Alien

This letter is for all those who have found themselves living in a foreign place. Or anyone who is thinking of doing that.

We all do it for different reasons. But for many of us, it's because we think there is something "wrong" somewhere and we go to try to help. To "do something". Or maybe we just can't stand watching it from afar and want to get closer and see better what's really happening.

So we go. And pretty soon, we figure out that it's not like we thought it was. It's worse, or more complicated, or more enormous. At this point, some of us realize there's little or nothing for us to "do". And if we stay on, we begin to shift our awareness and focus from doing to being. As my friend Jesse recently wrote so wisely, it dawns on us why we're called human beings and not human doings.

So we begin to think and talk and write alot about "Presence". The importance and significance of just being with people who are in hardship.

And that's where many continue to live while they're there.

But I think we have to be careful with this Presence thing. It doesn't necessarily mean relationship; in fact I would argue that it rarely does. It can have a deux ex machina quality about it. Dropping in to just "be with you." I think we can move through presence and come to realize how it is different from making relationship.

We are forever alien in these new places we inhabit. No matter how much we want not to be alien. That's what all of us wanted when we came - to not be alien. We wanted to learn the language and every nuance of the culture and "belong".

I'm not sure we can ever belong. Which can leave us in an isolated place, especially if we came alone. But if we're really, really fortunate we can learn to abide in this alien state without deluding ourselves, and on occasion live in moments that show us the real reason we came.........

I live in a flat in a GuestHouse. There is a beautiful courtyard garden which I can look down on from my windows. A few days ago, there was an engagement party in the garden. It was beautiful. From time to time during the evening I watched in a kind of cultural voyeurism, seeking to know better how to "belong". As I watched during the evening, two friends who work at the GuestHouse and were serving that night weaved through the crowd, looking movie-star handsome in their black slacks, white shirts, and black bowties.

'Round about 10 pm, the party had broken up and the clean-up was just about finished. There was a knock at my door. It was one of the two guys who had worked that evening. His wife had been taken to the hospital and he asked if I would drive him there and go with him. So the three of us went.

His wife was in the emergency room, thankfully doing fine. She had fallen and had some bumps and bruises. The hospital is a large one in East Jerusalem whose staff and patients are just about exclusively Arab. Late at night like that, I was the only foreign face for miles around. I stood with my friends, waited for and talked with the doctors to find out what the situation was, watched all the people coming and going.

I realized with a suddenness that startled me that I wasn't alien to my two friends that evening in the ER. I was just with them. Not in a Presence way - I wasn't there to "support" or do anything. I was just there because they knew I would go with them and they weren't afraid to ask me. The cultural prohibitions against that - and there are many - were no longer operating with us. We were there together just because we know each other.......

Just steps from where I'm sitting right now occurred some of the most momentous events in all of human history. Some believe God incarnated and walked here. Died and rose from the dead. Some believe that a people here in ancient times were chosen by God to be an example of devotion for all future generations. Some believe a great Prophet came here one night in a miraculous mystical journey.

Millions of people come here to see where these things happened. To hear stories about them, pray about them, wonder about them, be transformed by them.

When I leave here someday and think back on this time, it won't be those events or places that I remember. It will be an evening that I spent in an ER with some friends.