Tag: Rachel Pieh Jones

Pillars – How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus

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“I have waited for a book like Pillars all my adult life, a personal book that discovers similarities and
honors differences between Christianity and Islam, a book that . . . shows what can happen when we
connect rather than collide.”

Marilyn R. Gardner, author of Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging

I think it was in 2012 when I first “met” Rachel Pieh Jones. We connected online over a mutual love and struggle over lives lived between worlds, over writing, and over a shared connection to Muslim majority countries. Meeting Rachel has been a gift that keeps on giving. Through the years we have shared our hearts and our stories and I have learned much through my friendship with this extraordinary woman.

Today, Rachel’s second book Pillars is released and I cannot tell you how excited I am about this book! I had the honor of reading an advanced copy and feel like I have been waiting for it my entire adult life.

Below is an interview from the press release for Pillars developed by Plough Publishing.

When Rachel Pieh Jones moved from Minnesota to rural Somalia with her husband and twin toddlers eighteen years ago, she was secure in a faith that defined who was right and who was wrong, who was saved and who needed saving. She had been taught that Islam was evil, full of lies and darkness, and that the world would be better without it.

Luckily, locals show compassion for this blundering outsider who can’t keep her headscarf on or her toddlers from tripping over AK47s. After the murder of several foreigners forces them to evacuate, the Joneses resettle in nearby Djibouti.

Is there anything you find daunting about putting your story out like this for the world?
Absolutely. Spirituality is deeply personal. Sharing such a personal story makes me feel incredibly vulnerable. I hope to honor my Christian tradition, even as my ideas of what it means to be a Christian have been transformed and I’m not sure how people will respond to some of my conclusions. I also aim to honor Islam as I experience it in the Horn of Africa and it is daunting to present another faith tradition as an outsider. I hope to have done so respectfully.

Why do you choose to do it in spite of those apprehensions?
I’m a peace-builder at heart and have learned that peace does not come through avoiding hard conversations, and that peace does not mean homogeneity or agreement. Peace is built right in the middle of complexity as we learn to honor another’s perspective. This is something our communities desperately need. Peace is built through shared experiences of joy, grief, fear, and celebration, through choosing to love people without needing to change them, and through realizing that we are the ones being loved too. That conviction compels me to share this story as one example of what peace-building can look like.

How do you imagine your story will be received by North American evangelical Christians? By the Muslim community?
I don’t expect all readers, whether Christian or Muslim, will agree with all the conclusions I come to in Pillars. I even anticipate some pushback because Christians and Muslims have a complicated history that can make it hard to see positive aspects in the other. I hope even in the places that feel uncomfortable, readers will find intriguing possibilities for conversation andfurther exploration. At the same time, I know many Christians and Muslims who have developed
meaningful relationships. I hope these readers will feel less alone in their quest to find common ground.

REVIEWS:

Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation
“This is a beautiful story, beautifully told. It’s much more than the memoirs of a Christian American living in Africa and exploring Islam with devoted Muslims; it’s about learning how to be a good neighbor to the people around you, wherever you might be in the world. This is the kind of book we need right now.”

Amy Peterson, author of Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World
“Filled with hard-won insights of a mature faith lived in long community with Muslim neighbors, Pillars refuses sentimental calls for the kind of peace that glosses over differences. Instead, Jones finds her faith unraveled and rewoven, stronger for what she’s learned in the Horn of Africa and from her Muslim friends. Anyone whose faith has been challenged by life experiences will find a helpful model for spiritual growth here.”

At the end of my full review I said this, and I leave you with it now:

“Read and savor this book, which shows what can happen when we connect rather than collide.”

You can purchase the book here.

Loving People Well – Djibouti Jones

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Readers, I’m sending you over to Djibouti Jones this morning. She has written a beautiful “post U.S. Election” piece called Loving People Well.

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Here is a just a taste of her beautiful piece:

What does it look like to love well? Listen to broken hearts, serve the needy, give up my tendency toward greed so that my neighbor can be clothed, welcome a stranger who needs someplace to sleep, bandage wounds, take financial and physical risks. I mean these things literally. Placing bunches of bananas near the head of a sleeping homeless man so he can wake to a feast. Giving a woman who just had a miscarriage money for the hospital. Or for drugs, how can I know? I can only know that she has no roof over her head and I have money in my wallet. Risking so much to start a school so there can be jobs and education and community. Caring for my family with zeal and creativity…

You can read the rest here.

I’d love to have you respond to this question in the comments – What does it look like for you to love well?  I would encourage you to be specific. That way we can all learn more tangible, concrete ways to love well.

The Heart of Ruth Van Reken – Djibouti Jones

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Readers – I am again linking you to Djibouti Jones and a continuation of the series “Our Tribal Elders” by Paul Asbury Seaman, begun last week. My hope is that whether you are a third culture kid, a cross cultural person, or someone who loves the world (so I’ve basically covered everyone who reads Communicating Across Boundaries!) you will find something in this series that you can relate to!

bleeding-heart-

Heart… Ruth Van Reken (b. 1945) Our deepest, most satisfying connection to others—as well as to places, things, even ideas—comes from the heart. This is where we hold our most cherished beliefs and sense of self, and it is the heart that tells us we are home when we find what we have been yearning for. The first quadrant of the medicine wheel is the East, the direction of the rising sun, of new beginnings, and family. This is where we experience our emotions and our most vulnerable moments. It is here, in the heart, that we feel the ache of displacement and it is through the heart that we redeem our sense of belonging.

Ruth Van Reken’s credentials as a spokesperson for TCKs are partly genetic. She comes second in four consecutive generations of third culture kids. At one point when she was a little girl, her family (including her parents and older sister) consisted of four people born on four different continents. In her adult life, her husband’s career as a doctor included time in the Navy and several years with an interdenominational mission board; in Liberia he was assigned to the main government hospital, sponsored by USAID; in Kenya he worked as a professor for the medical school of Moi University in Eldoret. This gave Ruth experience in four of the major categories of sponsoring agencies from which TCKs come: military, religious missions, government, and education (the others being corporate and nonprofit).

Her grandfather was a missionary doctor who set up a Presbyterian hospital in Resht, Iran—then known as Persia. Her father was born there, became a missionary himself, and took the family to Africa for the first time in 1944. (The ship on which they crossed the Atlantic was sunk by German planes on its return voyage to New York.) Ruth was born in Kano, Nigeria and, not counting two home-leave “furloughs,” lived there until she was thirteen. Four more of her siblings were born in Nigeria where her parents worked for a total of thirty-four years. During high school Ruth lived with her grandmother and aunt in Chicago. She did not see her parents once in four years.

Read the rest of the piece here at Djibouti Jones.

Intimacy is the greatest expression of feeling at home. Learning to embrace the whole of our past (whether or not we ever get it all untangled) is part of our wholeness as human beings—and as a culture.*

*Paul Asbury Seaman in Our Tribal Elders – The Heart of Ruth Van Reken

Photo Credit – http://pixabay.com/en/bleeding-heart-flowers-garden-538323/ with word art by Marilyn R. Gardner.

Wrapping up the Week – February 14, 2015

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For those who follow Communicating Across Boundaries regularly, you know that I am buried under seven feet of snow. We have word that another 18 inches are coming tomorrow into Monday. I have nothing else to say on that matter!

But snow and indoors make for some great reads! We go from forgiveness to homes to vaccinations in today’s recommendations. I hope you enjoy them!

The Act of Rigorous Forgiveness by David Brooks is a stunning piece in the NY Times. The impetus for the piece is the scandal in the United States of news anchor Brian Williams and his lying about being in a military helicopter that came under fire during the Iraq war. What I appreciate about the piece is Brooks does not focus on the ‘sin’ of Brian Williams; rather he moves us into a deeper look at forgiveness, not as a sentimental gesture but as a ‘rigorous’ action. He then describes the steps of rigorous forgiveness. This is an article worthy of bookmarking and re-reading. The excerpt I have chosen hit me hard, because I see the tendency in writing to do those very things.

Excerpt: “The sad part is the reminder that no matter how high you go in life and no matter how many accolades you win, it’s never enough. The desire for even more admiration races ahead. Career success never really satisfies. Public love always leaves you hungry. Even very famous people can do self-destructive things in an attempt to seem just a little cooler.”

Safe as Houses by Rebecca Martin in Curator Magazine. Of all the pieces I have read in the past two weeks this piece moved me deeply. The author begins by taking us into her childhood world and the houses she experienced in books. From there she talks about houses, safety, and paying attention to those around us. But that’s doing the article a serious disservice because it is so much more. Lovers of literature will especially love this piece as she pulls quotes of home and space from a variety of sources.

Excerpt: What is the point of yearning for a home if some piece of eternity can’t break into this present reality and illuminate ordinary days with a sense of belonging, of comfort, of peace, of history, of safety, of meaning, of home in all its best iterations?

On Vaccinations and Immunity, thoughts from east Africa by Rachel Pieh Jones. You would have to be an ostrich to miss the outrage on social media about the outbreak of measles at Disney Land. I love this piece because it gives the perspective of people who live in countries that don’t have a lot of money, that are not privileged, and that understand the terrible consequences of the decision not to vaccinate. As a public health nurse this piece resonates; as someone who has lived in the developing world it resonates even more. Rachel also quotes from the book on my night stand — On Immunity by Eula Biss.

Excerpt: “When someone tells me, in the US, that they don’t need to vaccinate because we don’t have those diseases here anymore, I want to say, ‘The reason we don’t see those diseases is because of vaccines.’ Kristen Howerton of Rage Against the Minivan quoted this statistic: ‘It is estimated that before vaccines and antibiotics more than 70% of children died before the age of five.’ It is an incalculable privilege to be able to raise our kids in a time without rampant diseases that blind, maim, and kill. The diseases have not been eradicated, our kids are simply protected. And they aren’t protected because of some imaginary ‘super immune system’ or because they are being raised in an illusion of isolation. They are protected because of vaccines.”

On my night stand: Nothing new to report, but some new ones on the horizon! Namely a book given to me by my husband for my birthday Midnight at the Pera Palace – The Birth of Modern Istanbul. I hope to get lost in that in the next few weeks.

Travel Quote (of sorts!)

door Narnia quote

Lastly, Happy Valentine’s Day to those of you who celebrate! We’ve done some posts on Valentine’s Day in the past and I have linked those below for any who want to read. We tend to challenge the notion of Hollywood and Hallmark expectations in these pieces!

 

“A Happiness Whose Other Name is Home”

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Doors 2 with quote on home

If you had a few weeks to live, where would you go? Roger Cohen asks this question in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times called “In Search of Home.” He talks about the “landscape of childhood” that place of “unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.”(op-ed April 3,20014 NYTimes)

While the question is hypothetical, Cohen surmises that it is a good question. A way to get beyond all that fills our lives, drilling down to what is truly important.

In the piece he describes what another writer, James Wood, calls “contemporary homelessness.” He says it is perhaps the issue of our time, the state of our world of constant movement, where the immigrant, the refugee, the expat, the third culture kid, the military kid, the military family, the diplomat, the person who moves coast to coast and back again in the same country all live in a place where home is hard to define, harder to feel.

The opinion piece resonated deeply in my soul. Here is a writer who gets it – who understands this dilemma for so many in the modern world. He goes further to say that if you begin to dig deeper into the depression that many experience, so much of it is about not fitting in, not belonging. Again with a gift of words he calls it “displacement anguish.” The essay is similar to what Rachel Pieh Jones expresses in her piece “Saudade – a Song for the Modern Soul.” Rachel quotes from another essay on longing and belonging “I, like many of this era, am a nomad rich with diverse experiences, yet will never be able to collect all of my place and people-specific memories together in one place, in one time.”

Toward the end of the piece, Cohen’s short description of where he would go should he have a few weeks to live had me sitting by a rock pool in an ocean, warm with the sun of Cape Town on my back. He described this place and says there he felt a “Happiness whose other name is home.”

So I ask two questions – where would you go if you had a couple of weeks to live and what do you remember about that place? What beckons you to come and leave the clutter of your life, drilling down to what is truly important?

What is that happiness whose other name is home? Is it the pine trees blowing through Himalayan mountains and the smoke of wood fires at dusk? Is it the dogs barking in the distance and walking on a dusty street when the sound of the call to prayer comes loud across the city? Is it the sound of a lake and voices of children, alive with the joy of innocence? Is it a porch swing, your legs curled up under you, a book in your hand on a lazy summer day? Is it the smell of frying fish as you come back home from a fishing excursion with your grandfather? Is it the lapping of waves on a sandy beach, sand pipers tiptoeing across the sand leaving their distinct marks? Is it a crowded bazaar, where distinct smells and sounds make you feel alive with all the possibilities?

Or is that happiness whose other name is home spiritual? Is is something that can’t be captured in a place? 

What is that happiness whose other name is home? 

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!”― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

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The Gift of Saudade

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Saudade “A sense of home is, it seems, worth more than any other comfort. And one of the questions I want to answer now, for myself, is what makes a place feel like home. I know that it is not so simple as living where people speak your language and look like you and have lost what you have lost, but there is a kind of comfort in that, too” – Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss page 128

As we returned to Cambridge yesterday after a long weekend away I felt a familiar longing. I turned to my husband and asked him if he felt like our home in Cambridge, was indeed ‘home’.

Because I don’t. Not always. Despite my work and church and friends and general life being here, the sense of ‘home’, of ‘belonging’ still seems to be just out of reach. I don’t feel this daily – I feel this when I return from being away. Because usually when I’ve been away, I realize no one knew I was gone.

Home is a place that when you return, people knew you were gone. They welcome you back. But in Cambridge, no one ever knows we’re gone. 

Almost two years ago I was introduced to the word ‘Saudade‘. I learned of the word from my husband, who in turn learned it from a Brazilian friend. I immediately came to love and rely on this word to express that peculiar longing that I never had words to express. I used it in writing. I used it in speaking. I particularly used it when connecting with immigrants and refugees through my job.

Saudade is described as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.” – In Portugal of 1912, A. F. G. Bell

This is what I felt yesterday as we returned. Once again I had saudade. 

Ute Limacher, in a beautiful piece written for the series Painting Pictures, says that we can have ‘saudade’ for people, for places, and for moments. I’ve felt all three of these, sometimes all at the same time. 

I have come to realize that this saudade, this ‘indolent wistfulness’ will never be completely gone, and I’ve also come to be okay with this. It is a longing that nothing on this earth will ever fully meet. I have my moments of feeling completely at home, feeling like I belong, even as I ache for what I can no longer have, places I can no longer live, people I will no longer see. In a beautiful piece called “Saudade – a Song for the Modern Soul” Rachel Pieh Jones writes: “There is a peace and joy in belonging and an ache for what is not, for what can no longer be.”

As a Christian, perhaps the biggest mistake I could ever make is being too at home in this world, all my longings met, wrapped up in the temporal.

For beyond the reminders of worlds and lives past, saudade is the reminder of another world, another longing not yet realized. A reminder of a world where there will be no more sadness,where tears will be wiped from our eyes, where a lion and a lamb, earthly enemies, will lie down in peace.

So I’m coming to delight in this saudade, to recognize it for the gift that it is. I don’t want to fill it with something false, a shadow comfort of what is real. I want to live each day, accepting the inevitable saudade that comes — sometimes forcefully, sometimes quietly. C.S. Lewis says that if we “find in [ourselves] desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that [we] were made for another world.”*

In saudade I recognize that I was made for another world.

Today is a new day. I am back to a routine and grateful for this routine. I feel at home in my skin and surroundings, and it is all the more precious because of saudade.

What about you? Do you find yourself with longings that will never be met in this world? 

****************

A bit after I was introduced to ‘Saudade’, I wrote a piece called “Saudade – A Word for the Third Culture Kid”. I wrote it quickly one night, hoping that at least a few would relate with the word. I was overwhelmed by the gracious response to the post. Along with the reads and shares of the piece, the post was also picked up by Among Worlds – a publication of Interaction International, an organization for third culture kids. I continue to get comments and emails about it, connecting me to people I would never have met. So many of us had a visceral response to the word. The comments themselves were gifts as they expressed longings for home and belonging that are not easily verbalized. If you’ve not seen the post, click on the link above to take a look – make sure to read through the comments – they are the best part.

*C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

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And There are Floods in Djibouti

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I am tired.

The ‘luminous foundation’ that makes television people look so pretty can’t hide the shadows under my eyes. After a delightful Easter weekend my head aches from the traffic on the highway getting home; from listening to The Clash full blast to pass the time; from Easter candy that looks so pretty in the bowl and feels so rotten in my stomach (because I am who I am and I overindulged.) It’s an Easter Hangover – but not the sort you are supposed to have where the glory of Easter moves into the Monday beyond.

I have my head full of all kinds of petty, so hard to get rid of petty. I feel exiled and frustrated and full of – I’ll say it – first world problems.

And then I remember there are floods in Djibouti. A place where it doesn’t rain — one of the hottest places on earth. Djibouti – a country that is often forgotten when naming countries in the African continent. Djibouti – where poverty abounds and most could care less.

Djibouti – where floods, even small ones, cause massive problems.

English: Mosque in Djibouti city, January 2008

“When there is no rain for so long, drainage clogs and people set up homes in precarious places, lulled into security. We had been in Djibouti less than four months when the last flood came through and killed more than 500 people in 2004. That year we lived on the upper level of a duplex and stood with our landlord’s family downstairs, watching the water rise more than three feet inside their house. This flood isn’t as massively catastrophic, but to people who have lost everything, there is no difference.” From Djibouti Jones

I need my ‘floods in Djibouti’ moments. They bring me back to reality. They remind me to pray. They push me to flush narcissism down the toilet. They tell me this world is big and God is bigger – and it matters to him that there are floods in Djibouti. It matters to him that people who have nothing are losing even more. These moments remind me that the circles under my eyes are merely circles – that I will get a good night sleep and they will go away.

That my energy and attention had best be spent on finding my Djibouti, finding those in my area that the floods of life have overwhelmed.

“This is the week of Easter, this is the week of miracles and resurrection. For many in Djibouti, this is a week of loss and grief. Pray for those who have lost so much. May God have mercy.” Rachel Pieh Jones

Blogger’s Note: If you haven’t already made your way over to Djibouti Jones – I urge you to do so. Rachel Pieh Jones and her husband have lived in Djibouti for over 12 years and I believe her perspective on life and faith will resonate with readers of Communicating Across Boundaries. She views the world through a much-needed cross-cultural lens. More importantly she communicates this view through all her writing.

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