Last night I went to church for the first time since I've been here. It appeared to be a nondenominational community church; my Arabic teacher, who I went with, just kept saying "It's Protestant, it's Protestant," and I couldn't get her to be any more specific than that. Maybe they don't have as many flavors of Protestant here as they do at home.
So we walked in and were immediately greeted with--wait for it--a worship team led by a guy on guitar with the words on the overhead projector! People, I was so at home. It's like the evangelical version of the Mass or Communion: wherever you are in the evangelical world, you're home, because they too will have guitars and overheads.
There was a section where we sat that was labeled "For Foreigners," which I'm going to assume sounds more inviting in the original Arabic, but it was because those pews had headphones where you could listen to an English translation. It felt like sitting at the U.N., so I chose to eschew the headphones and trust in my ability to follow the basic arc of a worship service. Since I've been to a few in my life, you know.
What I found was that not understanding most of what was going on was actually refreshing, because I felt like it bypassed my rational mind and just went straight to my spirit like a healing balm. I just wanted to be in church. I have finally made peace with the fact that no matter how far afield I am tempted to wander, Jesus has caught ahold of me and is not letting go.
When you are not absorbed in understanding every word, you can hear the brokenness and desire in people's voices when they pray. You can hear the passion when they sing. There was one song where I understood exactly three words: walidi (my father), kul boum(every day), and alleluia, which apparently translates the same way in every language. Alleluia, my Father, every day. It's pretty much all you need to know.
I looked around that church at these brown-skinned people singing in a language that is so close to the one Jesus actually spoke when the Word was made flesh, in this land where He fled to safety as a child and where so many of our spiritual forebears--Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Joseph--have sojourned, and was so struck by the reality that of all the places to go and people to be born into, He chose the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalized, those in turmoil, those who are seen as "other" by the people around them--and He chooses them still, and your best chance of seeing Jesus is to do like Zaccheus did--fight your way into the midst of those people and find a perch. I can meditate on that forever and give intellectual assent to that truth but sometimes I just need to sit and experience it happening around me, and last night I got to.
Alleluia, my Father, every day.
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I thought of Richard Pratt (OT professor friend of mine at RTS) when I read this. Reason - when he was at Harvard like you will be soon he told me that the only thing that kept him sane (read Christian) was the little church where he worshiped and served as interim children's minister. Just something about the family of faith that keeps us in the faith. Like you said, Jesus has you and he's never letting you go. Or like that cat that Anne Lamott writes about, "you let him in and he's gonna stay."
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