Yesterday we traveled on two planes with toilet water leaking all over.  On the last leg of the Ethiopian journey the ticket agent asked us to put our children on our laps so that others wouldn’t miss their connections at Addis Ababa.  We were on the plane again at 2:00 a.m.  We went to Mary Poppins on the day we arrived in London.

While we were waiting in line at intermission during the Mary Poppins musical, Melia asked in a loud voice, “Am I going to have to pee in a hole again?”

 

 

London, England to San Francisco, California    2 February 2007

 

Epilogue.  With my ambitious aims and our surprising experiences I should have more to sum up what happened and how we have changed so much in this relatively short time.  I imagine that our photographs and drawings contribute to this – they tell a kind of story also, one that we may not even have intended.

So now we are in that same kind of in between time that I first observed at the beginning of our adventures.  We float somewhere above Greenland between movies on the plane.  Godthab is the nearest settlement somewhere down below.  Micah is playing computer blackjack on the airplane video screen.  Melia and Heidi are doing some kind of crossword puzzle.  We have the lights on.  It feels cold outside.

After Table Mountain, orphanages in Malawi, the slave markets of Stone Town, the Ngong Hills, the blessings of priests on Lake Tana and in Lalibela, we spent days in the churches and museums of London thinking about our new picture of the world.  The Tower of London and the Tower Hill which was the site of public executions reminded me how brutal life can be.  They used to save the front seats for the children so that they could see everything at the drawing and quartering festivals.

Africa showed me again how simply many people live – herding a few rangy cattle, cultivating wheat on a tiny remote plot of land, trying to make it by on a  few pennies left by irritated tourists, living in urban shanty towns by collecting the refuse of industrial life.  I feel grateful now for the material abundance that we take for granted.  As I have written the safety that we enjoy in a peaceful San Francisco suburb gives us a freedom that the Kings of Gondar and England, the sultans of Zanzibar and the wealthy Nairobi business magnates did not have.  The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor writes about the affirmation of ordinary life.  Responsibilities to family and community can be seen in contrast to the epic or heroic.  I see better how much I appreciate things – the work of material culture, business and artists in contrast to the battles and empires and victories.

I came on a pilgrimage and saw a form of piety in Ethiopia in which things were sacred.  In California it is the community that is sacred, not the church wall or the scrolls within the Holy of Holies.  Perhaps our digital world with its cheap copies of sound and image make it hard for us to regard a physical object as particularly special.  Maybe it is just that in our wealth objects are ubiquitous and unappreciated.  We have one kind of wealth anyway.  It is another kind of riches to regard your people as especially chosen by God in the days of the earliest scriptures.  They have legends that are part of the received faith that are unique to them as a people.  In modern California I can’t quite imagine a California equivalent to this.

More than anything, I appreciate what we share – the ordinary labors of lay people, deacons and priests working for the kingdom of God, giving thanks for what raises us above the suffering, our gratitude for the love and beauty that we discover and can never quite deserve.  Holy images, ancient liturgy, the orders of ministry, a connected orientation of an ancient tradition to a modern life, struggle with changing social conditions – all connect us.  With people all over Africa we share a common mission as Christ’s body caring for a world that needs more than we have to give it.

From St. George’s, Trinity, the Zanzibar Cathedral, St. Michael’s, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Southwark Cathedral I learned that in the most important respects I am probably not personally in the Anglican Communion anyway.  I don’t know Anglicans on other continents; I am not in conversation with them about faith.  I am not working with them as partners in ministry.  I do not worship with them or sing together or learn together.  For me this kind of communion means far more than the legalistic definitions of African primates who treat Christian community on the model of some kind of international treaty or global business contract.  But perhaps I should lighten up – we share the body of Christ in such amazing and surprising ways.  The Holy Spirit is the basis of real communion and generates always startling connections between far distant people.  For me, the most powerful moments in the journey happened during worship when God spoke to my heart and said, “These are your brothers and sisters in Christ!”

I don’t know how to put this but inter-Anglican conflicts over sexuality are not entirely unrelated to very different views about gender.  When women are allowed to lead we begin to see them as more than one dimensional objects of desire or temptation.  The question of the role of gay people in our church ultimately will not be regarded as a simple question of sexual activity either.  In western cultures and around the world a different kind of family is coming into being.  It isn’t clear how the Bible should be used to discern what this means but to me it has more to do with the central texts of scripture like the Great Commandment or even the Great Commission than with particular verses airlifted out of Leviticus or Paul and then dropped down into the very different context of the twenty-first century.

In any event I am glad that we met the Bishop of Dover and heard the Archbishop of Canterbury preach.  For me this is the beginning of a new form of communion.  The priest’s sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral about gay adoption controversies in the UK was so delicately put that even after questioning him after church I have no idea where he stands.  But even this confusion is part of communion.  We begin to learn something about each other when we recognize that we do not completely understand everything that someone else says.  I could tell from the archbishop’s remarks later in the week that he loves this communion and will work very hard to keep it together.  I’ll try to do my part too.

Overseas travel often makes me proud to be an American and a Californian.  I especially notice our democratic institutions (in church and state), the commitment in SF to regional parks, technological efficiency, the astonishingly far-reaching cultural impact of California (which helps me see why inheritors of ancient and rich cultures like in Arabia might reject more than just American military and political hegemony), our orientation toward modernity, the role of immigrants in our national life, etc.  So often though we also seem like a mythical giant in underestimating out power.  We pay too little attention to the people who unobserved have made important international policy decisions which have had a huge effect on societies that the general public knows nothing about.

I’m grateful for the natural beauty of Africa, its rich and fathomless history and our new and old friends.  I feel so blessed to be able to see this world and to have the opportunity to learn from it.  God continues to bless us!