2018:6 - Heat

 When you live in the desert, you learn to seek the shadows. Years ago on a bus trip to the Eastern desert to visit the monasteries of St. Anthony and St. Paul, I looked out my bus window and was surprised to see a single tree in a vast expanse of desert, and under the tree, a man. I blinked, expecting the vision to have been a mirage, but when my eyes refocused there he was, a single man sitting in the shadow of a single tree.

Finding the shadows is a survival strategy when you live under the glare of the desert sun. The surest way to stay cool is to keep from getting hot. And if you must be out during the day, the surest way to keep from getting hot is to stay out of the sun as much as possible. I used to be surprised to find the streets and markets of Cairo teaming with people of all ages at 10 or 11 or even 12 at night. The reason is simple though, temperatures can cool considerably once the sun sets for the day and so Egyptians who can, spend their daytime hours enclosed in their homes expending as little energy as possible and waiting for the darkness to come when they can finally emerge into the cooler evening air.

When I am out and about in the daytime I've learned to traverse the streets with the most trees, which provide the most shade and the greatest chance for protection from the hot desert sun. But at midday when the sun is directly overhead, shade is hard to come by, even on tree-lined streets. At these times, I zig-zag my way down neighborhood streets, making my way from the shadow of one tree to the shadow of the next. I can imagine the women and mostly men who sit along the neighborhood streets watching the world pass by as they drink their tea and talk to their neighbors, comment on the crazy Western woman who doesn't know enough to stay inside during the heat of the day.

2018:5 - Pace

Egypt can tax the patience of even the most laid-back and patient Westerners. Laid-back and patient are rarely words that are used to describe me. Here schedules are often suggestions, appointments signal desires, and Insha’Allah (God willing) is the tentative confirmation of every plan that's made. At seminary, classes end at 10 minutes to the hour, but the class bell might ring anytime from 15 minutes before the hour, to three minutes before the hour, to never. For an agenda-driven person like myself, this can be maddening. But it can also be eye-opening when I let it be.

The fluidity of time, the tentative nature of all plans, allows for a responsiveness to the present moment. When a friend appears at your door, you stop and invite them in to visit, rather than excuse yourself because someone else is expecting you. When a stranger asks for assistance, you stop and help rather than pass by because of the appointment awaiting you. Biblical Greek describes time using the words, chronos and kairos. Chronos is the time we measure by dividing into seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Kairos is God's time - the time of ripeness when what needs to happen in the moment, happens. By these definitions, Egyptians, in general, live more in kairos. I have been taught my whole life to live by chronos.

There are days, I confess, when the frustration caused by the collision of these two concepts of time bubbles over the surface and I snap. But there is gift in living more kairos than chronos. Guided by kairos, I am more attentive to my surroundings and circumstances. I dare to cancel appointments because I realize I'm not at feeling up to it or I acknowledge my spirit is not into the task at hand. I stop to sit with a friend, rather than pressing on to the next thing in my calendar or the next task on my list. When I'm focused on chronos -- keeping schedules, being "on time" -- I rarely pay attention to what's happening around me, or even within me. I simply press on with the list, the task, the to-dos in the hope that in the end it will be enough.

I learn the most about myself, however, when my clock is set to chronos and people around me are living kairos. This often happens to me on my teaching days at seminary. The other day I was waiting for students to return from their 10-minute break between classes. When the appointed time for their return came and went and my classroom remained empty, I found myself setting the stop watch on my clock to count precisely the seconds until they returned. Somehow I thought knowing exactly how late they were would make me feel better (not my best moment, to be sure).

When the final student strolled in several minutes late, I suppressed my urge to give a lesson in American time and Egyptian time. God knows they've heard that lesson before from me. Instead I asked, what had caused his delay. "My friends needed to talk with me." My friends needed me ... now ... in this moment. Maybe there isn't a better reason to live.  

2018:4 - The Head Table

The visit of the Italian tourists on Sunday evening (see 2018:3 post) became the source of conversation in class on Monday morning. As a way to practice English conversation I asked my students to talk about what they had seen, what they had heard, and what they had noticed.

It's always interesting to listen to their responses and hear the things that stand out for them. For my students, mostly in their 20s, from a country where 41% of the population is under the age of 20 and 61% of the population is under the age of 30, the age of the tourists was noteworthy. Most in the Italian group appeared to be in their late fifties, sixties, or older.

Some of the students commented on the words of the Italian bishop from Viterbo who preached and presided at the Mass. In his homily he had spoken a strong ecumenical word, "we are not Orthodox or Catholic, Coptic, or Latin, tonight we are one in Christ."  

As the conversation was coming to a close, one of my student asked, "And what about you, Pastor Amy, what did you notice?"

What I noticed as I sat in the dining room following the service on Sunday evening was that the head table was filled with very important people, as would be expected. There were priests - Italian and Egyptian, bishops - Orthodox and Catholic, important people in the church - the Patriarch of the Coptic Catholic Church and the Vatican Ambassador to Egypt; and they were all men.

"How sad," I thought to myself as I observed these sons of Christ's church. They are all able to communicate with each other through the Italian language that they share, but because they are all men, they also communicate through the shared language of male privilege in a church that still honors men above women. The dominant voices they hear, the stories that shape their experiences and realities are primarily the voices of other men like them, except when they choose to invite a woman (and often it is only a single woman) to their table.

I was not disappointed that I was not at that table. I was disappointed that these leaders in Christ's church still live in a world and lead a church where theirs are the dominant voices and experiences that shape the decisions that are made and the ways the story of Jesus is told.

It's easy to read this and think that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), where I am called, is beyond this. I am called to an ELCA congregation where I serve as co-pastor with another woman, Pastor Abigail Zang Hoffman. Since 2013, the ELCA has been led by a presiding bishop who is a woman, Elizabeth Eaton. This past synod assembly season across our church, six new bishops were elected who are all women. I rejoice in all of these things.

The scene of the head table made me sad because it was such a vivid example of the world that many of us live in today, myself included. It is too common for me to sit with and talk to people who look like me, who talk like me, who share the same kinds of life experiences as me, who affirm the same political views as me, who talk about Jesus in the same way that I do. As I looked at that table of men on Sunday evening and willingly, even eagerly, judged them, I can't help but turn my disappointment toward myself and ask: "who sits at the tables where I sit?"

Like an Italian bishop who preaches and I'm certain sincerely believes, "we are all one in Christ," all our words are like dust until we dare to live as though those words are true. We encounter the presence of Christ when we share bread and conversation with those in our communities who we know and love, that is something that many of us have come to expect of life in Christian community. What is surprising, world-expanding, and a great blessing is when we encounter the presence of Christ in people whose lives and experiences are vastly different from our own.

Perhaps we can start to ask one another, "who is sitting at your table?" And maybe, we can even help one another to sit at new tables together. I'm confident the Spirit of Christ will help us.