Embracing Weakness. Shannon K. Evans

little by little, to close myself off from everyone. My subconscious couldn’t hold the tension between my failure to perform my job and the nagging feeling that the job itself was asking something of me that I didn’t like. So, I withdrew. Day by day I pulled further inward, holing up in my tiny house to cook unnecessarily intricate recipes and watch movies rented almost daily from the local video store. Consumption was an opiate, an escape from the reality of my desert-dry heart, an escape from the disappointment within that felt too raw to touch. Where were those dreams of worshiping street kids and redeemed orphans now? They felt like the hopeless naiveté of a girl from long ago.

      I willed my mind to return to the neighbor’s chatter. Today was Idul Adha, she was informing me. I racked my brain and vaguely remembered: ah, yes, the feast of sacrifice. I had been taught about the Muslim holiday honoring Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son to the Lord, and the mercy of Allah to provide a ram in his stead. A feast of mercy, I thought to myself, I could get on board with that. I told her I would put away the groceries and return to walk to the mosque with her.

      As we navigated our way through the alleys that made up our beloved neighborhood, a familiar heaviness weighed on my heart. This holy day was the perfect segue through which to present the gospel message: The parallels between the stories of Isaac and Jesus Christ are blatant and poignant, and anyone remotely interested in religion of any form would be keen to discuss it. It was an underhand soft pitch and all I had to do was swing.

      But I kept silent.

      We turned onto the only road in the kampung wide enough to fit a car, and I did a double take. There was a flash of red out of the corner of my eye, and was it what I thought? I squinted, then sucked in my breath as we stepped closer. Flowing, gushing, running through the open drains that lined the streets of our neighborhood was an unmistakable stream of siren-red blood. Blood mixed with water, in fact, as though it had come flowing straight from Christ’s pierced side. I felt him there, suddenly, a heavy presence; I felt him nearer than he’d been in a long, long time.

      We walked further and joined the mass of neighbors gathered for the annual animal sacrifice. Goats and cows dotted the landscape, some alive and some no longer. Men and women grinned proudly to show me what they had brought to offer. Boys and girls ran amok, happily weaving in and out of hanging carcasses. To me, it was a bloodbath. To them, it was a feast of mercy.

      I could only bring myself to stay for a little while before walking the path home alone. A knot made its way up my throat as I closed my front door. Falling to my knees, I began to sob without even being sure why. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world had already come, and they either didn’t know or didn’t believe: My years of missionary training told me that was why I wept. If they died today, they would be headed for the fires of hell: My ultraconservative faith formation told me that was why I wept. But neither felt true; neither felt sufficient to explain the aching in my heart, the grief that I knew was from Christ but for which I had no language. It wasn’t until years later that I would put my finger on what I felt that day. I cried heaving tears on cool tile not because my neighbors didn’t know Jesus the way I did. I cried because I didn’t know them like he did.

      1. Daniel Hamermesh, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

      2. Laura Entis, “Chronic Loneliness Is a Modern-Day Epidemic,” Fortune, June 22, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epidemic/.

      3. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, reprint edition 2005, originally published 1972).

      4. Marguerite A. Wright, “Appendix: Stages of Racial Awareness,” in I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Bi-Racial Children in a Race-Conscious World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).

      5. Barna Group, “Sharing Faith Is Increasingly Optional to Christians,” Research Releases in Faith & Christianity, May 15, 2018, https://www.barna.com/research/sharing-faith-increasingly-optional-christians/.

      6. Homily at Mass in Quito’s Bicentennial Park during visit to Ecuador, July 7, 2015.

      7. For an example, see Russell Heimlich, “Threat of Secularism to Evangelical Christians,” Pew Research Center, FactTank, July 12, 2011, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2011/07/12/threat-of-secularism-to-evangelical-christians/. While this research looks specifically at evangelical Christians, I think it is fair to say that many of the findings are broadly applicable to all of us.

      8. For my Protestant friends who are reading, I feel the need to clarify a grave misconception. We Catholics do not believe we are saved by these works alone, but that true faith always goes hand in hand with action, as it says in James 2. A properly catechized Catholic understands this important distinction.

       Chapter Two

       Numbing Agents

      My feet were giddy as I stepped into the welcome air conditioning of the Western-style mall. We had driven an hour and a half from our much smaller town just south of Surabaya to this large Southeast Asian metropolis. We needed nothing here but familiarity, which was more than enough of a reason to make the road trip.

      Without pausing to consult one another, my husband and I instinctively turned the corner to nab a place in line at Starbucks like a pair of caffeine-deprived synchronized swimmers. I didn’t even drink coffee, but when you’re in search of Americanized comfort in a shopping mall, your quest is not complete without a green mermaid on a cup. Minutes later, nursing our respective drinks, we commenced a luxurious day of window shopping. Maybe we would buy a pair of overpriced jeans. Maybe a tennis racket. Maybe we’d catch a movie in a theater that wasn’t rundown. The world was our oyster for one glorious weekend, and everywhere we looked we found reminders of much longed-for home and comfort.