Russia -- 2004 (#6)The church at the end of the trolley line

       The house church we visited at the end of Palm Sunday was about half a mile by my estimation from the last trolley-bus stop.  The streets were full of potholes, litter, and mud. In our brief time in country so far, this was the common condition of streets.

     The apartment buildings were all startlingly decrepit. One sees such things in American inner cities. Here this level of architectural wear and tear seemed to be everywhere. After a bit we turned down an alley although the street we had been walking resembled an alley. The alley was largely mud. It had grown quite dark and there were no street lights. Someone from the leadership group mentioned that the head of the Orthodox Church lived nearby. Like many things we heard, there was no way to verify the information or time to ask follow-up questions to clarify what was being passed along to us as we walked.

     Seventy-five yards down the alley we turned in at a gate in a rough wooden fence. We entered one of those small wooden houses that look ruinous from the outside although details were hard to see in the dark. The only light on the street seemed to come from the open door we were entering. We entered what is usually called a "mud room" in the US, where we removed our muddy shoes and left them in a pile.

    The mud room was cold, but the house proper was cozy warm. The inside of the house had been remodeled very nicely, mostly in wood paneling and partly in plaster. A parenthetical note in my journal adds, "real pine." The young couple who owned the house had been in the worship service we attended at the Mission Center; they were doing the remodeling themselves. The woman was one of the singers in the worship team.

     The room we held our service in lay just off the kitchen. It was simply furnished by American standards but very nice. I cannot identify the house church members pictured here but I am pretty sure there were folks gathered in the house for the service who were not in the photograph. Our Houghton ministry team -- John and Eric Woodard, Gary King, Stefan and I -- are all to the left.

    The Canadian missionary who brought us to the house led our discussion for a short time before the house church pastor, a young Russian man who had been through the Bible School, arrived and took over.

    Each person in our visiting team was asked to contribute something from personal experience that had made a difference in our lives related to discipleship. Our experiences were translated into Russian. For my part, I told about a man in the church I attended from 3rd grade until after Donna and I were married; Edgar Gray had always been for me an example of a believer who put his faith into action every day. He had a reputation for being the same person at work on Monday that he had been in church on Sunday. He was kind and generous and loving, soft-spoken and consistent. He invested himself in his large family as well as in the young folks of the church, overtly conscious that his actions and attitudes set an example. His devotion and behavior should have been the norm rather than the exception, but, as I say, he stood out. An example to follow.

     We had a sincere time of sharing. The householder played guitar and the others sang a few songs in Russian with great conviction and animation. I was touched despite my inability to comprehend the language. Then, before we left, the pastor asked that we return in a few days to talk with the young people about  "dating," an idea (as I understood it) for which there is no equivalent word in Russian. The term that was translated for us was "sexual relations."

      I must admit I had not seen that request coming. It certainly gave me pause as we pulled on our cold shoes and headed back into the darkness outside.

Many Stories Told Throught Nativity

 Fifty two Christmases ago, as newly-weds, Donna and I set up a nativity in a corner hutch. The hutch has been a present from my father. My parents had given us a set of nativity characters without the shelter that usually houses a Christmas display. So, I "built" a manger setting for the figures to go in. I used scrap materials -- pine board for the bottom, a piece of plywood for the back, cedar shingles for the roof, and four birch roof supports I cut from a tree near the little cabin we were living in. I tacked it all together with nails I had salvaged from other jobs. In those days, I salvaged a lot of things.

Over the years we repaired that nativity even as we began collecting nativity sets from other countries. My mother started us on the path toward an international collection by giving us an olive-wood nativity purchased on a trip she took to Israel with her sisters in the early years after all of their husbands had died. 

Our collection began to grow first through gifts -- such as my mother's -- from family and friends who traveled or who had come from other lands, and then through intentional purchases when we have been able to travel ourselves. 

 

From the beginning, we didn't want a lot of nativities that all had a similar "look." The idea that informed our collecting has been that the nativities should have both a personal connection and a cultural connection. 

When our youngest son and his future wife, Rachael, went to Africa with Jon and Barb Arensen as part of the Houghton Tanzania program, they brought home a nativity carved in black stone. 

 

This black stone carving (above) was the first of, now, a number of African nativities that offer different ways of seeing and understanding the Advent story. One, from a former Houghton College (University) professor, is made of corn husks. Another is made of stiff wire and cloth in "local" patterns.

 

 

 

A good number of our nativities are tiny. From Donna's mom we inherited a nativity carved and/or chiseled from a single piece of stone. It fits in the palm of one hand. At one point, after a bit of rough handling, Joseph's head broke off, but I was able to glue it back on with a bit of epoxy. 

 

  

A few years ago one of our Korean home-stay daughters sent us a tiny Navajo nativity she bought in  Arizona during a trip she took with her parents following her graduation from college. We were also given an extremely tiny Inuit nativity, complete with a miniscule penguin, which is an interesting feature of this display.

This past May, during our amazing trip to Egypt, we found Egyptian nativities both in Cairo and in Luxor. This nativity, made of clay, tells many stories for us, as one might imagine. There is at heart the Advent story, the Incarnation story with its central figures -- Mary, Joseph, and so forth, with Jesus in his manger-bed -- that gives Christmas its significance and gravity. There are also the materials and artistry that root these figures to Egypt, characteristics that tell us the Christmas story is a shared, global story, the story of the family of God. And a third story is personal -- how this universal and universally shared story connects us personally with believers in Egypt.
 

My favorite among our nativities, however, is one I brought home from Russia in 2004. It not only tells the stories already mentioned, but it carries for me added significance. I bought it from the man who carved and painted it, our guide, translator, mentor, brother in Christ, and my good friend Andrew S. It is Russian to the core; carved with care and love and attention to detail, it tells us of the hope we share in Jesus. In these days of raging conflict and misunderstanding, it is a vivid reminder of the message of the gospel: The coming of the Christ child proclaims Peace on earth and good will to all mankind.

China Revisited -- 2013 [23]

Paying Attention: What to See When There is Nothing to See

There are family stories from my childhood that involved me sleeping in the car. But they are not, obviously, things I remember -- I know the stories second hand. I put boredom in the same category.  I am sure that I have been bored at various times -- during  a tedious sermon, perhaps. But I do not remember being bored, ever, actually, and I do not remember sleeping in a car unless I have been sleep deprived and my body shut itself down.

During our return to the States after a good will basketball visit to Russia in 2004, while my teammates slept or watched an out-of-sinc Bruce Almighty, I looked out the window. Whenever the cloud cover broke, I looked down at the expanse of the Atlantic and at the land as it gradually emerged from the horizon. Waves, currents, boats, icebergs, coastlines -- not to mention the subtle shifting of blues, greens, greys -- you get the picture. It was all good. Not only was there something to see, there was much to contemplate, to feed the mind.

On our first morning in LuHe, January 1, I wrote in my notebook, "Praise God for this opportunity!"  We saw a lot in our three days there, everything we had asked to see and more. At the same time, we hadn't asked to see nearly enough. We had not known what to ask for. What we saw raised new questions for us, created new curiosities, and revealed doors I could not have imagined before.

As always happens when we are open to what is there rather than just to what we expect, the questions and possibilities far outnumber the answers. And yet so many answers, so much information!

On the day we left, all we had planned was the trip back to Shenzhen. It was to be, essentially, a travel day.

Nevertheless. The raw data in my notebook for this travel day reads as follows:

"7 a.m. [wake up] call for 7:50 departure [It was cold every night but by this last morning it felt less

Breakfast -- same restaurant as yesterday [around the corner from the Zhang "town house]

3 or 4 kinds of noodles -- soy drink -- fried bread  [outside the restaurant, two women are repairing a hole in the street. One is wearing a red jacket; the other, black. Beside the hole in one direction is a pile of sand; in the other direction, a two wheel hand cart filled with what I take to be bricks. On our first short trip to the Zhang village we had seen something similar: two women screening gravel to mix with powdered cement in the mixer they were operating.]

Head back to Shenzhen       litter everywhere     poverty mixed with prosperity   side by side     families on scooters, kids/old people on bicycles
[the common American impression that Chinese streets are clogged with bicycles is no longer true]

scooters    /car garages next to restaurants, steel (rebar) sellers and stone cutters next to food shops, half built houses between/next to old houses and, new houses

much rubble/ red plastic trash bags, clothes hanging on lines from hangers, here and there vegetable plots (always neat [as I have noted often]) or larger fields (rice terraces [easy to spot now that I know for sure what they look like]), cows grazing [on stubble] in last year's rice paddies, stacks of product from bamboo to bricks to wood posts to rebar to building materials -- cement bags   boxed cases of whatever [not being able to read Chinese],   soy jars, dried plant material

[there is a lot of litter and litter is a problem, but I think litter is a problem nearly everywhere. the questions is what to do about it. the solution will, I think, require the cooperation of everyone]

from a distance the square buildings look like Soviet era buildings in Russia, women laboring alongside of men, digging trenches, working in road despite traffic [a Soviet era building is essentially a square or blocky concrete structure with a somber, grey, aging utility to its appearance]

household goods, chickens, cats, stray dogs (all tan) [am I missing something?] pens with animals, police stations and walled government buildings, lots of concrete, all farm roads are raised, most fields systematically scoured with irrigation trenches

[firearms, I think, are illegal (no second amendment here. But three times along the road between settlements I saw men carrying crossbows]

so far I am handling the food OK . D less so.

Duck ponds with hundred of white ducks [around the edges and in the water]

Once we got back on the big hi-way, the view changed. Like American interstates, the farms and towns and backroads are hard or impossible to see, the details harder to absorb. To the west in the distance rise the mountains; to the east somewhere beyond the shrubs and trees growing up along the route lies the sea.


My conclusions about what we had seen and what that might mean are still tentative, subject to reconsideration and new information.

At some point in the years after I stopped napping in the car and forgot how to be bored, I adopted a life principle that has served me well.  It has served me well.

It is simply this:  pay attention.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#19]

The Art of the Ordinary


We did not spend a lot of time in the villages. We were in Edward's mother's village once for about 90 minutes and in Edward's father's village twice, on consecutive days, for a total of three hours or so.

I took a lot more pictures than I have been able to use in the stories I have told so far.

These pictures of brooms, for example, have not found a place in a story -- yet I find myself drawn to them as meaningful objects. These brooms are made of a kind of dried weed or straw tied to a bamboo pole or stick. There is nothing unusual about these brooms apart from the fact that they are handmade of regional materials and, thus, they look interesting.

As odd as this may sound, I think that the brooms people use indicate something about them. Certainly these brooms tell us about culture and history, but perhaps they indicate an attitude about the present as well.  To illustrate, in all my six plus decades, I have never seen anyone use a handmade broom in America; yet I have seen handmade brooms in all the foreign countries I have visited.  I am not sure what this indicates about us as Americans apart from our preference for the neat, progressive look of factory brooms.

But both in Russia and in Korea I saw brooms without shafts in common use.  Imagine straw brooms, like the ones pictured, without handles.  Short brooms of that sort require the sweeper to bend over, sometimes nearly double.  In Russia these short brooms seem to be made of bundles of sticks, although I may be wrong in that observation. I first saw them in use by soldiers sweeping at the front gate of a military post, so they are not just the choice of the old women who appear everywhere sweeping streets and hallways. Many of these old women seemed to be bent double from the hardships of life.

 

A broom similar to the Russian model, made of straw, is common in Busan as well. The stoop of old women using the brooms might be unrelated, but the visual connection between bent posture and sweeping, to me at least, is compelling.

Another kind of picture I have been drawn to involves gardens. As I have said, it did not matter what poor condition a house might be in or the general state of a neighborhood, the garden outside or nearby was always well laid out and well tended. Even on January 1st the produce was thriving.

 

This first picture is the common area in the Zhang village close by the tea table under the trees. Likely the plots are individually assigned or owned. The area itself is neatly fenced, cultivated, staked, and healthy.

These two gardens are in Lehu, the neighboring town of 380,000. Local residents have created neat gardens that fit and utilize small or odd shaped areas that would otherwise lie vacant and gradually fill with trash. In both of these cases, the areas are designated for building projects; but in the meantime, enterprising folks are raising vegetables.

To shift my focus a bit, disposing of trash, like pollution generally, has been an urgent problem of rapid modernization in China during the last thirty years. Among the pictures I did not take (for a variety of reasons) was a picture of the stream that ran through LuoXi village. It lies below the iron pipe railing on the left-hand side of this picture.

What struck us about this little stream was that it was filled with plastic bags of the grocery store variety. Many of these bags in the countryside are red, so they stand out. The widespread use of thin plastic bags is a recent phenomenon in China, as it is, interestingly, in England too. These bags are cheap, useful, and sturdy to a point; but their wide use has created a litter problem previously unseen.  Villagers, until recently, would have used bags or baskets made of natural fibers that could be repaired or that would disintegrate over time, so the habits of disposal that have worked for milenia  now create problems.

A third kind of photograph I like to take involves brickwork, stonework, tiles, roof lines, wall construction, earthen buildings.

Whatever else this building may tell us, its construction is an odd mix of masonry.  Part of the building was built of stones such as one would pick up from the river bed or even from the fields. Walls lining fields in New England are famously made of stones removed from cleared land in order to facilitate cultivation of fields.  Sometimes, too, foundations of old New England homes may be made of these same stones; these are called rubble foundations. Well-made, they can be sturdy; but inexpertly made, they tend to fall apart. On this building, the stone-work is augmented by or repaired with two kinds of bricks. The older of these are the larger, tan bricks. These don't separate from one another and crumble into a heap like stones, but they do tend to break apart more easily than the newer, smaller, modern "red" bricks, which are the newest part of this building.

After our celebration dinner for Edward's father and after our conversations around the community tea table under the trees, I had wandered a little bit to get some pictures. I walked down to the dry, stubbly rice fields, I looked at the gardens and chicken coops and pig houses.  I found a shrine to the local land gods.

When I walked down to this little building to take pictures of the walls and the tiled roof, thinking the sunlight might create some interesting textures and patterns, my interest seemed to create a stir.

As I got to the door, after shooting any number of wall pictures, Edward hustled over.  "Pop," he said, "don't go in there."

I backed away, thinking I had approached something forbidden, hidden, secret, mysterious. 

"They are afraid you might go inside," Edward said.  "It's an outhouse."

I shot a lot of interiors, but not of that building. That was another picture I decided not to take.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#17]

Where Did You Come From? Why Are You Here?

On January 2nd we headed for the Zhang family village, which is to say, the village of Edward's father's family.  Festivities honoring Edward's father were set to begin around noon, and we were invited.

We had been to the Zhang village briefly the day before after our hike into the mountains. Before going to bed we had been told to be ready to go by 9; but at 7 a.m. Edward announced we were leaving in 20 minutes.

As it is also nearby, we drove first to Edward's mother's village, LuoXi. To say that these villages were unexpected to us as western foreigners is almost laughable. In this world all manner of discontinuities exist side by side.

I had had similar impressions on visiting Vladimir, Russia, in 2004. There, Soviet era buildings on the main streets gave way to 19th Century wooden houses on streets of dirt and mud on every side street and back street. The telescoping of time, culture, technologies, and material wealth is almost beyond comprehension for American eyes; the transition from one block to the next is simply astonishing.

In these Chinese villages there is no transition. The telescoping is absolute. For example, there is no mud in the thoroughfares as one might expect -- and as I found often in Russia -- because nearly all walking and driving areas are smoothly and recently paved with concrete.

It is easy to see that a certain kind of village renewal has been going on and that the government has invested in basic kinds of infrastructure (roads, paths, bridges, public areas). This investment was also true in the Zhang village, so it was clear that progress in rural villages has been a priority.

Houses, unlike the road and bridge infrastructure, are structurally varied. New construction sits side by side with old buildings.  All construction, all progress, moves by fits and starts; it continues, I am informed, until the money runs out.

Construction itself is labor intensive, which means virtually everything requires many hands, from digging foundations to mixing cement to hauling materials to laying bricks. Older home are made of an earth colored brick with tiled roofs; many have dirt floors. Newer homes were largely poured concrete slabs with brick walls layed on a two-story, rebar reenforced concrete framework. When they are finished the houses have steel doors and metal grills over the windows; but some houses had open windows and empty door frames, presumably because money had run out before grills and doors could be purchased.

It is one of the astonishing stories of recent Chinese growth and success that these two women, Edward's mother and aunt, spent the first twenty years of their lives in this little blond brick house. It has two rooms. To the right is the room where their father slept. It was his room. To the left is the room where the mother and her children slept. Two thirds of the room is a bed; up a wooden ladder in the loft is another bed.

The window opening is covered with wooden bars and the ceiling is just the underside of the roof tiles, which rest on sapling supports. My guess is that the tiles slid occasionally and let in wind or rain.

 Edward's father grew up under similar circumstances.  Either just before or just after they got married, Edward's mother and father left the village for the town, Lehu, where they lived in town poverty rather than village poverty. For a number of years Edward's father worked various laboring jobs before their fortunes changed and he began to make money.  Edward remembers being poor when he was very young and envying playmates who had new toys.

Poverty remains part of life in the village.  We watched Edward's aunt try to give money to the masons building a house next to their two room childhood home -- the construction pictured above -- so that they could buy supplies to continue working. But giving the money took considerable negotiation and explanation since neither of the masons were used to handling money.

We have this phrase in English, dirt poor, that I have no first hand experience with.  But here we came close to seeing what it might look like. This poverty is as unimaginable to me as the material success and wealth of Edward's parents. Their rags to riches story is the stuff of dreams, American or otherwise.

Despite this recognition, nothing I might conclude from visiting this village is simple or easy. Perhaps it is enough, here, to say that I have been astonished and humbled to see with my own eyes what I could never have imagined.