Читать книгу Nail Scarred Hands Made New - John Shorack - Страница 6

Another day, another morning bus ride in the big city. Caracas, a city of at least seven hills and six million tightly packed inhabitants, lies at the foot of a beautiful mountain range that stretches the length of the city’s narrow, ten-mile corridor. First impressions are everything here, and as a first-time visitor entering the urban core from the airport, you cannot miss Caracas’ slums. From every inch of freeway to every crowded street corner, they are ever-present, always visible, spotting the city’s many hillsides with their makeshift red-brick dwellings.

This is the city that’s been my home since 2001. I live with my family and a small mission team on one of those hillsides in one of those red-brick homes.

Caracas, Venezuela

On this particular morning, I managed to ignore the pulsating beat from the bus driver’s stereo enough to read the morning paper while simultaneously noticing two young men that boarded the bus. They made their way to the back of the unusually empty twenty-four-seater, sitting directly behind me, just inches away. Without taking my nose out of the paper or even diverting my eyes, I noted to myself that these were possible malandros—Venezuelan street criminals. On the heels of that thought came another: they could put a gun to my neck if they wanted to. I read on, my mind consumed with national and world events.

Five minutes later I was shaken out of the news by the realization that the bus was being held up! The two young men had gone forward presumably to pay and get off. One of them pulled out a handgun, which he pointed at the driver. His accomplice made his way to each passenger, taking jewelry, cash, and cell phones. There were only six or seven passengers, including myself.

The young man took earrings from the woman directly in front of me and the other to my right, both seated within inches of me. Not wanting problems, I made a special effort to demonstrate my compliance. I began taking out my pocket money. For reasons God only knows, the young men never acknowledged my presence. I tried to get their attention, assuming I was next in line. Inexplicably, I was invisible to them. They moved to the front of the bus and jumped off. Nothing short of an act of God spared my wedding ring.

I would not be so fortunate the next time. Within a few weeks two young men on another bus noticed my ring, threatened me, and stole it. Then three young men jumped me in yet another incident on a bustling commercial street in downtown Caracas. While shopping for school clothes with my two daughters, one of them threatened to shoot me while his buddies reached into my pockets and took everything I had. Marna, my nine-year-old daughter, screamed to attract attention, hoping someone might come to my rescue.

I became traumatized as a result of these experiences. I found myself consumed with the notion of dying. My mind wandered to my childhood and the loss of my father. My mind turned to my own children—Johanna (13), Marna (10), and John Mark (9). “Lord,” I prayed with tears welling up, “I don’t want to die yet! I don’t want to leave them without their dad.”

My perception of reality became distorted. How dangerous is life in Caracas? I lived fifteen years in a dangerous inner-city neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The sound of gunshots was routine for my family. I coined an adage that helped me explain the danger to the occasional visitors who ventured into the neighborhood to see us: “Anything can happen at any time, though most things won’t happen most of the time.” In that city we witnessed the violence without being targeted ourselves. Gangsters considered us off-limits. In Caracas, no such social buffer exists. They target Venezuelans and foreigners alike.

Taking greater precautions, I continued walking the hillside, visiting homes and riding public transportation. But to make matters worse, a teammate and I were held up at gun point fifty yards from my home during a routine walk at dusk. I felt confused and insecure.

My mind replayed the stories of all the people I had met since visiting Caracas the first time in 1998. The first words I learned after stepping off the plane at Simon Bolivar International Airport were malandro (a delinquent youth who commits street crimes and kills people) and inseguridad (lack of safety). On that trip I encountered many people gripped by fear of street crime. Now, several years later, I honestly cannot think of a Venezuelan with whom I have shared my story who has not responded with a similar, if not more dramatic, experience of their own.

“T.O.A.”: Traumatized on Arrival

Two months after getting jumped in downtown Caracas, I boarded a plane for the United States to attend meetings of the InnerCHANGE leadership team. I remember my arrival. It was a Friday evening. From the moment I touched down I wanted to talk. I needed to talk.

I talked first to the friend who picked me up at the airport, then to the twenty guests who had gathered at his home to welcome me. The next day I met one-on-one with several people. In seemingly endless conversations, I dwelled on the crime and violence in Venezuela. I was consumed with the notion of dying. Try as I may, I couldn’t change the topic.

Sunday morning I went to church in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. The turn-of-the-century gothic structure contains a traditional sanctuary replete with stained glass windows, oak pews, crimson-colored carpet, and pew cushions.

The service concluded and I hung around to greet people. When the sanctuary emptied, I passed through the large doors to the foyer. As I did, I greeted an elderly usher. At that moment, while my hand was in his, I remembered a jarring story my brother Todd told me.

Todd, two years my senior, had visited Geneva, New York, the upstate college town where our family lived in the 1960s. He stood up in the First Baptist Church during Sunday morning worship and introduced himself as a visitor: “My name is Theodore J. Shorack III.” The small, aging congregation gasped in disbelief. Thirty-three years earlier they had sent off a promising young father of four named Theodore James Shorack Jr. to fight in a distant war. When he didn’t come home, they inscribed his name in a stained glass window as a memorial to my father.

That sanctuary was also large and traditional, with permanent, hardwood pews and crimson-colored carpets. After the service, my brother also mingled with church members until the sanctuary was nearly empty. And when he passed through the heavy doors into the foyer, he too met an elderly usher. As they shook hands, the man told him, “I’ve been an usher in this church since the sixties. I knew your dad well. I’ll never forget his last Sunday before leaving for Vietnam. I shook his hand on this very spot and I heard a little voice, like a whisper in my ear: ‘He’s not coming back.’”

There I stood, shaking the hand of an elderly usher at an old church in Los Angeles, California. In my trauma, the story of my dad’s death flashed through my mind and shook me. I’m due to return here on furlough next year. Does this mean I will die in Venezuela before then? I wondered to myself. Was this a word from God? From Satan? A product of my fears? I felt confused and troubled.

Depressed and defeated, I pulled my suitcase and troubled spirit to Fifth and Olive Street to await a city bus. This was back when downtown Los Angeles became a desolate place on a Sunday afternoon. Buildings and streets lay abandoned, the quietness out of character. A haunting wind whipped up the paper trash, giving it the eeriness of a ghost town. City buses passed every sixty minutes, if that. I took my place at the bus stop with some folks that looked worse off than me.

When I got to Pasadena, I pulled my suitcase to the campus of Fuller Theological Seminary, where I studied missiology nearly two decades earlier. I had an hour before my friend was to pick me up. I sat down, pulled out my journal, and found company with my heart. So much was going on inside. As I put my emotional churning on paper, tears flowed. I didn’t want to die. I thought of my children.

My journal entry from that day:

I feel closer to death. It’s weird and kind of morbid. Part of me resists putting words to these thoughts, yet I can’t deny the feelings that are so close to the surface that they pop out in conversations that inevitably touch on my life in Venezuela and my fulfillment of a dream there. Satisfaction and death . . . they go together—like Simeon, I feel a depth of satisfaction in Venezuela that enables me to say for the first time: I’m ready to go. I’ve seen my dream. I’ve touched it.

A strange thing happened. Even though I see in retrospect that my emotions played games with me and that my perception of reality became twisted, God used this drama to do a new work in me. I came to terms with what I was feeling about the price we’re paying to live in Venezuela with all its risks. Was I ready to die? Was I willing to die in Venezuela? There, in the commons area of the campus, sitting alone with God and my turbulent heart, I found a place of rest. Somewhere in my tears I came to a moment of release, when I could joyfully and tearfully declare from deep within my being, “Yes, Lord. I can go.” In that moment, the sun broke through the clouds that covered my soul.

My friend arrived. I was ready—to die, yes. But also to live.

I am a mission worker with InnerCHANGE, a Christian mission community whose vocation is to live and work with the poor as a sign of God’s kingdom. My wife, Birgit, is from Germany. We met in Southern California and together started the InnerCHANGE team in downtown Los Angeles where our three children were born: Johanna (1990), Marna (1993), and John Mark (1995).

As mission practitioners in poor communities around the world, we place a high premium on context. We rarely, if ever, open a new work with a pre-made plan. We let the place and its people speak and inform us. We take time to grow in the host culture, listening and learning our way into a slum community. For these reasons, this book is very contextual, with reflections that have tangibly risen out of the streets we walk, the worldview of the people we love, and the history of the place where our children call home.

This could sound rather romantic. It’s not. To live and work in a violent slum is to look evil in the face in ways I was never prepared for by my comfortable upbringing in middle-class America. This challenge gets exasperated by the generally pessimistic outlook we inherit regarding the world-at-large. Irreversible climate change, insurmountable conflicts in the Middle East, recurring famine in Africa, and the hypocrisy and arrogance of politics that exploits and dominates in the name of “freedom” and “democracy” are but a few of the woes that besiege us with hopelessness. In my childhood these remained largely abstract. Moving into a slum community put flesh and blood on many of these destructive powers. Without a solid grounding in Christian hope, I couldn’t survive, much less thrive, over the long run.

To thrive long term we must also be more than workers. My use of the term “partners” in the section titles is not inconsequential. Because InnerCHANGE mission workers cultivate a three-pronged identity of missionary, prophet, and contemplative, the partnering with Jesus that I envision (“at the cliff’s edge,” “with Cornelius,” “outside the gate”) reflects a prophetic stance and a spiritual union. We don’t simply do the radical thing. We do justice with Jesus. Or, to use Pauline terms, in Christ and “in step with the Spirit.” This is something I explore in the coming pages.

One of InnerCHANGE’s most pronounced values is what we refer to as “the upside-down kingdom.” For us this means that God’s ways are radically different from ours and that much of what the world—and the Church—esteems stands in polar opposition to what God esteems. In our literature, we state it this way:

We will minister low to high, that is, from the bottom rungs of a society upward, remembering that significant aspects of God’s kingdom are often lodged in the humblest crevices.

We will not despise faithfulness to small things in favor of the big picture, believing that the kingdom of God is upside down with regard to many of the world’s values.

In many ways my reflections develop this motif from fresh angles. I do this by employing a narrative theology model that holds together three intertwining threads: (1) urban slum realities, (2) the biblical text, and (3) the practical expressions of the church in mission. This method uses a contextual story as the launching point for missional reflection.1

Several theological influences merit special attention because they provide the paradigms that shape my reflections: Kenneth Bailey, Tom Wright, Vernard Eller, and Justo González. Though not represented by an author per se, the ministry of the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship and the revival associated with it represents yet another paradigm within which my reflections take place. In the final chapters, authors Vishal Mangalwadi, José Míguez Bonino, and Jacques Ellul provide invaluable insights that bring the loose ends together. Only later in the writing process did I realize the influence of Lesslie Newbigin and the concept he calls “the logic of election.”2

One comment about the prodigal parable is in order since it figures prominently in the book, and I lean heavily on the insights of New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey. In the context of Luke 15, Jesus tells three parables in response to the murmuring of the Pharisees and teachers of the law over his fraternizing with “sinners.” His intent with the stories is to explain his mission. Throughout Nail Scarred Hands I freely associate the younger son of the parable with sinners and gentiles. Kenneth Bailey does not do this. I do so because I believe it’s consistent with Jesus’ ministry and message to which the parable testifies. (As a case in point, in Luke 4:25–30, the “younger son” of Jesus’ message to the synagogue was Namaan the Syrian and the widow in Zarephath, both gentiles.)

Finally, though I am a lifelong member of InnerCHANGE and ooze so much of what we collectively hold dearly, I don’t write in the name of our community. Nor do I intend to represent the views of my colleagues. I do hope that what I have written will inspire those embarking on InnerCHANGE-like work in urban slums of the world.

1. Van Engen and Tiersma, God So Loves the City, 241–64.

2. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 80–88.