July 2006
Costa Rica
Lord, to those who hunger�
Tonight I got down my Lutheran Volunteer Corps cookbook from my kitchen shelf to copy down a blessing called �The Sending Forth.� I thought it would be a great prayer to include in a manual I am putting together as a resource for group reflections. While I searched for the prayer I had in mind, I came across this Latin American prayer: �Lord to those who hunger, give bread. To those who have bread, give hunger for justice.� Even though I have heard it before, this time it really �called my attention,� as we would say in Costa Rica.
I have been in Costa Rica for over 10 months now. I have experience the rainy season, the dry season, and the beginning of the rainy season again. I have experienced the full spectrum of the difference in time of when sun moves beyond the horizon and darkness fills the sky (it varies by, at most, an hour throughout the year). It has been over a year since I started my service with the ELCA Global Mission unit, and in realizing that a year from now I will be back in the United States, I am feeling a bit reflective. Yet somehow this simple prayer that I ran across, these 2 simple sentences, seems to contain a lot of what is on my heart right now.
Many people enter service in a foreign country to give bread to the hungry. They may enter into sustainable development projects, build wells, teach farmers how to harvest fish or plant organic crops, or they may hope to bring bread to the hungry by educating girls in countries where girls are rarely given a chance at an education. My work in Costa Rica, however, is not aimed at giving bread to the hungry. Or rather, it is but in such an indirect manner that it has much more to do with the second sentence of that Latin American prayer than the first.
How does someone help others hunger for justice? I find this to be one of the toughest questions I have ever encountered. In the year before coming to Costa Rica I worked in the office of 2 non-profit organizations dedicated to educating faith communities about US policies towards Latin American countries. It is the hope of those involved that, once people learn of the good and bad our government has done and continues to do to our friends in Latin America, they will be filled with hunger for justice and feel inspired, motivated and called to pressure governmental leaders to vote for just policies. But often when I try to talk with others about these issues, issues that are key to the breathing, living, and dying of so many around the globe, I encounter people who said that they don�t want to discuss such political matters. Yet I wonder how we can obey Christ`s call to justice while remaining silent against systemic injustices? Why is it that we feel good about giving bread to the hungry, but feel somehow vicious or �political� or pushy in trying to make ourselves and others hunger for justice? It inspires me to see examples of the church engaging in the real struggles of this world on an institutional level, and I am encouraged by Archbishop Desmond Tutu who, in explanation of his and the church`s work for national healing through the South Africa`s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said, �We were involved in the struggle because we were being religious, not political. It was because we were obeying the imperatives of our faith.� How can we transfer the involvement of people of faith in a new South Africa to something that is the reality of our own church, country, and governmental system?
When United States church/campus delegations come to visit the Iglesia Luterana Costarricense, they see a side of the country that conventional tourists don�t know exists. They spend time laughing with local women as they share coffee in a rusted tin house in the middle of a squatter community with sewage-infested waters running freely outside. They play soccer with kids who play barefoot because they have no shoes to wear. They meet people with large areas of damaged skin from work in pineapple or banana plantations where they are not given gloves to protect themselves from the chemicals. They sweat together, exchange smiles, and leave as friends with people with whom they do not even share a common language. This time together usually easily accomplishes the first and foremost goal of the church in these exchanges: the formation of relationships. What is harder is to achieve is one of the secondary goals � that delegation participants return home aware of their power as US citizens and ready to make consumer and congressional choices that will dignify and not degrade the lives of their new friends. The question remains, do delegation members leave hungry for justice?
Try as we may, we cannot make anyone hunger for justice. I can put together a program itinerary aimed at showing the societal injustices forcing this wonderful community into a cycle of perpetual poverty, but I cannot make anyone hunger for justice. To the question �What can I do to help?� I could maybe answer, �Hunger for justice! Enough to do something about it,� but I have doubts on how effective that would be. My job here does not give bread to the hungry in any immediate way. Through my work, I am somewhat abstractly involved in the long struggle for justice that I hope and pray will eventually bear fruit-in vast quantities!, but if we believe that advocating for just policies is solely a political matter and has nothing to do with the church, why am I here?
So I sit here tonight, like I have so many times before, reflecting upon my time here and contemplating the public church and how we can work for �hunger for justice.� As I return to the prayer I was originally searching for, I discover that the answer to my questionings and discontents lies in the words of that prayer, �may you be blessed with discomfort�may you be blessed with anger�� It is a prayer. A petition. A request for God to bestow upon us this gift of hunger for justice. I cannot make anyone hunger for justice. I cannot keep hunger for justice alive in myself. But God can. It is the Holy Spirit that blows to bring people to Costa Rica, the Holy Spirit moving in our time in Central America, and the Holy Spirit who will bless us with this hunger. What I am doing here, then, is simply asking the Holy Spirit to move within me, to move within those who come, and make us hunger for justice. I ask you to join with me today and pray:
May [we] be blessed with
discomfort at easy answers,
half-truths and superficial relationships
so that [we] will live deep in [our] heart[s].
May [we] be blessed with
anger at injustice, oppression,
and exploitation of people and the earth.
so that [we] will work for justice, equity and peace.
May [we] be blessed with
tears to shed for those who suffer
so [we] will reach out [our] hand[s] to comfort them
and change their pain to joy.
And may [we] be blessed with
the foolishness to think
that [we] can make a difference in this world,
so that [we] will do the things which others say cannot be done.
Amen.