The eCrozier

When I was a missionary in Honduras over 30 years ago, one of my assignments was teaching my 5^th graders at St John’s School, Puerto Cortes, the Honduran National Anthem: Tu Bandera. The irony of that has never left this Norte Americano. It’s not just that (as anyone in church can tell you) I have a hard time carrying a tune, but what was I doing, a young man from Los Estados Unidos, teaching young Hondurenos their own national anthem? My certainty ever since then has been that there are now 16 or so middle-aged Hondurenos out there who sing their national anthem slightly off key and with an awful Ohioan-infused Spanish accent.

Life is often difficult to translate from language to language or culture to culture. One day in Honduras when I had recess duty after the school lunch, a 2^nd grader named Castulo ran up to me and told me in Spanish what I thought was the following: “Rodrigo is swallowing his pencil.” I looked over toward Rodrigo and he was bent over making spitting movements and noises, so I rushed over and put my emergency medical technician training to good use. I performed the Heimlich Maneuver, standing behind him, bringing my fist up into his stomach and forcing his lunch (and hopefully the pencil) up and out onto the playground. You guessed it: there was no pencil. Students gathered around wide-eyed, Castulo repeated what he said to me and at once I realized the horrible mistake I had made. He had said masticando (chewing) rather than tragando (swallowing). Chewing one’s pencil was against school rules and Castulo only wanted to bust Rodrigo. Students never chewed their pencils after that. The punishment was too severe. A teacher forced you to lose your lunch on the playground!

Life is difficult even when we share the same language and culture. The possibilities for misunderstandings and hurt feelings are, as the Bible might say, legion. That’s why we need another Biblical word if we’re to be faithful: hupomona. That’s most often translated endurance (See Romans 5:4). Maybe a better word, however contrived, is stick-to-it-ive-ness, a willingness to stay in relationship and not run away when misunderstandings arise or feelings get hurt, so we can stay together long enough to work through it and maintain our bonds of affection. That doesn’t mean differences won’t remain. Often they do. But it does mean that our differences need not be the cause of a rift in the Body of Christ. A Biblical Hebrew word also comes to mind here: hesed, steadfast love or covenantal love, a love that means that I can no more walk away from the other, whoever he/she may be, than I can walk away from my own body.

That’s why the Benedictine virtue of stability has always been needed in the Church, and for that matter, in all important relationships. We can’t control how another person will handle misunderstandings or hurt feelings. They may walk away from us. But we can control our own behavior. We can resist the desire to walk away. We can work to stay connected trying to understand the other, and remain engaged long enough for God’s love and mercy to work its way past our mutual need to justify ourselves. We can make the relationship more important than insisting that the other acknowledge that we were right and they were wrong. In other words, we can exercise hupomona and hesed.

+Scott