I’m starting to believe that my green t-shirt and my Levi’s plaid button-up are not dirty when I wear them for a day. I am not believing the sad truth. Maybe it’s because I live in Bolivia and I want to believe people can’t smell me. Maybe they can’t smell me. Maybe it’s because I wash my clothes in the backyard…which is not what you’re imagining. It’s cold here. Maybe I make much todo about nothing. I’m starting to believe my cat is an independently employed spy. I think she knows and is indifferent to what her preeminent sociologist owner thinks, but has watched her every move and NOW pretends to be the cat that lives here. I talk to it…all the time. I’m starting to believe the irony of this environment. Why shouldn’t I talk to the cat that does not leave me alone. Or why shouldn’t I wear the same clothes over and over. It’s cold here. We can’t smell anything unless we’re smashed in little mass transit Toyota vans that never need new transmissions. Even the 1960’s Ford buses are still climbing the steep steep valley “calles”. The streets are cobbled and sidewalks are narrow. The homes are gated and the “oficinas” facaded. At night it’s dim and thick and old and the Old Ford buses lumber up the little narrow streets, too big for normal life and barely big enough for 800 passengers. And inside I sit and I think about the irony of the circumstances. I think about my cat and my landlady and my home and my writing—or lack there of. I think about Spanish and teaching English. I think about you and I think…sometimes this little life in big-ironic-Bolivia is to be transparent. It’s to say a whole lot of things all at once, but not incoherence. It’s to say, “hi Mom and Dad, I’m alive. I’ll tell you a story.” It’s to connect and share. I remember someone once saying, “We teach what we know”. I know a whole lot. I mean a whole damn lot.
I’m kind of joking. I know you didn’t expect that. “Enserio?” I know you don’t know how much I love absurd humor and words…or that I’ve secretly wanted to be British ever since I met my 12th grade American English teacher. “…but we teach what we know,” inadvertently, knowingly and unknowingly. You behave and talk and open your mouth and say things that describe something of what you believe, what you think. Aaack?! I think all the time. I think I have loads to say, probably all the time, but what do I know? What should I teach? I’m a teacher, an ESL teacher.
The funeral was on a Wednesday. The viewing was packed. The casket lay lengthwise in the sunlit room, concentric rings of sad, brightly colored flowers covering the floor. I can’t remember the last time I had seen so many flowers. I found the pastor dead. I found him in the swollen, rainy season river on the way to Coroico. Two weeks before I had heard him speak in that same church. He was calm and chose his words. He knew what he wanted to say. I think maybe he was wry but not silly. He was tall and handsome in his Sunday suit, close cut hair and one long lock in, I think, a very selected location. He carried himself as man who enjoyed simple things, his wife, the church, the Bible, and truths that somehow simplify the ironies of La Paz, Bolivia. He smiled and it was confident but considerate. He reflected on the Bible in front of him and was transparent. I found him captivating, and I found him in the river, the same but beaten and lying still, face down. He’d been missing four days and the complications of getting him back to his agonizing family made me feel numb. I don’t know why. I can’t. Good men die everyday. I wondered why I wasn’t him, taken in the river, bone and skin stolen from the body. “It’s appointed unto man once to die.” I think he walked through a gate of splendor that day. Or maybe for a moment I did…as if that sandbar was a space between Eternity and Bolivia, God and his time and me, Feb.20th. The sandbar sat amid those rainy season rapids and on it was only a body. Back in La Paz people, bodies of love, breathing and praying and hurting, waited. I watched. I have never seen so many people at a funeral. Affected or not, those who knew him honored the memory of an exemplary man and wept at the loss. That’s what I felt. He was 37. That’s not what he said though. “He said he gave his life to Jesus,” in a video testimony he had made when he was probably 18. He gave it away. His wife lost him. His congregation lost him. But Christ holds him. That pastor’s death made those people weep because it’s God’s great love he shared with them. God shared him with them.
God made us to love him. Ironic? We were never meant to die. But we (Adam) had a choice. We always have a choice. We can always say, “Jesus didn’t die because he loved the whole world. That’s not true. …Jesus wasn’t God’s Son and God has nothing to with good men dying…and neither does Adam.”
But why do people want to fall in love? ...I rhetorize. To be chosen? To feel chosen? YES. To be known and somehow love and know another? YES. …And do people die? YES. And does God say, “I love you”? YES. Does that die? Does it change? God is love, all love, the ethos of love. He made you for him. You are (the verb “to be”, “ser”) to be loved. 1 Jn 4:19 “We love because he first loved us.” Ps. 8:17 I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me.” He wants you to know he loves you.
Life and Death is the choosing or the not choosing eternal, perfect Love. Death is at the end of your life, and it is also in the walking away, thinking, “He doesn’t love me. I don’t understand. I do what I want.” Life, your life, began in the mind of God before your parents lay together, and you know love when you believe what he says...about you, “He loves me. He has always loved me. 'Do you take this man...? and Do you take this woman...?' ‘I do.’” (1 Jn 4:7) “…love comes from God and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” Life and death are the daily practice…or lack there of…of love. Choose him. Choose to be loved and then love as though love is of God…and that is why we are here. Fall in. Tip over backwards and fall so deeply in.
I left the funeral feeling all of life is for living a transparency, for telling about a Love that is complete and I get it and it’s difficult and it’s serene and ironic and I don’t get it…because it’s Love. I left feeling ‘I will live that way’. I will choose, because Love chooses…everyone. I will wait, because love never leaves. I will live a transparent life, because thank God, I know how to do nothing else.
So…what do I know? What do I want to share? A few stories about life I can’t keep for me. I’m starting to believe….
1 Pet. 1:12 “So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have. I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body.”
