On the road to find out

I leave this week for Honduras. More specifically, I'm headed to a children's home.

I spent two summers at this home in undergrad. I look back on it as one of the most defining experiences of my life.

In undergrad, my worldview broadened exponentially. For the first time, I was exposed to international politics and national as well as global poverty. I devoured the words of Freire and Gutierrez. I was full of passion and optimism.

The Honduran orphanage added a healthy dose of cynicism to my otherwise idealistic understanding of a world of revolutions. I stopped romanticizing poverty after that experience.

While at the home five years ago, I wrote this:

Little hands, deep brown eyes

scarred and barred, get free!

Or are you cursed eternally?

Penetrated.

Your childhood terminated.

A lack of food has left your stomach inflated

And all we can do

is coo

"how cute".

Life: a brute.

How has it treated me so well?

My much larger hands have not known your hell.

I moan and groan in the ripples of your past

The curse it cast

Does change stand a chance?

You are David, but where is your stone?

Doubt cuts to the bone.

But giants will topple

and cycles will break.

Brown Eyes,

I can't wait to see

what your little hands make.

As you can see, I stood at a point in my life with one foot in youthful faith, believing that all ends well, and the other foot awakening to the harsh realities of this world and a growing sense of hopelessness. Several times throughout my journal I used the phrase, "All to the good". I believed that everything, in some mysterious way, worked to the glory of G-d, as well as my own personal benefit.

"Someone stole my favorite shirt while it was drying out on the line, but it's all to the good, I want to overcome material attachments anyway".

The phrase becomes more bothersome in the context of, "These children come from backgrounds of extreme abuse and abandonment to a home where violence and neglect are perpetuated realities. All to the good."

I needed that blind faith as a nineteen-year-old to face daily life at the home.

For the past two years I've been living under the rock of graduate studies, pretending to learn how to come up with creative ways to address the roots of societies ills. I changed my mantra from, "It's all to the good" to "It's all up to me and you".

But I still believe in the mystery. There's a human resiliency unaccounted for in the mathematics of sociology.

I'm not sure where I stand now.

I'm on the road to find out.

Passover

Passover

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .

and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
-Exodus 12: 7 & 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?

Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

~ Lynn Ungar ~