Literature of the Wounded

Literature of the Wounded

 

“Literature of the wounded” emerged in China in the late 1970s, after the death of Mao Dze-dong. It described the sufferings of communist party staff and non-party intellectuals during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 76. The new literature attacked official hypocrisy and corruption. A more current European and American version might be found in the #metoo and #churchtoo comments and warnings issued by women who have been sexually abused in political, business, entertainment and church organizations around the world.

Being male, I stand on thin ice if I speak promises of healing and uplift to to women, men or anyone else who has been abused. Any assurances I might give, no matter how many Bible verses I pile on them, ring hollow. The claim that “the wicked will be cast to the ground” can be seen as the most resonant line in Psalm 147. And we’ve begun to see that happen some entertainers and pastors.

Hoping for their downfall only goes part way. We need to join the many women, men and children whose hearts have been broken, whose psyches have been wounded and whose bodies have been trodden underfoot. Preachers sometimes say that after he ascended, “Christ has no hands but yours.” If that’s so, then reach out your hands to those who suffer, listen without explaining, and offer a hand of uplift. And if it’s not so, reach out, listen and lift anyway. After all, whether it be with Christ’s hands or with our merely human ones, the work is in front of us.

 

David Alexander resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

It’ll Show on your Face

It’ll Show on Your Face

In South Africa under the Apartheid system, football was primarily followed by black people, and rugby almost exclusively by white people. A story is told, of Nelson Mandela. After getting out of prison he attended a rugby match between a team from England and the South African national team. He noticed that white South Africans were cheering for the national team, and black South Africans were cheering for England. After he became the president he made a point of being present and visible at rugby matches. He urged ALL South Africans to support the national team. He became a prime example of one who wanted, from the depths of his heart, to overcome racist separation.

I was once the translator at an event where a former president of Taiwan was to speak. Before he entered the hall everyone was locked out so that security guards could check the venue for threats. I had thought that I could go in by a side door to the translator’s booth, but a guard stopped me. He was very polite, but very firm. It showed on his face.

People go to church for different reasons, not all of which are “good.” When I was 23 or 24 years old I attended both Wednesday and Sunday evening events at a church 40 miles from the university where I studied. It wasn’t even the church that I attended on Sunday mornings. I went because I was interested in a woman there (alack and alas, she was NOT interested in me). The person I wanted to get close to at that church wasn’t Jesus. My motives probably showed in my body language. Nonetheless, the people welcomed me and made me very much at home. What was on my heart was romantic and sexual (probably obvious on my face and in my body language). What was on THEIR hearts was relational and Christian.

What’s on YOUR heart? If it’s mostly what your cultural identity, social class, educational attainment and self-interest have written there, it’ll show. Whether you want to show it or not, eventually, even if you try to keep it hidden, it will come out. In March of 2018 the government and ruling party of a large imperial nation in Asia changed their constitution to enable their current president can stay on for as long as he likes. Pictures of the man voting for himself were in the news. Supporters in his party made speeches to honor the event. One picture revealed a member of a group of supporters rolling her eyes as she listened to another supporter go “over the top” in words of praise for the “once president, now president-for-life”.

If we want to be “prima-facie” honest, we need to work on our hearts.

David Alexander resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Cranes and Creation

Cranes and Creation

There’s a kind of long-legged bird called a crane. That’s the same word as is used for the piece of construction equipment that lifts heavy things up high. In the 1980s someone suggested that the national bird of Singapore should be the “Yellow Construction Crane”, because so many buildings were going up there. Sometimes new things are made, not by building up from the ground, but by doing new stuff with something old. If most of a building is replaced, it might be called “reconstruction”. If several things are being “fixed” (rather than replaced), it can be called, “rehabilitation.”

Rehabilitation is also used regarding human bodies and lives. People who have had heart surgery or knee replacement follow up with months of rehabilitation therapy. People who have been addicted to alcohol or narcotics may go through months of residential rehabilitation programs to figure out why they have become dependent on their “drugs of choice” and how to correct those conditions in order to remain sober and drug free afterwards.

One of the most common rehabilitation programs for persons who have become addicts comes with the word “Anonymous” in its title: Alcoholics Anonymous; Narcotics Anonymous; Overeaters Anonymous. etc. Sometimes these are called “12 step” because of the method used. It was devised, or “created” sometime around 1940, in an age of greater religious faith than we live in today. Five of the original 12 steps mentioned “God” or “A power greater than ourselves.” In more recent decades, as people without a belief in God have become more and more involved in the movement, mentions of God have been “edited back”. Because the aim of the movement is to free people from addictions, and not to do a lot of God talk, I think that God, as I understand God, probably doesn’t mind the change so long as people are being set free and lives are being rehabilitated.

Rehabilitating a building takes more than putting a fresh coat of paint onto a wall that really needs to be torn down and replaced. New creation is work! 12 step programs take time and life-long commitment. Groups are always open to people who fail and start over again. When we seek to be new creations in our emotional, physical and social lives, we KNOW that we’re going to have to work. It’s not a matter of “I started exercising three weeks ago, but I’m still overweight.” Exercise is mostly for the sake health and strength anyway. If it’s going to have a weight-loss result, that will take time and life-long commitment.

And, there may be debts to repay. A person who has borrowed to fund an addiction before rehabilitation cannot say, “Yes, I once borrowed money from you but now the old things are past and gone, so I owe you nothing.” This especially applies to anyone who might want to claim exemption from being punished for sexual harassment or maltreatment because “that happened before I knew Jesus.” Being forgiven of sin against heaven and being pardoned for crimes against society and persons are different things. Being a new creation begins with trust the in creator and a commitment to work with heaven as we’re changed. It’s more than even a yellow construction crane can offer.

David Alexander resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Listening to the Pronouns

Listening to the Pronouns

An accusation of “public radio junkie” aimed at me will elicit the response, “guilty as charged.” My spouse and I are happy to be sustaining members of our regional public radio outlet. Before our credit card rolled over to a new expiration date in January I phoned the station to inform them lest a hiatus interrupt our giving. All of the buttons on the car radio are set to that one station. When we travel outside of our region the search/scan function seeks out our favored types of programming. Last year when our millennial son mentioned a similar habit where he resides, we were elated. As junkies, though, we have to put up with the all-too-frequent pledge weeks and membership drives.

During a recent pledge week, which was preceded by a membership drive, I listened closely to the pronouns used when the voices I’ve come to trust with news made pleas to listeners to begin or renew support commitments. It was often unclear whether I belong to the “you” or the “we”; to the “your” or the “our”. When an voice asks that I call in to “help meet our goals” I don’t recall having been part of setting “our” goals. I guess that in those cases the voice belongs to the “We”. But where do I fit?

I understand what it means when I hear “So you can get the programming that you rely on.” In that sentence I’m in the “you”. But when that’s followed by, “We’re all in this together…” I wonder if, like Harry Potter, I’ve suddenly apparated somewhere else.

Three years ago as a member of a regional group of activists asked to endorse a pre-written statement for adoption by an international agency, I found myself unable to sign. In the 175-numbered-paragraph statement, “we” sometimes referred to the writer and his friends, other times it meant the entire agency, or all people in the affected oppressed class and sometimes to all of humanity.

Public radio, which I support notionally, monetarily, and, yea even spiritually, seems, during pledge week, to suffer from the same kind of ambiguity.

Clean up your language. Either that, or stop using pronouns.

David Alexander resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Mr. Lonely

Mr. Lonely

 

Brains don’t fill up, like gas tanks on cars, do they? I didn’t think so when I finished college, but about 20 years later I began to wonder, and one day I began to really think so.  Long after “finishing” what I thought to be my final degree, I returned to school to get a further professional qualification, which required learning a foreign language. I was on a car trip with my family, sitting in the back seat with flash cards for vocabulary. It was tough going. Up front the radio was on, playing an oldies station.  I couldn’t remember many of the words on the cards, but one chord at the beginning of a top-40 song from the 60s brought every word of that hit back to me.

A similar thing happened when I began to read a bit of scripture recently. “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people…” It dragged up something even deeper, the lyrics of the song, “Mr Lonely”, written and performed by the Polish-American entertainer Bobby Vinton in 1964.

 

“Lonely, I’m Mr. Lonely. I have nobody for my own.

I am so lonely, I’m Mr. Lonely. Wish I had someone to call on the phone…”

 

Loneliness, whether expressed Vinton or the writer of the Lamentations is a normal part of human life. It is experienced by persons (Vinton) and places (Lamentations). When Chiang Kai-shek moved his government and army from China to Taiwan in the late 1940s, he held power in part by vowing to re-arm and then re-take China from the communists. Part of the fiction was that Taiwan existed only as one province of the entire nation. The other provinces were “temporarily under bandit control.” Taiwan was granted its own provincial government with a legislature, a governor and capital city. These were established near the center of the island at a place named, “China Rises New Village”.   In the 1990s Taiwan experienced democratization. The need for a separate provincial government disappeared. “China Rises New Village” was still there, repurposed as a conference center. When there were no conferences in progress, with little purpose, it was a pretty lonely place. People without purpose can feel a similar kind of loneliness.

Are you familiar with the expression, “The party’s over”?  During my late 40s I used to be a parish minister. There were Sundays when I would have 2 or 3 events when I could “be in front”. My body chemistry changed. I was flooded with Adrenalin. But Mondays, when the party was over and I was alone again, felt quite different. Don’t be surprised if and when your party ends, loneliness descends.

“The party’s over” is one way of saying it, but there’s another. “The chickens have come home to roost”. The loneliness of “China Rises New Village” is due, in part, to the abusive government that established it.  Though we should not go around wondering what we’ve done wrong in the past to have become so lonely now, we can regularly be honest with ourselves about where we want things to go, and orient ourselves in that direction.  

What direction? Whether we are students, teachers, professionals, farmers, peasants or homeless people, we need to call to mind the people who care about us in the here and now.  Vinton’s song has a line wishing that he had “someone to call on the phone”. Maybe it takes less than a phone call. Maybe we only need to call up or take out a photograph to look at.

Honesty with ourselves can also be helpful. If the love we’ve once felt has grown cold, we may need to rekindle it. This isn’t just or primarily about sex, but about relationships, beginning with ourselves personally and extending to others. We can take this as privilege, but maybe it starts somewhere else, as duty. Remember whom you serve, what kind of service you owe, and do it.  It’s when we get confused about whom we serve and how to go about it that we encounter things like loneliness.

When we remember to whom we belong, and who belongs to us, when we sing together in some sort of communion, we can find hope, even in our loneliness, even for a future that it may be difficult to envision.

 

David Alexander resides in Holland, MI where he recently retired after decades in Taiwan

Put the Dirt Where it Belongs

Putting the Dirt Where It Belongs

I spent 9 months of my 18th year in Vietnam. Like former US Vice President Al Gore, I was part of the U. S. Army’s 18th Engineer brigade. Unlike him, I got very dirty. My job was to operate an earth mover to  build roads. Vietnam’s roads were narrow. The job of my battalion (the 577th) was to make one of them wider.

We brought sand from a nearby mountainside to the building site. My equipment was both large and noisy.  To communicate with us who operated it, sergeants standing on the ground used hand signals.  Operators would watch for, interpret, and follow these orders.  The signal to begin releasing the earth from the machine, spreading it as I drove along, was a closed hand struck against an open palm. When I saw that from some distance away I was expected to set things loose. Over time, operators and and sergeants would become accustomed to each other. Big signs became less necessary, and small ones sufficed.

Once I was away for a few days when a new sergeant came.  Other operators had learned how he communicated. I hadn’t. On our first day of cooperation, there was a problem. Arriving with a load of earth, I drove towards him.  When we could recognize each others’ faces, mine was confused and his was angry. His hand signals became large and emphatic. Without words he told me to stop and to climb down. Then, with no small amount of profanity, he inquired why I had not put the dirt where he wanted it. I said that I hadn’t seen his sign. Only then did I learn that his orders were not given with hands, but with eyeblinks.  All of the other drivers already knew that.

There’s a bible story about a priest who met a woman with a problem. She had come to talk to God. He watched her and misinterpreted her body language. The result was that he accused her of being a drunk.

Musicians have to be careful about directors’ body language, that’s often the only way they can know what to do. Conductors must beware; a sneeze might be misinterpreted as an order of how to sing or play. Social workers pay attention to what clients say and also to how they dress and move. Things that don’t match can be meaningful.  But guesses have to be checked or misinterpretation can result.

The priest in the bible story saw a woman praying silently, moving her lips. His misinterpretation resulted in an accusation.  But he did something right. He spoke up. He learned that he was wrong, and what she needed.

Whether we are musicians, social workers, counselors, students, teachers, heavy equipment operators or voters, we need to check our interpretations with others.  Maybe we’ll see what we’ve misunderstood. Maybe in learning another’s meaning and need, we’ll put the dirt where it belongs.

 

David Alexander resides in Holland, MI, where he recently retired after decades in Taiwan.

The Poetry of Hands

The Poetry of Hands

In 1970, Aleksandyr Solzhenitzyn, a writer from the Soviet Union, won the Nobel Prize for literature. Fearing that his government wouldn’t allow him to return home if he left the country, he didn’t go to Sweden to get the award. He had written several novels, only one of which was published in Russian. That’s the one for which he was awarded the prize. His other writings were hand-typed and carbon copied, circulating illegally. For those novels he was arrested in 1974 and thrown out the next day. He sojourned in Europe for a few months before moving to the United States, where found American life too soft, American culture too shallow and American people too weak. When the Soviet Union was no more, he returned to Russia in 1994.

In one novel Solzhenitzyn created an intellectual character in prison for his opinions. This man did slave labor by day and scholarly writing by night. His project was to prove that every human language began from the word for “hand”. This would connect language to “work” and show that he was a good communist who shouldn’t be in prison. One “handy” expression in Englis has at least two meanings. “Give me a hand” means, “help me,” and “applaud for me”. When someone asking for help says, “give me a hand” and you applaud because she’s doing a good job, she’s not happy!

When I was a kid, though my father was important to me, but I assumed that he wasn’t particularly important in the world at large. He was just a father like all my friends had. One day, though, I discovered a box of the name cards he used in his job,which involved meeting a lot of people. To me having name cards made someone very important.  After I finished a college degree and relocated to Taiwan, where name cards are common, I had some made for myself. They made me feel important. During my decades in Taiwan I returned to America every three or four years, spending several months visiting churches. I passed out many name cards and I shook many hands. At rural churches many hands belonged to farmers. Mine were small and soft compared to their large, rough and strong ones. Their hands were their name cards declaring, “I work with cows; I work with machines; I work!”

Engineers and technicians who design and make artificial hands have solved many problems helping people who have lost arms or hands recover the ability to do physical things. We have the nerve cells involved in touch all over our bodies.  When we touch, we learn the temperature, texture and solidness of what we encounter. We may even be able to tell it’s weight. Touch cells connected to our brains help us figure out what we touch or what touches us. These cells are more common in our hands than anywhere else on our bodies. More of the brain is involved in interpreting touch signals from our hands than from other parts of our bodies. Though engineers have done wonderful things, nothing replaces the sense of touch that is lost when a hand is gone.

Jesus once mansplained to a woman that God is Spirit. Of course, she already knew that.  What they both knew fought against a lot of bible language that uses “body part” words to describe the divine. The psalms are full of references to God’s eyes, face, ears, lips, wings, hands, nostrils, and feet. In Exodus we read of God’s  butt (which apparently resembles that of a cow). Psalm writers were poets who used metaphors unsupported by what we’d like to call, “facts”. Poetic use of words carries meaning beyond the factual. “Hands” indicated more about care than about anything physical. Prophets sometimes seem to be have more authority. One quoted God as saying “See, I have inscribed your names on the palms of my hands.” Does that mean God has hands? Not necessarily. God is a poet too.  

We have choices regarding our hands. We can use them to show kindness and love; support and aid; to correct people; to set folks straight; to punish them. Our hands can be signs of our identity. They can be used to get information; and to remind us of who we love. Whatever else we do with our hands, may we use them in the service of love.

 

David Alexander is a resident of Holland, MI, where he recently retired after 39 years of life in Taiwan.

Where is Your Treasure?

Where’s Your Treasure?

A new friend, a woman in her 40s, told me how neither her current profession nor her first job out of college have had any relation  with what she studied in college. No surprise to me. After taking a BA in Spanish at the end of 1975, I worked with it part-time for 6 months, then moved to Taiwan, leaving Spanish behind. But something I learned then recently surfaced from the depths of  memory.

In the 16th century Spain was the dominant sea power in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In Europe the king of Spain ruled most of Italy, parts of Austria, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The Empire stretched around the world. Wealth from the colonies created a boom, Spain’s “golden age.”  The crash of that age, began in 1588. By 1898 most of the little that remained of the overseas empire was lost in a brief war. Some intellectuals began asking serious questions, wondering where, if any existed, Spain’s treasure might lay.

Treasure is a difficult thing to wrestle with.  Our hearts tend to follow it; into our investment prospects, past glory days, or the accomplishments of the children we raise. Many people compute net worth and feel they might be doing better. We cling to what we have and look to get more. We grieve over what we have not yet acquired or about what we have lost.

A clergy couple in New Jersey wrote an appeal for a book recommendation in 2001. A woman in their church was grieving because her only child, a daughter, had grown up and moved away into a career in the US Military. “The Mom’s whole life revolved around this daughter, and the daughter now wants some space.  Can anyone recommend a good book for someone grieving their empty nest?”

            Laurence, the deacon of Rome, was martyred in the year 258. He was persecuted because he managed the church’s properties.  A magistrate demanded that the wealth of the church be turned over, so Laurence pointed to a crowd of poor people whom the church fed and clothed, saying, “These are the treasury of riches of the church.”    Treasures are not just the things we lock up in vaults and homes. Where our treasure is, there will our hearts be, also. Where’s yours?

 

David Alexander is a resident of Holland, MI, recently retired after 39 years in Taiwan.

I Guess I’m the Lucky One

I Guess I’m the Lucky One

 

As a kid, through adolescence and into middle age, I was generally afraid of “getting in trouble” so I fenced my own behavior with many rules. The result was that in many ways I took longer than my peers to grow up.

 

It was especially so in my teens and early 20s, when I kept away from things that brought much pleasure to some of my friends. These behaviours “weren’t allowed” to me, because I sincerely believed that if I was caught at them, I’d be “in trouble.” This inchoate trouble might come from immediately from the authority figures in my life, and if not from them, it would come then eternally from a divine source. I didn’t necessarily want to see my friends punished for breaking my real or imagined rules, but I didn’t want to take those risks myself

 

I eventually came to see most, if not all of the activities on my “don’t do it” list as morally neutral. My fear of trouble resulted in my missing pleasures like coffee with a cigarette, occasional lost weekends, regular marijuana highs, “friends with benefits” relationships and stuff like that.

 

Both of my parents smoked like chimneys, and when my mother’s parents weren’t visiting, the fridge was always stocked with the beer they drank like camels. But I come to my now advanced age of 67 with clear lungs, no arrests or convictions for driving under the influence of intoxicants, and a loving and unconflicted sexual relationship to my wife.

 

I guess, compared to those friends who enjoyed greater freedom when I was hedged in by so many self-made onerous and useless rules, I might be regarded as the lucky one. I can’t say for sure, but I guess.

 

David Alexander resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan

See You At The Top

See you at the Top!

I lived in Taiwan for 39 years, all of them in the southern fourth of that nation’s territory. My children were born and grew up in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s “second city.” On my occasional visits to Taipei, up north, I always felt like a foreigner.

Proud to be a Southern Californian, I first drew air and grew up in Los Angeles. I bless God that I never had to live or work San Francisco or the Bay Area. San Francisco did attempt a call to me when I was a child. A TV commercial for the Mark Hopkins Hotel ran on stations I watched in Los Angeles. The ads billed a particular upstairs bar there as:  “the most romantic cocktail lounge in San Francisco,” describing it as, “always elegant, … a favorite with famous, rich and beautiful people from all over the world…” The ad concluded with an expression that remains with me today, “See you at the top; The Top of the Mark.” Though the city has no appeal to me, the location at the top of Nob Hill there seems attractive, because it’s on a high place, and I like mountaintops.

Traditionally lots of religions have chosen mountains for prayer places. In ancient Israel the people often used “high places” for worship. King Solomon’s dream is set at one of those high places.  In ancient Greece the temples to the sun god Apollo were on peaks. When the Greeks became Christians they turned those temples into churches, dedicated to St. Elijah, who, like Apollo had a sky chariot.

Mountains are often at a distance from the hustle and bustle of life in towns.  Many young people have gone to summer camps or conferences in hilly or mountainous locations and come back changed for life by the encounters that they have had there.  I did that a few times in the 1960s. Maybe it was the intense companionship, maybe it was the great recreation and daily swimming, maybe it was the different girls from those in my own church youth group. I don’t know. Anyway, when the cars arrived to take us home, we weren’t all overjoyed.

We tend to feel safe when we can see far enough into the distance or the future to make plans. Sadly, we don’t always have that opportunity. Much of our lives pass by in a conditions of unknowing.  We need clarity. Our backgrounds, immediate foregrounds, and distant hopes distract us and prevent us from learning new and exciting things from what is all around us. Life can be bland at times. We need retreats to get away from it, we need mountaintop experiences to get us through the valleys in which we spend so much of our time.

We need to be open to surprise, delight, and to the possibility of being overtaken by joy immeasurable. There’s no guarantee that any of these will come our way., There’s no way to prepare ourselves for any of them, but we need openness to them. Elsewise, what good is the Top of the Mark, or any other high place?

 

David Alexander is a resident of Holland, MI. Recently retired here after 39 years in Taiwan.