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Cobbling Community
2–4 minutesA few weeks ago my Birkenstocks busted. The leather strap that fits around my achilles gave up the ghost. These are the Birkenstocks that have followed me since high school. I’ve had them repaired no less than three times, once in high school, once in college, and once in seminary. When I send them in, usually the only salvageable part is the leather with its trusty bronze buckles. Finally, however, the leather buckled while I was walking to work one morning, the dislocated strap flagellating my heel as I marched on top of it–payback for years of being trodden on.…
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Good but Unacceptable
2–3 minutesThis morning was the first meeting of a new Hebrew reading group that fellow colleagues and I started up. What was new for me was singing in Hebrew. Here are some audio clips from today: Psalm 133:1 and Lamentations 5:21. We decided to read an Old Testament book that is usually one of the first to be translated. This whittled down the choice to three books: Genesis, Ruth and Jonah. I suggested that we go with the OT’s favorite Moabitess, Ruth. Who doesn’t enjoy a good love story? After almost two hours of reading and discussing, we got to v. …
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Express Yourself
2–3 minutesThis week I’ve heard two conflicting testimonies concerning African languages…from Africans. On the car ride back from a village visit yesterday a brother remarked, “Ma langue est pauvre” (My language is poor). What sparked the comment was a conversation we were having about borrowed words in his language. They’ve borrowed words such as tabili (table) from either English or French. He presumed that such gaps in his mother tongue signaled poverty, a poverty of vocabulary as if it were somehow shameful to grab and adapt another’s word for a household object. Borrowed words are often a point of contention. When…
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African Music is Hope–Its Dances Are Life
3–4 minutesAs far as the human experience goes, nothing is more natural than death. Everyone dies. Spiritually-speaking we know that death is not natural. What a strange world then in which we find ourselves, pondering questions such as whether death is natural or not. Through spiritual eyes we see that the unnatural has become natural while the natural seeks to regain ground lost to the unnatural. Last month we lost a colleague. Although I never met her, I felt compelled to attend her memorial service in order to show myself a committed and caring member of the community. The first half…