Afterwords

The mission of God always has an inner as well as an outer movement. God's mission in Creation is to bring about communion, the coming-together of differences into relationships that are more than the sums of their parts. The mission of the Church is to restore all people in communion with each other and with God in Christ; that is a particular form of the general mission of God. Mission trips like ours to Honduras help to build up communion, relationship that is more than the sum of its members, among different people in Christ; and that is a particular instance of the general mission of the Church. Communion has an inner and an outer aspect: as we come into deeper community with others, we have the opportunity to learn more about ourselves, to become more fully alive and aware persons in more fully communing relationships. Every mission in God's name has an inner as well as an outer movement. Every mission in God's name is both outer and inner work.

The outer work of this mission trip has been relatively easy to describe: that's what most of this blog has been about. Words like "trench" and "roof beams" and "church service" point to things that most of us recognize right away. The inner work of this mission is a little more difficult to put into words. Phrases like "sacred sites" or "movement of the Spirit" can mean many different things to many different people, and those meanings can change as experiences change. Now that we're back home, it's time to start sifting and sorting through the memories, time to start interpreting and integrating the inner work.

That inner work will be different for each one of us. For some of us it might have to do with thinking through the connection we feel between this kind of labor-for-others and what we're more accustomed to doing in church on Sunday mornings. For some of us it might have to do with changing our habits of commerce and consumption in response to the poverty we've encountered. For some of us it might have to do with cultivating a deeper sense of gratitude for everyday things in life, things like fresh fruit on a hot day, or a good meal after hard work, or a handmade hat that doesn't quite fit but was given with unanticipated joy and goodwill--things that were given to us by folks who had little to give. For some of us it might have to do with being more ready to recognize what we have in common with those who are foreign to us, while still respecting the reality of what makes us different. For some of us it might have to do with learning yet again, on a yet deeper level, the truth of St Paul's words that our different gifts come together into one body in Christ. Although we all went on the same trip, we all had our own unique experience, and integrating that experience into who we are and how we live will give each of us our unique inner work.

For me, one piece of inner work I bring home has to do with the passion of prayer. I've described our services of Holy Eucharist. But one thing that struck me, and I didn't quite know how to write about before, was the way they did the Prayers of the People. At both Espiritu Santo and Mision Santa Cruz, we used Form III of the Prayers, in Spanish of course; and at the end of Form III, in both English and Spanish, comes a time when we are bid to pray for our own needs and the needs of others. In the Anglo churches I've served, this is usually the time when the prayer leader reads off a list of special intercessions for the sick, for those in need, for the armed forces, for the departed, and so on. In the Honduran churches they did it differently: when Deacon Concepcion invited the people to pray, they started praying: spontaneously, some loudly, some quietly, all at once, saying the things that were on their minds, saying the things that were in their hearts. Concepcion himself grew more and more fervent as he prayed, and even without knowing much Spanish, I could hear the names of people, I could hear snippets of Prayer Book language, I could hear the traditional role of the deacon to be a prayer-servant of the people--but more than that, I could hear that his spirit was really all wound up in the Holy Spirit, and that this praying meant something, this praying was doing something, this praying was an energy that was really moving in the world. Now as a priest and a theologian, I believe that about prayer, I think that about prayer, I can give you a metaphysical account of that causal efficacy of prayer. But I confess that sometimes I wonder; sometimes the pall of scientific materialism that hangs over most Western modern culture creeps up on me; sometimes I fear that maybe prayer is all just words, maybe prayer is just talking to ourselves, maybe prayer does something between the soul and God but doesn't really make a bit of difference to the world. Sometimes. And then I encounter something like the Prayers of the People at Espiritu Santo that reminds me of the passion of prayer, something that shows me that a world where this kind of praying happens really is different from a world where this kind of praying doesn't happen. One of the things I want to integrate in my inner work from this mission is a renewed sense of the real personal power of passionate prayer.

It is things like these that we bring home from Honduras. The inner work, the outer work, the memories, the pictures, the stories, the foundation for a retaining wall, the rafters for a church roof, the relationships begun and continued, the prayers prayed together, the presence of Christ among us--that is the stuff of communion, the mission of the Church, the mission of God.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

And So It Begins...

Today was our last day on the work site, but certainly not the last day of work at Mision Santa Cruz. We finished transforming the trench into a foundation, and did perhaps as much work in one morning as we had all day yesterday. Overnight the weather changed: the temperature dropped, it rained, and this morning was cool--well, cooler than it had been--and "soft," with mist and occasional light rain. I found it nearly perfect weather to work in. And apparently I wasn't alone, because, as I said, we got a lot done in a relatively short time. By the time we had finished lunch, there really wasn't much work left to do--just one job that required only about five people to work in close quarters. So five volunteers stepped forward, and the rest of us came back to the hotel.

But not to laze about! It was time to purchase the coffee. Every year our mission trippers bring back from San Rafael farms a load of coffee beans to sell at the church at spaghetti suppers and other occasions. The coffee sales help support the mission trip, and they also support a wonderful farm that is reclaiming once-wasted land for organic, shade-grown coffee. We've been told that the coffee plot, with its banana shade trees, has attracted birds and butterflies that haven't been seen in that area for a long time, and that surface streams are running across ground that had been eroded and unable to retain water before. This is not just a cash crop, but a wonderful example of land reclamation. It makes me proud to be bringing back forty pounds for the church. And a fair amount for home use, too. And it tastes really, really good. Did I mention that?

So we arranged for the coffee, and unloaded big bags full of smaller bags when it was delivered to the hotel, and divvied up the smaller bags for packing in the mission tripper's luggage. Lee and I got our share in our big suitcases; now our room smells delicious. It almost makes me wish we didn't have any clothes to bring back .. We could pack that much more coffee.

Another thing San Rafael farm is doing these days is making cheese. One member of the owning family, Carlos, studied food science both in Honduras and in the States, and he learned cheesemaking on a farm in Indiana, and now he's come home to practice the art with the milk from the eighteen Brown Swiss cows at San Rafael. He is very good at his art. A group of us sampled six of his cheeses--including a wasabe fromage blanc and a smoked baby gouda that were my personal favorites--with Chilean wines as a before-dinner treat. And it was quite a treat! The cheese platter definitely goes on the list of things to do when we come back.

But I get ahead of myself... After the coffee and before the cheese, we went back to the work site to collect the five volunteers, and to celebrate the Holy Eucharist with the people of Santa Cruz, and another congregation that had been invited for the occasion. We'd been planning on celebrating in the shell of the church, but the rain and the mud kind of changed that plan. Instead, we gathered for worship on the patio of the house where we've been eating our lunches. Concepcion was there; Padre Mejia, the one priest for this whole area, was there; members of the local Christian mariachi band were there; and the people were there. The Epistle lesson was from Romans, and even though I understood only a few words of the Spanish at a time, I recognized that it was the passage where Paul speaks of the Church being many members yet all one body in Christ--and standing at the altar, celebrating communion with Episcopalians of the Diocese of Honduras and the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, I knew the truth of Paul's words in a new way. There is something here that is bigger than all of us.

And that's why I title this blog entry with reference to beginnings. Our work here is done for another year. But this ending turns around and is transformed into a beginning of a new stage in the life of the congregation of Santa Cruz. At the service we presented them with a cross made from Virginia walnut wood, as a sign of our continuing relationship. Someday they'll put that cross on their wall, after the roof is finished and the interior is plastered and the altar is built. Someday we'll return and see that cross in place. And that, in it's turn, will be a new beginning for this part of the body of Christ. That is the gift of the God who always creates and always promises to make all things new.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

Hot Hot Hot

It was very hot at the work site today!--so much so that even the local folks said it was too hot to work. I've always thought that coming here in the winter meant it would be cooler than in the summer, and it is, at least a little. But the real seasonal difference here is not so much hot and cold as it is wet and dry. So we got a taste of the "normal" hot weather today.

Today's work was further complicated by the fact that the electricity went out this morning--all over town, and apparently well into the countryside as well. We were told that the power company was working on the lines, so it was, I suppose, what you could call a "scheduled outage." But with the electric saw and the electric arc welder thus rendered out of commission, the planned work on raising roof beams could not be done today. So we went to Plan B: the trench.

And here we got a bit of good news. It seems the trench was deep enough and straight enough (mostly) not to need any more digging. Instead, it was time to make a foundation. Huzzah! So for the better part of the day we shifted between making cement, searching through the rock piles for just the right sized rocks, carefully placing the rocks in the trench, and slopping cement over them. The skilled construction workers among us placed rocks. The rest of us formed long bucket-brigade-style lines to move the rocks, and later the buckets of cement, from up the hill to down the hill where they were needed for the foundation. It is to be a retaining wall, after all, so the hillside is a key element in the design. It was really muscle-straining work; and since I make it a practice not to strain my muscles too often, it was work I found difficult and draining. And it seems I wasn't the only one: by 2:30 in the afternoon we were all flagging, and when it was believed we'd run out of cement, the general consensus was that work should stop immediately. (Actually, there were more bags of cement tucked away somewhere, but as they weren't in immediate view, it was an honest mistake.) So we knocked off earlier than usual--even earlier than the ususal "earlier than usual"--and came back to the hotel. At which point the hotel's generator gave out, the water pump stopped working, and showers became an object of unfulfillable desire.

I will admit to being less than my ideal self at that moment. More than anything else, at just that moment I wanted to be very still, very silent, very prone, and very chilled. I managed three out of four. And Lee, bless her patient heart, said to me "You don't really seem to enjoy this very much; why do you come on these mission trips?"

I had to think about that for awhile--and only partly because at that moment I didn't feel quite capable of coherent speech. But the answer that emerged from some reflection had to do with that service at Espiritu Santo on Sunday. And with the ruins. And with the incredible hospitality the local church members show us. And with the way that silly trench changed, bit by bit, stone by stone, all through the day, into solid foundation, something that people who come to work after us will be able to build on, and raise up higher, and fulfill the design, and turn into something we ourselves can only begin to guess at now. What a metaphor for the ministry of service! What a metaphor for the church! And, as well as being a great metaphor, it's a concrete fact (yes, I had to say it), a real thing we built where there was nothing before. There is a kind of satisfaction that goes along with that reality, a satisfaction that is worth the aching muscles and the straining joints and the trips to the rockpile and the bucketing of cement.

And a marvelous tilapia dinner at our favorite restaurant afterwards, a dinner that gathered our whole group around a common table and a common accomplishment--well, that was pretty satisfying, too.

Tomorrow is our final work day, to be concluded with a church service inside the shell of the church we're helping to build. It will be a grace-filled moment, in many ways.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

Half a Day

It's Monday, and that means back to work. The work progresses: some beams were raised for the roof, and the digging crews got the trench closer to the needed depth for the foundation of the retaining wall. It seems as though the required depth keeps changing; the foreman comes, takes a look, says "another two feet"; we dig another two feet; the foreman comes, takes a look, says "another two feet." So we dig. At least it means that none of us need to scamper up the scaffold and try to put roof beams in place.

After lunch (lovely local tilapia, by the way) Lee and I and John Lane revived an old custom of these Honduran mission trips: we took the afternoon off for personal purposes. Apparently it was the case on the first couple of trips that people got at least one half-day off during the week, while others took up the slack on the work site. But some over-achievers (as it was explained to me) on one trip worked straight through, and the custom fell into abeyance. Well, say I, it's high time to revive it. So the three of us cadged a ride back into town with the lunch crew; John met up with Bizzy, who'd taken the day off herself because of a slight infection she's been monitoring; and Lee and I went to the museum at the archeological park. It's much larger than the museum in town that we'd seen on Saturday, and we spent a good two hours taking in the sculptures, the friezes, and the exquisite stonework that has made the Copan Mayan site famous.

The most amazing feature of the museum is the full-size replica of the "Rosalila" temple that is in the center of the open-roofed museum building. The Rosalila is a temple from perhaps the middle of the Classic period of Copan culture, which had been completely built over and buried by a later temple, when a king wanted to enhance his prestige by building--literally--on the foundation of his ancestor. But the Rosalila wasn't just buried haphazardly: it was buried with respect and care, to be the heart of the new temple. The upshot for archeologists is that the burial process preserved the older temple almost completely intact, not only with its stonework, but with the elaborate stucco on the stone, and the vivid painting on the stucco. The Rosalila is still under the bigger pyramid; but the keepers of the site have built a full-sized replica, with the stucco modeling and the colorful painting, just as the original would look if it were unearthed. It's an amazing sight, and the museum is built to highlight it to advantage. I don't know anywhere near enough Mayan mythology to understand all the symbols and motifs on the temple. But one of the things that strikes me about it is the faces: there are faces everywhere: faces of people and faces of monster/spirits, faces on the corners, faces in medallions, faces emerging from the mouths of other faces. It's as if the temple itself is community of myriad spirit-presences, watching the world from their otherworld vantage, and ready to communicate visions and meanings at a moment's notice. I'd post a picture, but none of our snapshots would really do it justice. Look it up with an internet search; you'll be amazed.

After the museum, we met up with the rest of the group, and then all went out for dinner at the home of a family from the Santa Rita congregation who've been friends of our group from the beginning. Putting on a meal for nineteen people (our mission group plus our bus driver and his daughter) is no easy task, but the extended family handled it with generosity and grace. And really good food!

So this was a multifaceted day. Not quite so multifaceted as the faces on the Rosalila, perhaps, but watchful and communicative in its own way. Working in community, eating in community, appreciating the art of a long-ago community. These are things that make the mission not only an outreach to someone else, but a gift for our souls, too.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

Two Sacred Sites

Sunday is a day for sacred space, and today we had a double dose.

In the morning we went to the town of Santa Rita, just a few kilometers up the road, where we joined the congregation of Espiritu Santo (Holy Spirit) for a rousing celebration of the Eucharist. Concepcion, the deacon in charge, invited me to celebrate; but since I have no Spanish, we traded paragraphs: I'd read in English, and he'd repeat in Spanish, and together we prayed the prayer. I did try a few phrases in Spanish--like "Oremos" for "Let us pray"--and while I'm sure my pronunciation was atrocious to the ears of native speakers, they were gracious to me and made the responses. I love liturgy.

And it was a great experience of what liturgy can do. Although the Anglos in the room could not understand the Hondurenas (even our Spanish-speakers have a hard time keeping up when they're at full speed), and the Hondurenas could not understand the Anglos, we still came together in prayer and worship and communion, because the liturgy is bigger than any of us, and the liturgy has its own rhythms and movements and shape, and the liturgy carried us all along together into the epiphany of Christ's love in our midst. As I put the wafers into people's hands at communion, saying "El Cuerpo de Cristo" as well as I could, knowing that word and gesture and bread were all coming together to communicate more than was humanly possible, I was deeply touched by the awareness of God at work among us, and the gift of sharing in the making of the peace that surpasses understanding. The whole church, which our mission trips had helped to build, was bathed in the radiance of sacred space.

After church we headed back into town, where different parties banded together for different afternoon activities. Five us us--Lee and me, John and Bizzy Lane, and Ralph Ruedy--went to the ruins, where a very thorough and splendidly informed tour guide led us on a journey through the ancient city and the deep mythology of the Mayan Copanecas. I visited the ruins last year, and I've done some reading as well; but today I felt as though some things really came alive in my understanding in a way they hadn't before. Just one example: the king whose name I've always seen rendered "18 Rabbit" actually had a much more interesting name: the glyph looks like a rabbit (well, like an agouti, really), but it means "image of the god," so the king's name was really "He Who is Eighteen Times an Image of the Dynastic God." How's that for a royal name! We spent nearly three and a half hours walking slowly from building to building and stela to stela, hearing stories of the kings of Copan, myths of the Creation Hero Twins, fine points of the artistic development of Copan culture. It was truly wonderful.

It was part of Maya mythology that the king served a priestly function to communicate with the gods of the heavens and the ancestor-spirits of the underworld on behalf of the people. Mountains reached toward the heavens, and caves communicated with the underworld; so the place of effective ritual was a mountain with a cave at the top; and that is what they built their temples to symbolize. The acropolis at Copan is ringed with such artificial mountains, marking the whole enclosure as sacred space. It has even been suggested that one of the plazas could be flooded at will, so that it became a representation of the watery underworld upon which the solid land floats; when the king emerged from the temple-top chamber and looked out over that artificial lake, it was like looking out over the whole creation.

I find encounters with ancient myths, and the religious spaces that embody them, to be fascinating. The way the human spiritual imagination works to map its cosmic visions onto physical spaces runs very deep in us, across many cultures, through all the centuries. Trinity Church, sitting in its churchyard full of ancestors, with its tower reaching toward the heavens, with its nave to gather the people for the journey of life, with its sightlines focused on an altar that stands below a representation of Christ ascending, bearing the human reality up into the very being of God--Trinity Church is its own kind of map of the cosmos, a representation of the spiritual imagination worked out in the physical world. I come home to my church with my imagination enlivened and my spirit deepened by these encounters with other people's forms of sacred space.

One Sunday, two very different sacred sites, both bearing their own special gifts of insight and wisdom and love from God. And both reminding me to keep my eyes open for the sacredness of every space where God can be revealed

Sabado en Copan

The Spanish name for Saturday is Sabado, which comes from Sabbath, which is a day of rest--and that's what we did today: rest. Instead of going to the work site, we had time to stroll around town, visit the shops, try a new place for lunch (well, new to me and Lee), and just generally play. Lee and I lunched at a place called "Casa de Todo," which means "House of Everything," and they mean it: it's a restaurant, a gift shop, a wireless hotspot, a laundry, and a paperback book exchange. Lee had a chicken and guacamole sandwich, which she promptly proclaimed "the best sandwich I've had in my life"; and I tried the baleadas, which is sort of the Honduran version of a burrito, with beans and cheese and crema wrapped in flour tortillas. I got the extra special version with eggs. All familiar tastes, but blended in a way, and made with such fresh ingredients, that the overall flavor was truly wonderful. I love it when simple things reveal depths of goodness we don't typically expect, or we're too busy to notice, from them.

Lee and I spent a good part of the morning in the archeological museum just off the town plaza. Copan is of course a major Mayan site; the actual ruins are just a little way outside the modern village; but many original stonework pieces from the ruins were brought into the village and housed in a museum early on in the site restoration, as much for their own protection from further erosion by the elements as for people's ease in viewing them. When I was here last year I spent as much time as I could in the ruins and in the major museum at the ruin site; but until today I'd never been in the smaller museum in town. There are some wonderful carvings from buildings, stelae of rulers, and very delicately flaked flint ceremonial objects in that museum. Some of the information on the pieces was translated into English, but much of it was only in Spanish, so I'm not at all sure if I understand much more now than I did before visiting the museum this morning (especially concerning the bloodletting rites of the rulers--ugh), but it was still an amazing feeling to get a close look at things that had been part of a people's vibrant cultural and spiritual life so long ago and in a mental world so different from our own. We are going to the ruins and the big museum tomorrow, and I can't wait to visit them again. I think I want to read up on Smoke Jaguar and 18 Rabbit (interesting names these Mayan rulers had...), the two rulers who really consolidated Copan's power at its zenith, before seeing their monuments tomorrow.

There is something very special about having a day of rest, a day to be curious, a day to try new things, a day that is not parceled out into work blocks and obligations, in the midst of a heavy work schedule. And I think that's true whether one's work is heavy manual labor or intense emotional labor or focused intellectual labor. I think that is the wisdom of the sabbath, a wisdom we would all do well to cultivate, and a wisdom that presented itself for the sharing on this Sabado in Copan.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

TGIF

May the blessing of God rest upon the people who figured out that the best schedule for our mission trip is to work for two days, have a weekend, then work for three more! It makes life much easier for those of us unaccustomed to hours of physical labor.

Work today continued on the trench for the retaining wall foundation. Part of the soil we're digging through is actually fill that was trucked in more than a year ago to provide flat space where before there had been only hillside. So to get the trench deep enough to be a strong foundation, we have to dig pretty much to the original ground level. This provides some interesting challenges, as for instance when we encountered a tree that had been partially buried by the original fill and now had to be cleared for the foundation. The crowning moment of the day for me was when we dug the tree down to its roots, chopped a couple of roots loose, and watched the whole tree tip over with a slow eerie grace. And we didn't even need to get the ax!

It wasn't all digging, of course. We unloaded truck deliveries of roof beams, roofing sheet metal, cinder blocks, and bags of cement. We painted said beams. We went through another two big bottles of water. It was a hot day today. Once again today, we quit a bit early because the water ran out. I think we've figured this out: drink lots of water, and stop work early. Sounds like a plan.

The town of Copan Ruinas picks up the pace for Friday nights. Saturday and Sunday are market days, but on the Friday nights beforehand the shops open up, the bars are doing more business, there are more street vendors, and generally more people about. This allowed us to see firsthand how some foreign policy decisions have effects on local lives. Oakley and Ted and Michael, who speak enough Spanish to have actual conversations with the owners of the restaurants and hotel we frequent, had heard that business was way down, due in large part to the absence of American tourists because of the travel advisories posted after the ouster of Zelaya as president. Cashapas, a favorite restaurant, had not had a single customer from July to December. Earlier today I saw a few other visitors staying in the Plaza Copan hotel with us, and they were not Americans. And walking by the plaza tonight, I didn't see any other Americans at all; last year I remember at least a few here at the same time we were. One Copaneco starting yelling obscenities at Lee and me as we walked to dinner, venting his general rage at American interference with their enconomy at the only Americans he could see. It is disturbing to come to another place, intending to do some good while you're there, and to realize that you are the symbol of some people's anger at the same time you're doing your best to join with others to be a sign of hope. But then the Gospel is often disturbing, and we are certainly not the first to grapple with anger while we try to share in hope.

Many of our party have been checking emails and phoning home, and there is great interest here in how you all in Staunton are coping with the snow. We are encouraged by the reports we've been hearing. We trust you'll arrange for sunny skies and snow-melting temperatures by the time we get back.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

More digging

We had our first day at the work site today. It is immensely gratifying to see a place that was just a bare plot and a pile of rocks when we first encountered it, and which we left as a set of foundations with rebar towers sticking out at intervals, standing now as a shell of a building with real walls and windows and doorways. It is just a shell, of course, and there's a lot for us to do this week, but it is gratifying to see it start to look like a church.

The first thing we learned on the site is that they want a retaining wall at the edge of the property, on the downhill side of the church. So we needed to dig a trench for the foundation for that wall. I remembered digging foundations from last year, so it was easy to fall into a familiar rhythm: someone with more skill and strength than I have goes to it with a pickaxe to break up the clods of soil, and I follow with a shovel to clear the broken clods from the steadily deepening trench. About four of us formed a good rotation team on one end of the trench, while others were working similar tactics at the other end. When the two groups met I thought we ought to have a golden spike for the occasion, but there was no time for ceremony. Other tasks beckoned. A good deal of the rocks and dirt we took from the trench were wheelbarrowed up to the church by eagerly volunteering local children, where the soil was used as fill for the dais on which the church's altar will eventually be placed. A beautiful synergy emerged.

At one point in the day, Ted and Wolman, our Honduran foreman, built a scaffold that will be used for some of the roofing work. I don't think they'll be getting me up there at all. But I watched with real appreciation as a bunch of boards and posts became a scaffold at the hands of two talented builders.

It was a very sunny and hot day today--hotter than I recall it being last year; hotter than some who've been making this trip for awhile say they ever remember it being--so we all had to be careful about drinking enough water and checking our sunblock from time to time. We actually went through two big bottles of water by mid-afternoon; and by that time we were all noticeably flagging in energy, so the decision was made to knock off a little early and make sure we maintained our energies for the next days' work. It was a popular decision.

As we sat around the pool in the hotel, some with cold beers, some with cold soft drinks, some in the pool splashing about, we checked our emails and compared notes about what we were hearing from Staunton. Just how many inches of snow do you all have forecast for this weekend? We've heard varyng accounts. We all wish you the best with your snow emergency--but I'll be honest: snow is kind of far from my mind tonight. Sunburn and blisters are higher on our list of concerns.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

We are here! We are here!

Well, after our scary snowy ride to Dulles and our long wait and the wee-hour gate, we had a blissfully uneventful pair of flights--the first to San Salvador and the second to San Pedro Sula--and a four hour bus ride to Copan Ruinas. The bus ride provided a little adventure in that the engine overheated a couple of times while climbing steep and windy mountain roads. But a little water and some time chillin' (literally) by the side of the road took care of that, and we made our way in good time. It is very good to be here.

I remember being told once that human beings tend not to remember pain. We remember times when we were hurt, but not the sensation of the hurt itself. I wonder if that applies to travel, as well. Trips like this always remind me that I don't like traveling very much. I like being places, seeing new things, having new experiences; but the process of getting there always seems to me to be kind of a pain. And invariably, when I look back on a trip, it's the fun of being there and not the hassle of getting there that I remember. So I'm going to chalk the airport anxiety and crowded-plan curmudgenism up to personal idiosyncracy, and, now that we've arrived, get on with the enjoyment of being here.

Several of us have opted for cleaning up and catching a nap after traveling through the night. But a few have gone to the work site at Mision Santa Cruz to check things out and see what we'll be doing during our week here. We dug trenches and laid foundations last year; and just recently we saw pictures of the walls that have been put on those foundations. It's beginning to look like a church! The roof needs to be put on next, and then interior finishing work needs to be started. We'll have a better sense of what all that will really mean when we get the report from the work site inspection.

But for now, having arrived and settled in a bit, it's time to go in search of dinner!

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

Out of the snow, into the gate

We've reached our first milestone on the trip to Honduras: we've arrived at Dulles Airport and are waiting for our plane.

We left Staunton at about 8pm, in the middle of a snowstorm that had been gathering strength all day. We and our luggage filled two vans, driven by hearty volunteers from the parish who were willing to get us to the airport in the snow, and who wisely decided to find a hotel room nearby and not venture home until at least some of the snow could be cleared from the roads in the morning. Thanks, John and Erik!

Leaving for Honduras in wintry weather seems to be a running theme. Last year it was freezing rain and heavy ice. This year it was snow. Makes the prospect of sub-tropical weather all the more appealing.

I'd never thought of it before, but there are certain advantages to checking in to an airport after midnight. Only a few of the airline service desks are open, so there are only a few lines to wait in. Passing through security is a breeze--once you find the one security checkpoint in the whole airport that is open 24/7. People are nicer, because there are fewer of them around to be rude. Of course, there is also the drawback of getting to your gate with three hours to spare before your flight, and having none of the concourse shops open. Makes for a good time to nap. Or blog.

So here we are, camped out on semi-comfortable airport seats, gathering our energies for church construction and relationship building and Mayan ruin visiting and a different sort of participation in the Body of Christ. And snow and late hours notwithstanding, we're off to a good start.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+

Preliminaries

The word "preliminary" means "just before the threshold"; and here's a thought just before the threshold of our Honduras trip.

This past weekend was the annual Diocesan Council of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, and Lee and I spent the weekend in Roanoke, doing diocesan business, seeing diocesan friends, participating in diocesan workshops--and also being away from home, shaken a bit out of the usual routine. Council was good; but at times I found myself questioning the wisdom of spending a weekend being busy away from home, just two days before leaving for Honduras, to spend a week being busy away from home. Isn't that crowding the calendar just a little too much?

Perhaps. We'll see if I feel a powerful urge to nap more than usual in the days to come.

But there is an upside to going to Council just before the mission trip, as well. Gathering as the diocese is a significant reminder that none of us does ministry all alone. As individuals we have our peculiar gifts and talents; as congregations we have our particular programs and partnerships; and all of these are set in wider and wider contexts, widening circles of connection and importance; so that what we do, we always do with others. At Council we heard about ministry and mission relationships our diocese has with the Sudan, with the diocese of Bradford in England, and with Episcopal Relief and Development for earthquake relief in Haiti and malaria prevention in Africa. We heard about various Haiti relief projects going forward in convocations and congregations within the diocese. We heard about--and actively engaged in--ministry and mission involving children, youth, young adults, middle-adults, and senior adults, all in a seamless garment, woven from top to bottom, of mission in Christ. We worked and learned and listened and prayed as members of a Church that transcends and includes all the particular bits of life any given one of us may know.

And that sets a good context for our mission trip to Honduras. This is not something that the seventeen of us are setting out to do all on our own. We go to Honduras as representatives of Trinity (and Emmanuel, and others), carried forth on the prayers and support of so many people of the parish. We go to Honduras as partners with the Diocese of Honduras, whose plans for growth and mission we are honored and happy to assist; we don't just show up in Copan saying "We know what's best for you and we're here to do it," but we develop mission goals and work plans based on local leaders saying "This is what God calls us to do and here's how you can help." We go to Honduras as participants in the Mission of God to bring all creatures into communion with God and each other in Christ--and understanding that helping to build one church building in one community in one Central American country is but one step in that whole emerging communion dance.

Our trip to Honduras is to us a big deal--but it is a big deal in an even bigger context, the context of the always-expanding, all-embracing love of Christ. And attending the gathering of the household of the diocese just before the threshold of our Honduras trip is a good way of being reminded of that larger context.

Even if it does seem to crowd the calendar just a little.

May the Peace of Christ be with you,
Paul+