central america

ideas

Take a look at the first before you read this second one,
http://wp.me/p14q4r-Rx

Also, I’m not sure whether or not I think the word god, as used here, should be capitalized or not. Thankfully the word Christian is a straight up syntax question without baggage, so it stays normal.

I don’t like to write something that’s not a story; I’m not very good at it and it feels stuffy.That said, here she goes.

The churches here in Guatemala have given me some problems, of them there’s one whopper. They made me realize something: I feel that god is for people who have good education and read lots of good books. If you don’t wonder deeply about redemption and covenant and all that and then go have a scotch and cigar and talk about all that with another  well educated book reader, if you don’t ponder infinity or make philosophical jokes about god…I feel you’re pretty much screwed.

When I first arrived here I first noticed that the churches are loud–the one across the street from my house is unfortunately very exemplary. They sing a lot of songs that sound much like what I imagine pagan chants sound like. They don’t sing the worship songs I know, like and am moved by. Then, when I began to visit churches and hear radio sermons, I noticed that they always preach very topically*. That’s not all, the topic almost every time hits hard on prosperity doctrine. Also, when someone prays it does not sound to me like a boy talking to his father or a woman to her mentor, what I feel prayer should be closest to. Instead it sounds like a screenplay being exagerated by an unskilled actor.

All these things together in my mind made for a single mental swing of ego and judgement: “wait-all these people are fake Christians. What’s all that   about?” If you want to duke it out with me for having thought that thought, take your best shot and see what happens.
So I notice all these things that are so different, and I am really bothered. I think to myself that I’m not like them. The next thing I think is “why?”

Why am I not like them?

I’ve come to the place I am at with respect to god by four things: (1) praying, (2) arguing about god and man, (3) thinking and (4) reading. So then I think to myself “of these four things, what makes me not like them?”

They pray here; they pray really differently, but prayer is such a complicated and peculiar thing I’m just going to leave it at “they pray here,” and so rule out number one. I’ll smoosh 2 into 3: arguing about god and man only counted when the arguement made me think, and what counted was the thinking, not the arguing. I know that the major part of how I think came from my studies at the university, and I know that very few here have had an education like mine. I’ll keep number three, with smooshed-in 2, and rename it “education.” Lastly there is reading. I’ve simply read more substantial books than the majority of churchgoers here. Through these books I’ve seen so many crazy different ideas and wild created worlds. Without doubt what I’ve read is key to how I think and a not-insignificant part of how I’ve come to where I am with respect to god. So I’ll keep number four.

So the result is that I threw out number one (prayer), smooshed number two (talking) into number three (thinking), and kept number four (reading). Education and books. So I look at these people and think to myself, they are spiritually fake and I am the real deal because of a degree I earned and the weekends and evenings I’ve whittled away reading books.

And worst of all, I have neither scotch nor cigar nor another “educated” book-reader to go argue, banter and joke about this with.

…maybe for now that’s best.

The end

———-

PS:
I implicitly cursed once. If you spotted it on the first pass, come visit me and I will make you a complex three course meal in 2 minutes flat and then give it to you.

*If you’re not familiar with preaching, there are two general ways to make a sermon. Exegesis is exposition using something resembling the “when did who say what to whom, where were they, and so why they say it like that at that moment?” It’s like this: imagine you were my boss’s coworker and needed to completely understand a very quickly-written incomplete email I’d written to him. You’d first need some knowledge of me and my job. You’d need some feel for the context of the email: was I pointing out a problem, clarifying a detail of an in-progress design job or maybe poking fun at the CEO with an inside joke? This is a good way to preach: good exegesis leaves little room for subjective error. Obviously there must still be a personal element-a preacher can’t just spew facts. But without the presence of rigorous reason and fact, sermons are at best lukewarm and at worst extremely decieving. Topical preaching is exactly what it sounds like: an arbitrary topic and an arbitrary batch of bible verses, almost always clipped out of context, that “talk” about it, where the definition of “talk” is up to the preacher’s whim. It is, at the core, the preacher expressing an idea or viewpoint in terms of phrases from the bible. If the idea or viewpoint is good, then often no harm is done.
stories

Last Saturday:

12 hours traveling (4 car, 8 bus), enough dramamine to kill a freakishly large lab rat, possibly the single most delicious lamb meat I have ever had in my life for breakfast at the highest place in central america with blue sky above and clouds on the horizon, one sponsored child successfully examined for hearing aids that will let her be a kid again and at the of the day one extremely sore butt.

Edit: I tweaked the exposure of the second picture in lightroom a little bit. Otherwise they’re both unedited.

funny, other

Here in Guatemala

1. Possums eat chickens, and in return folks eat possums. You know how possums love to play dead? Sometimes they’ll decide to play dead after they’re caught and clubbed. Then sometimes they come back to life after being skinned. Can you say angry-zombie-possum?

2. Common courtship process:
i. Boy and girl meet
ii. Boy decides he likes the girl, drives up to her house sometime after one in the morning and cranks a love song on his stereo for some indeterminate amount of time
iii. Girl goes to window and swoons for this indeterminate period of time, or goes to window to glare briefly then goes back to bed.
iv. Depends on the result of iii: (negative) the boy repeats step iii until he goes back to step i, or (positive) the boy and girl start to date.
v. After some time of going out, they become “novios,” something pretty similar  to being boyfriend/girlfriend. Then after being novios for a while, they get married.

…at any point in the process, either the boy or the girl can tell the other that they do or don’t like him/her; often neither this event nor whether or not it’s reciprocated generally affect any of the five steps.

3. It is not a meal if there are not tortillas. Literally, like it doesn’t count as a meal without them–if you eat what we United-States-ians would usually call a meal, and it’s without tortillas, you actually get to eat another meal (with tortillas, of course) because the first time around didn’t count. This is pretty awesome, although may bode ill for my health if I don’t play a ton of soccer…and number four…

4. Soccer is different. It’s like…eating a meal or walking to work. I’m used to “oh cool, yeah lets go play soccer!” Here it’s not really something to get stoked about. Not that people don’t love it…they really, really really love to play soccer…it’s simply a part of life. Just about everybody has a brother who’s played semi-pro, or plays semi-pro.

5. In the U.S. if we’re going to make a gesture to signify the person we’re talking about, we generally point with the hand or nod with the head. What’s the most common way to do this here? A kissing-like-gesture with the mouth. This one took a while to figure out.

6. They drink lots of fruit punch. It’s very delicious and very specific: apple and pineapple juice with a bit of sugar and cinnamon, only served hot and with little pieces of coconut floating in it.

7. Coffee’s like this: brewed light, heavily sugared and always with sweet bread to dip. Once in a blue moon somebody in a restaurant will order coffee with milk–beyond that, coffee with any sort of dairy product mixed in is purely out of the question.

8. There are tons of motorcycles. They all–
1. Look different
2. Have nearly the exact same Chinese chassis and engine

9. There’s more of life and death and heaven and hell than you can shake a stick at.

photography

Click on the picture for the bigger version–it’ll take a second to load.

Almost at the mountain top, but the sun had already set

Courtesy Microsoft ICE.