weaknesses of our human condition, but we’re too proud or too ashamed to admit them to anyone else — or, sometimes, even to ourselves. These two problems seem unrelated, but perhaps they couldn’t be more intricately tied. Perhaps the very thing that is meant to unite us to the world around us has actually distanced us from it — and we don’t know how to come back.
I walked the narrow alley back to our house, sandals shuffling dust underfoot, arms loaded with canvas bags filled with eggs and bread, oil and bananas. “Mau pulang?” The elderly woman a few doors down inquired with the polite warmth of a culture that prides itself on manners. “Are you going home now?”
I smiled, responded in the affirmative, and stopped to make small talk, reminding myself to be thankful for the spontaneous opportunity to practice my fledgling language skills. We had been in the kampung for eight months, and our Javanese neighbors were beginning to get used to the glowing white couple and our odd ways. Whether they were as happy to have us there as they seemed or the politeness of their culture had an iron will, we couldn’t tell: The best we could do was hope for the former. This particular neighbor had struck me as the kampung gossip, and I always wondered what foreign words she used for me when her tongue ran away with her. Was there an Indonesian word for snob? Surely so, but I didn’t yet know it. Perhaps if I did I would have kept an ear out.
When we moved into our little house in the kampung, we were thrilled to participate in the close-knit community life of a low-income Javanese neighborhood. At first, people came out of the woodwork to help move in the furniture we had bought in town or to bring us a hot meal. Eric and I had learned to adjust to life without hot water or a Western-style toilet or shower. Ignoring the cicaks (lizards) that constantly roamed our walls thanks to the permanently opened windows became second nature. I’m an animal lover, and geckos pose no threat. It was all going well, yet as the weeks ticked by, relationships had begun to lag. The language barrier was a problem, of course, but those things are overcome every day. This was something more.
The pressure to evangelize every person I met, the mission of converting hearts and minds, the lack of room for any true depth of mutuality in relationship, all felt like a suffocating weight I couldn’t bear. Any effort to get to know someone was haunted by the underlying mandate that I fix what was broken in their lives. There was no room for brokenness of my own; I could quietly take that back to the people in my own corner.
Consumption was an opiate, an escape from the reality of my desert-dry heart.
I soon observed that my response was, little by little, to close myself off from everyone. My subconscious couldn’t hold the tension between my failure to perform my job and the nagging feeling that the job itself was asking something of me that I didn’t like. So, I withdrew. Day by day I pulled further inward, holing up in my tiny house to cook unnecessarily intricate recipes and watch movies rented almost daily from the local video store. Consumption was an opiate, an escape from the reality of my desert-dry heart, an escape from the disappointment within that felt too raw to touch. Where were those dreams of worshiping street kids and redeemed orphans now? They felt like the hopeless naiveté of a girl from long ago.
I willed my mind to return to the neighbor’s chatter. Today was Idul Adha, she was informing me. I racked my brain and vaguely remembered: ah, yes, the feast of sacrifice. I had been taught about the Muslim holiday honoring Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son to the Lord, and the mercy of Allah to provide a ram in his stead. A feast of mercy, I thought to myself, I could get on board with that. I told her I would put away the groceries and return to walk to the mosque with her.
As we navigated our way through the alleys that made up our beloved neighborhood, a familiar heaviness weighed on my heart. This holy day was the perfect segue through which to present the gospel message: The parallels between the stories of Isaac and Jesus Christ are blatant and poignant, and anyone remotely interested in religion of any form would be keen to discuss it. It was an underhand soft pitch and all I had to do was swing.
But I kept silent.
We turned onto the only road in the kampung wide enough to fit a car, and I did a double take. There was a flash of red out of the corner of my eye, and was it what I thought? I squinted, then sucked in my breath as we stepped closer. Flowing, gushing, running through the open drains that lined the streets of our neighborhood was an unmistakable stream of siren-red blood. Blood mixed with water, in fact, as though it had come flowing straight from Christ’s pierced side. I felt him there, suddenly, a heavy presence; I felt him nearer than he’d been in a long, long time.
We walked further and joined the mass of neighbors gathered for the annual animal sacrifice. Goats and cows dotted the landscape, some alive and some no longer. Men and women grinned proudly to show me what they had brought to offer. Boys and girls ran amok, happily weaving in and out of hanging carcasses. To me, it was a bloodbath. To them, it was a feast of mercy.
I could only bring myself to stay for a little while before walking the path home alone. A knot made its way up my throat as I closed my front door. Falling to my knees, I began to sob without even being sure why. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world had already come, and they either didn’t know or didn’t believe: My years of missionary training told me that was why I wept. If they died today, they would be headed for the fires of hell: My ultraconservative faith formation told me that was why I wept. But neither felt true; neither felt sufficient to explain the aching in my heart, the grief that I knew was from Christ but for which I had no language. It wasn’t until years later that I would put my finger on what I felt that day. I cried heaving tears on cool tile not because my neighbors didn’t know Jesus the way I did. I cried because I didn’t know them like he did.
1. Daniel Hamermesh, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
2. Laura Entis, “Chronic Loneliness Is a Modern-Day Epidemic,” Fortune, June 22, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epidemic/.
3. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, reprint edition 2005, originally published 1972).
4. Marguerite A. Wright, “Appendix: Stages of Racial Awareness,” in I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Bi-Racial Children in a Race-Conscious World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).
5. Barna Group, “Sharing Faith Is Increasingly Optional to Christians,” Research Releases in Faith & Christianity, May 15, 2018, https://www.barna.com/research/sharing-faith-increasingly-optional-christians/.
6. Homily at Mass in Quito’s Bicentennial Park during visit to Ecuador, July 7, 2015.
7. For an example, see Russell Heimlich, “Threat of Secularism to Evangelical Christians,” Pew Research Center, FactTank, July 12, 2011, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2011/07/12/threat-of-secularism-to-evangelical-christians/. While this research looks specifically at evangelical Christians, I think it is fair to say that many of the findings are broadly applicable to all of us.
8. For my Protestant friends who are reading, I feel the need to clarify a grave misconception. We Catholics do not believe we are saved by these works alone, but that true faith always goes hand in hand with action, as it says in James 2. A properly catechized
