A letter from Marta Bennett serving in Kenya
April 2015 - Hope Out of Horror
It is April, and the long rains have come in Kenya. Last night our road was literally a white-water road-wide torrent—not deep enough to raft, but rapid enough to overflow the drain ditches and to have ripples and waves rushing down the slope past our gate.
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Marta with International Leadership University Ph.D. students, April '15
It is April in East Africa, and the long rains have once again set in. In the past, the pounding night rains have lulled me to sleep, safe, snug under my quilt, though vaguely aware of so many who lie down to sleep surrounded by mud walls, worrying about mudslides. At the same time, rain in any form here is called a blessing, where livelihood and the prediction of well-being for the following season is dependent on God’s provision of blessed rain. But now, at this time in April, each evening as it begins to pour in Nairobi, one wonders, is it blessing this year, or a weeping for “Rachel’s children,” for those murdered by terrorism and violence? First at Garissa University, mostly the Christian students singled out, then African foreigners in South Africa, now Ethiopian believers in Libya. I think of Sometimes in April, a powerful film set in the context the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Early in the movie the main character reminisces as he stares out at the heavy rain, “Yes it’s April again. Every year, every day the haunting memories. Every year in April, I remember how quickly life passes, and every year I remember how lucky I should feel to be alive. Every year in April, I remember.” Here we are in April once again, with more collected tragedies to be remembered.
Africa, with its thriving energy, humor, resilience, creativity, resourcefulness, and hopeful youthfulness, is at the same time ripe for terrorism, radicalized youth, and violence. Why? Right now we seem to be plagued with these human tragedies concocted out of hatred. Words cannot penetrate the depth of depravity that causes human beings to unite together for the purpose of destruction of nameless others. Where, O death is thy sting? It is here, in our hearts and minds, unable to grasp how creatures made in the image of God could instigate such atrocities.
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After the rain—my tires leaving the church parking lot after worship
Just as I was working to try to put words to a response to the 148 killed in Garissa, South Africans attacked expats with a frightening vengeance, and before I could come to shaping words for that, 30 Ethiopian brothers in Christ were executed in Libya. I am rereading Dallas Willard’s Renovation of the Heart and was gripped by the statement, “To serve God well we must think straight. Crooked thinking, intentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, it always costs lives” (p. 74). He continues, “In other words, thinking clearly is to take the information of Scripture into a mind directed and empowered by the Holy Spirit, and to pursue the truth with the resolute intention of living it out” (p. 75).
Bred out of a history of injustices, the arrogance of self-righteousness, ill-directed passion for purpose, the compulsion to be part of something greater than oneself, crooked thinking leads to destruction and death. How do we pursue, develop, and spread clear thinking in alignment with God’s Word, across the divides of harsh experience? How do we humbly stand before God, seeking ongoing renewal of our own minds so that we can embody and share straight thinking? That is what we work on daily as we teach and train leaders at International Leadership University who can then go and disciple others, who also can go and disciple others. With each new generation it is a renewed task.
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May 12, 2015 - Heavy rains in Nairobi leave school bus full of children stranded all night before help could arrive, on Muhoho Avenue, South C, very near PCEA (Presbyterian Church of East Africa) headquarters.
I am also currently reading Denise Achermann’s After the Locusts: Letters from a Landscape of Faith. A South African theologian, Achermann focuses one chapter on the language of lament. She ponders: “The suffering of the innocent and most of all the suffering of children raise the problem of evil and suffering in the most unambiguous way. It is the kind of suffering that can drive us mad because it seems so utterly pointless” (p. 99). “The early Christians did not need evil and suffering ‘explained away.’ It was simply a fact of life. What was needed was the means to go on in the face of suffering” (p. 105) and “Complaint asserts that the impossible is possible. The lamenters’ voices become subversive. They are, in fact, celebrating God’s ability to act in this world; to right the wrongs far beyond conventional notions of the possible…. It recognizes the fact that life can move from tragedy to celebration, from displacement to reestablishing of self. Such are the extremities of human experience” (pp. 126-127).
A few years ago my M.A. in Leadership students watched the film Sometimes in April as part of the class on “Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation Processes.” I have written about this before, but it is a fitting story as we consider what is happening at this time. The film is a powerful depiction of the Rwandan genocide through the eyes of two brothers, one a moderate Hutu soldier who loses his Tutsi wife with two beautiful children to the horrors of the genocide, the other brother on trial 10 years later for his provocation of the killings through his radio announcing. It is a story of coming to terms with what happened, struggling to make peace with each other, and tentatively building a new life out of the nightmare past. As we prepared to watch the video, the caveat was given that each student was free to choose to watch or excuse himself, knowing that several had lived through war in South Sudan, Burundi, the DRC, even Rwanda itself, and that this might be too close to home. All stayed.
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Partway through the film Pastor Felicien from Burundi involuntarily gasped, or was it a sob? I quickly caught his eye to motion to him that he was free to leave and I would go with him, to which he adamantly shook his head, and mouthed that he was fine. At the conclusion of the film, we opened up for discussion, and I asked the pastor if truly he was OK. This time he shook his head slowly in wonder. At a point when the camera had been panning the faces of those being lined up for execution, he had spotted the face of one who it turns out was a former neighbor back home in Burundi, who all thought had been killed in a similar ethnic genocide. Now here she was, alive and well and acting in a movie! What joy! Out of the story of despair and horror, the gift of life returned! Somehow, that sob of recognition embodies the hope out of horror. God brings new life in his church out of persecution, as has been repeated over and over throughout history. It does not diminish the horror, pain and loss, but it does signal that there are remnants of hope from which new life can begin once again.
In the aftermath of the Garissa University massacre on April 2 a huge one-page advert in the Daily Nation (one of Kenya’s main newspapers) declared, “You can break our hearts, but you cannot break our spirit.” The hashtag #WeAreOne, which was coined following the Westgate Mall attack of 2013 in Nairobi, is recirculating, along with the companion hashtag of #148NotJustA Number. We cry out in dismay, in horror, and we join our voices with biblical voices of lament, protesting the evil, finding “comfort in the idea of a suffering God who accompanies us in and through suffering. The ultimate argument for this approach is the suffering of Christ on the cross” (Achermann, p. 106). God is not distant. God is here.
Thank you for all of you who have sent emails of concern when the Garissa University news broke, and I request and urge ongoing prayers for deep comfort for those who have lost loved ones there, and for a means to effectively disarm the terrorism and take back the youth and others drawn into such seduction. Thanks too for reading these ramblings and ponderings in response to current issues in our lives here, and for your ongoing love and support.
With gratitude in the midst of lament,
Marta
As always, it is with deep gratitude for the support, encouragement and prayers of PC(USA) churches and individuals, which make possible all that we do. Your support and giving make possible the training of many African leaders, who in turn are being used by God to bring training, hope and transformation to many communities. To give financially, you may contribute through my PC(USA) mission account E200312 for individuals (see the link below or on my webpage), or account D506057 for congregations. Every contribution makes a difference as we partner together.
The 2015 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 145
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