here at all is a testament to the will of the survivors: the naked hills, thin air, incessant wind, razor blade grasses and the blowing dust, dust, dust, colour it all inhospitable. Uninhabitable. Though it is not.

One morning we drove to the worksite, silent, travel-weary and dull, and the radio sang quietly, “The earth is full of your glory.” We were passing the almost dried riverbed with its blowing collections of garbage stuck in the mud and its women and children who pick through the refuse in their endless pursuit for survival, and the irony of God’s glory crying out from these rocks only felt like an unkindness.

That God can be met in the extravagance of his creation when it is dripping wet with green and life, when the stars hurt your heart and the birds surge triumphant is believable, but what, I wondered, of God’s glory in the dead lands? What do these treeless hills cry out about?

Later, I saw that the beauty of this place was in the sky, in the way the clouds moved and shadowed the spaces, cupping and holding for a moment that was already dissolving, the life and lives of those travelling below, and I thought that maybe this land was witness to the uncontainable: that God is wild in mystery, vast, unyielding, folded in secret and sharp like a sword on the wind.




Photo Credit: Brian Wirzba

Washing

One Sunday afternoon we helped wash babies in Cochabamba: round, stoic, black-haired beauties from North of Potosi. They had travelled the 350km from there to here slung on the backs of their mothers who had walked, hitched rides, bumped in the backs of trucks over hours of dusty winding roads. The mothers had come for a few months to beg a living, sleep on the streets, and then make the trek back home again. But the streets are short on baths, and so, on Sunday afternoons these women bring their children to a tall tent that is pitched in the city square for a few hours and run by a local man and some volunteers. They are given milk and bread outside, and when they are done they bring their babies to be cleaned.

I washed the littlest ones - took off their layers and layers of homemade clothes and poured warm water over their black hair and chubby arms and legs. Mostly, the babies only blinked up at me. They were silent even with the soap and shampoo and the washcloth that scrubbed at the layers of dirt and grime under their noses, behind their ears, and in their deep and secret bellybuttons. Some of the mothers handed their babies off to me and then waited outside, and some of them helped quietly in the washing, calm and matter-of-fact as we striped, washed, rinsed and dressed their babies in clean donated clothing. There was hardly more than a word that passed between us.

Later, some of the women undid their long black braids and washed their hair in the square, necks bent, water streaming. They worked out the knots with small plastic combs while their children watched, teased and tugged at the mystery of those hanging black curtains, of their tired mothers made beautiful on a Sunday afternoon. The sun was setting as they lifted their heads and re-braided their hair: tight, smooth, cleanly parted and shining, glory around them, resting on their shoulders.


Photo credit: Colin Puchala