Kinship and Connection

By Tracy Keenan, Missional Presbyter, New Castle Presbytery

What makes us human? What does it mean to be in community and to have meaning? This post is about our trip to Guatemala, but it is also about our churches, our nation, our world, our homes and neighborhoods. If I tug on one strand, the others vibrate.

Here are some of the virtual carry-ons I bring with me on this trip:

• The cries I hear from many of our churches that they are aging and declining in number, distressed that no one seems to want what they offer. They feel as though the world has left them in the dust.
• Conversations from friends, family and colleagues, who are contemplating decisions about moving: to another place for employment or retirement or to be near family. They wonder if they will find friends.
• The din of our nation rattling as longstanding structures are dismantled without trustworthy alternatives in place and people facing displacement, whether literally or philosophically. A place to belong and share meaning seems scarce.
• The news that our denomination has pending a 50% cut of mission co-workers. Those partners, too, will be making decisions about location, community, and calling.

Meanwhile, on this fourth visit to Guatemala, I travel with a new community configuration of humans. We introduce ourselves, saying who we are and what we do. We eat together, crowd onto a bus each day, visit sites and learn and post photos. Daily, we become accustomed to one another’s quirks and habits, accommodate and adjust, even as we are continually surprised by the daily gifts of personhood unwrapped each day among us.

This coincides with the first week of the new U.S. administration, the executive orders of which affect even these remote, indigenous villages in the western highlands. There will likely be retornados, family members and friends being deported in the sweeps expected up north.

The question of what it means to be human is the bass line thrumming beneath our tires, our conversations, our questions.

In one of the several villages in the western highlands of Guatemala where we were received with generous hospitality, I watch the women. One young woman is braiding the hair of another who sits on an upturned plastic bucket. Laughter comes easily. Whispers and side comments abound.

They are an interdependent community. They help tend to one another’s children. One is a midwife. They pass along traditions and wisdom, but they are adaptable, too. When their men have to go to the city or to another country to find work, these women have learned new theology (CEDEPCA teaches that they are equally created in the image of God, precious and empowered to provide for an improve the health of their families), new skills (raising livestock, making and reinvesting profits, replenishing natural resources), and new technology (fuel-efficient wood stoves, water filters, and hygienic latrines) to thrive. They repay the revolving funds so that their neighbors can have the same opportunities. They share tips and advice.

Of course, there are the usual communal issues: gossip, envy, misunderstandings. But they navigate the delicate balances between conformity and uniqueness, unity and diversity, tradition and adaptation.

This is the work of being human. Whether it is seeking community in a new neighborhood, engaging in meaningful mission, or a nation enacting laws that protect safety as well as freedom, we need to claim the work of interdependent community.

We need each other. This is the kinship connection. What we do is not just about ourselves alone. Our inevitable connections mean that working out the tug and give is the lifelong work of being human. It is where we find our greatest frustration, but it also fulfills our greatest need.

Inspired by the micro-community that is each of these villages, the Spirit-woven kinship among our partnerships, immigrant neighbors, and CEDEPCA, I also hear again what Phyllis Tickle says in the book, The Great Emergence about our current emergent time: Belonging comes first. Any belief or action comes from that. And belonging takes continuous work.

May our Guatemala friends inspire us to see the deep need in our neighborhoods (and our world) to belong, to be loved, to be understood, and open ourselves to the ongoing work of balancing conformity and uniqueness, unity and diversity, tradition and adaptation.