This is my first Christmas in Kenya. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the first Christmas I’ve spent away from “home” in my entire life. I’ve spent every Christmas up to this point with my family – my mom and dad, when they were living, along my brothers and sister. When I went to college in NY, I travelled home for Christmas. When I first started working for IBM in NY, I went home for Christmas. For the many years I lived in the Boston area, I went home for Christmas. It feels strange not being “home” for Christmas, but Kenya is my home at this point in my life. However, it also feels different because Christmas is different in Kenya. There are, with a few minor exceptions, no indications that it is Christmas Eve (as I write this blog post). There are no Christmas decorations to be seen, no Christmas trees, no Santa Claus, no wreaths or candles. There are no Christmas songs playing, no holiday parties, no Christmas television specials.
In my one year of living in Kenya, I’ve found it to be much more overtly religious than the United States. There are churches or mosques everywhere. There is religious music or calls to prayer blasting from them at all hours. There are apparently no noise ordinances here, or at least not for religious entities. Everyone prays before meals. There are religious quotes and mentions of God everywhere. The ubiquitous matatus (commuter vans) prominently feature religious slogans. Storefronts often bear the name of Jesus or God. The churches are generally packed and people actively participate through prayer responses as well as singing and dancing. Government schools have religious names.
Religion is truly everywhere in Kenya, yet no sign of Christmas – not even in church. Not only is the church not decorated at all, but the music at Mass is exactly the same as it is the rest of the year. I’m not sure how to process it. I guess you could blame it on the fact that people don’t have money to put food on the table, so Christmas decorations take a back seat. However, I’m not sure that’s totally it. People decorate in simple, inexpensive ways in general, so not sure why Christmas would be any different. I still don’t have a good answer.
Although no external signs of Christmas is a little disorienting for me, the good news is that there is a complete lack of commercialization of Christmas here. Although I have seen the terms Black Friday and Cyber Monday used, they are by far the rare exception rather than the rule. This has allowed me this Advent season to focus more fully on what Christmas means to me and my relationship with God, as I didn’t have to concern myself with the external distractions that usually surround Christmas.
As Catholics, we talk about the three ways that Christ comes to us at Christmas. The first is Jesus’s coming among us in history as an infant two millennia ago in the Incarnation. God became man to dwell among us. The second is Christ coming to us today – through creation, in our encounters with one another, in his holy Word, and through the Church – especially in the Eucharist. The third is a look with hope to Christ coming again in final glory – the definitive triumph of good over evil. In this final respect, Christmas is the celebration of our final union with God – the ultimate end for which God created us.
I would like to focus on the second of these and our role in making Christ present in the here and now. Meister Eckhart was a thirteenth century German theologian and philosopher. He was also a Dominican preacher and mystic, who said
We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.
Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)
This is what I meditated on this Advent season. Think about it. We are all meant to be mothers of God. We are all called to make Christ present in our lives, present to those around us, and present in our world which is so badly in need of Christ’s presence. Obviously, the Virgin Mother is the ultimate example of how to do this. She did not just give birth to Jesus, but she gave her entire life to God. In her “yes”, she gave herself entirely over to God – physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Her ascent to God is the model of what our response to God should be. Unfortunately, speaking for myself, I was not immaculately conceived as Mary was and so my response is always somewhat imperfect. However, I accept my imperfections and continue to push forward following Mary’s lead and trusting that she always leads me to Jesus.
What an obligation Meister Eckhart presents to us. He is telling us that the Incarnation is not just a historical event worked through the cooperation of Mary, but rather, that God asks each of us to be bearers of the incarnate word in our own lives, in this sense, mothers of God. This bringing forth of Christ, which is an ongoing process, must take place within each of us. We are all called to bring forth Jesus now, in the present time and probably most frighteningly, within our culture – a culture which at best relegates Jesus to a secluded corner and at worst denies and aggressively tries to eradicate him.
But, like Mary, we are given a choice. In the measure that we say yes as Mary did and acquiesce to God’s desire to push concretely into creation at all times and places, we participate in the Incarnation. To me, this is the true meaning of Christmas. As Meister Eckhart says, “This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.” This is our call, not only at Christmas, but at all times. Not easy, but what God asks of us.
In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul says,
“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church”.
Colossians 1:24
I struggled with this passage earlier in my life. I knew that it certainly did not imply that Jesus’s atoning death on the cross was incomplete or somehow defective. So, what does it mean? What I have come to realize is that this passage from St. Paul is telling us the same things that Meister Eckhart is telling us. We are called to continually bring forth Christ in our lives. We are called to make Christ concretely present to others. Jesus suffering and death are not incomplete or imperfect, but God wills that we participate in this bringing forth of His son at all times and in all places.
God is love and true love gives without limit. God manifests his love in creation and in you and me. We “fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ”, when we participate in the manifestation of this love. We contribute to the glory of Christ when we allow him to manifest himself in us. We glorify Christ when we make Christ present in our lives and when we make Christ present to others. We give glory to God when Jesus is begotten in us. We make the Incarnation a present reality in the measure that we cooperate with God to continually push Christ into creation and into our world.
God wills that we be active participants in Jesus’s eternal birth. God calls us to continually say yes as Mary did. What more could we ask for as this is ultimately a call to share in His divine life. This is Christmas. This is the manifestation of the depth of God’s love for each and every one of us.
The schools in Kenya are on break for the months of November and December. It’s the equivalent of summer vacation in the US. One school year has just ended and a new one will begin in January. We are also approaching the hottest time of the year where the average high temperature in Mombasa is just over 90° F. We certainly have days with higher temperatures in the summer in the US, but it’s the humidity that kills me. The humidity in Mombasa is comparable Orlando, but there is no air condition here to escape to. Also, there isn’t anything resembling cooler weather to look forward to. During the “cold” season from June through August, the average high temperature drops to the low to about 82° F. It is certainly a different experience for me to be approaching Christmas with the weather so hot, but I don’t miss the cold weather.
As we do with all three breaks during the school year, we ran tutorials four times a week for our H.O.P.E students during the month of November, which kept me pretty busy. As I’ve mentioned previously, we installed a flat screen TV in our office to use during tutorial sessions to show videos and display graphics to enhance the learning experience for the students. The latest addition to my teaching toolbox is the addition of a tablet that I can use to display what I write freehand on the tablet to the flat screen TV as well as annotate on top of what is already displayed. Coralis went back to the US for her niece’s wedding for a few weeks in November. I used the opportunity to order (with my sister Tricia’s help and use of her Amazon Prime account) the tablet and have it shipped to Coralis in Texas. She then brought it back to Mombasa with her. If only I could get Amazon deliveries in Mombasa! There are some companies that claim to deliver Amazon products to Kenya, but they are expensive and I don’t really trust them. For now, I have to rely on people coming to Kenya from the US who have room to carry back my order.
The tablet comes in handy when teaching math, where I use the tablet like a whiteboard. However, my favorite use of the tablet is to add “color commentary” to something I have displayed on the TV monitor. During the tutorials this school break, we mainly focused on cell biology, organic chemistry, and in math, calculating the surface area of solid objects and the area of segments of a circle. Yes, I had to relearn all of this! Where possible, I use videos from Kahn Academy or Crash Course as the basis for the tutorial. However, we don’t just watch the video straight through (probably much to the displeasure of the students). I constantly stop the video to clarify concepts and ask questions to both make sure they are awake as well understanding the material. Plus this gives me an opportunity to use the tablet! What complicates the effectiveness of the videos, is the language. The school classes here in Kenya are taught in English, but the students are much more comfortable and fluent in Kiswahili. The material in some of the videos, especially the Crash Course ones, are delivered at a very rapid pace. The material is great, but hard to digest at the speed it is delivered – especially for someone who is not a native English speaker. I have to slow things down and reiterate concepts. Plus, I constantly challenge the students with questions. With all my interruptions and questions, it’s not unusual for us to take two hours to watch a fifteen-minute video!
One of my biggest complaints, and there are several, with the educational system here in Kenya is the rigidity of the curriculum. It is very rigorous and comprehensive, but at the same time rigid. The students are expected to be able to answer a standardized set of questions and solve a standardized set of problems. While this is important, I personally view the primary value of education as teaching students how to reason, think critically and solve problems. Most of us will only use a tiny fraction of the specific knowledge we acquire in school in our lives and professional careers. However, the ability to take what you do know and apply it to new and different problems is what is of real valuable. The ability to think through a situation, to reason and to develop solutions is what is key. In support of this, I constantly push back on the students when they simply want to plug numbers into a formula. Instead, I make them explain what the formula means and how it applies to the problem at hand. When the ask for a calculator, I typically tell them that I don’t care that they get the right answer, but rather that they understand the underlying concepts and how to apply what they know to solving the problem. The numbers are just the last step in the process, and in my opinion, the least important.
It remains to be seen how effective my methods will be in helping the students. The reality of the situation is that the students still need to be able to get good grades on, or at a minimum pass, the standardized tests. I can’t lose sight of that. However, at the same time, I’m aiming for a little bit more.
Last week we had our annual H.O.P.E. Sports Days – one day in each of the two locations where we run tutorials. The good news was that there was no rain in sight either of the two days. However, it was hot and the sun was brutal. Besides my best efforts to lather myself in sunscreen and wear a hat most of the time, I still managed to get a good sunburn on both the top of my head (where I now lack any form of natural protection) and my arms.
In Mbungoni, one of the technical schools we work with allowed us to use one of their campuses for our sports day there. Unfortunately, they are doing construction at the campus and the whole field that we used for the sports day was recently bulldozed over. In fact, there was more excavation work underway at the opposite end of the site while we were there. This meant that the field was all dirt (and some mud from raid we had earlier that week). That didn’t stop the students in the slightest. They played soccer, ran races, jumped rope, and got muddy. In Changamwe, we were able to put up a volleyball net and so added that to the list of events. Fortunately, we had grassy fields to work with there.
The Sports Days were a lot of fun for them as well as for me. This was the most exercise I’ve gotten since I arrived in Kenya. It was great trying to keep up with the kids. Unfortunately, most of our students don’t have many opportunities like this to just be kids. Most of our children live with their mother (with no father) or with a single guardian, typically a female relative, if both parents are deceased. From an early age, these kids are expected to do household chores and, in many cases, care for younger siblings. Not only are the school days long, with many children having to walk long distance to and from school, but these kids typically have to do chores both before and after school. That doesn’t leave much time for them to study, much less play.
Not only was it great to see the children running around and enjoying themselves, but they also practically got to eat to their hearts content. Most of these kids don’t get a lot to eat. Seeing them eat a big plate of pilau (rice dish with spices and meat) and then lining up for seconds, was wonderful.
However, the most special time of each day was the chance for the children to say goodbye to Coralis, who is leaving Kenya at the end of the month. Coralis has been the administrator of the H.O.P.E. project for the past four years. She has also been the Regional Director of the Kenya/South Sudan region. I am taking over the role of H.O.P.E. administrator from Coralis as she will be beginning a new missionary journey working with migrants and refugees on the US/Mexico border. As the previous administrator of H.O.P.E., Coralis has been my mentor for the past half year. As Regional Director, Coralis found me a host family to live with when I first arrived in Mombasa, who are now my Kenyan family, guided me in discerning a ministry job, which ended up being taking over her ministry job (no pressure), and helping me settle into my own place. Maryknoll provides a housing allowance to assist missioners in setting up their residences in their mission country. What also typically happens is that furniture and household items are passed down from departing missioners, which will happen with me when Coralis leaves in a few weeks. However, as there was very little in the way of “saved” household items for me when I moved into my house at the beginning of October, I basically had to purchase all the bare essentials that I needed. Coralis took me shopping, helped me make lists of what I needed, and assisted me in allocating the allowance based on her past experiences. We were able to get all the essentials that I needed to move into my house in about the span of a week and I was able to move in shortly after signing the rental agreement. I hate shopping and so am very grateful to Coralis for helping me get through this necessary evil.
Florah and I had been planning Coralis’s goodbye with the children for a while. We instinctively decided on the Sports Days as the events as these would really be the last time that everyone would be together before Coralis leaves. At the end of the day after lunch in Mbungoni, which was the first of the two Sports Days, we had the kids distract Coralis and then play a game where she was supposed to guess what a surprise was with her eyes closed. We then took the opportunity to sneak in the cake. Once Coralis discovered the cake, the children broke out in song which continued through the cutting of the cake. Corolis’s face was then painted with icing and she proceeded to feed each of us a piece.
It was impossible to pull off the same element of surprise in Changamwe the next day as the secret was already out. However, this in no way detracted from the specialness of the goodbye there. After lunch, the children again sang as we brought out and cut the cakes. Coralis again proceeded to feed everyone a slice of cake – all fifty plus of us. However, the day in Changamwe was special in its own right. There are not only more students in Changamwe, but more older students. Even a few former students attended. After cake, everyone came up and talked about what Coralis and H.O.P.E. has meant to them. I then presented Coralis with a memory book in which each student had a page to express whatever they wanted to tell Coralis in word and/or picture. The younger students mostly drew, but many of the older students wrote some very touching tributes to Coralis. Luckily as I mentioned, Coralis went back to the US for a wedding for a few weeks in November. This gave us the opportunity to have the kids make pages without her knowing. Here is a copy of the dedication page from the memory book that we gave her.
Last week I also had the opportunity of attending William’s graduation from nursing school. William is Florah’s older son (Pascal being the younger) and the oldest grandchild in the family. William graduated from a local medical training college with a diploma (three-year degree) in Community Health Nursing. I was honored to spend the day with William, Florah and the rest of the family. As I have mentioned many times (and hopefully will continue to do so for as long as I am in Kenya), they treat me like one of the family. I am so grateful to have them in my life.
Me and WilliamFlorah, me, Joel, Pascal and Patrick
This was my first Thanksgiving in Kenya. No, there isn’t a Kenyan Thanksgiving holiday, I mean the American one. As I understand has been the tradition, we spent the week in Nairobi at the Maryknoll Fathers House. All eight Maryknoll Lay Missioners in Kenya/South Sudan region travelled to Nairobi for the week. Steve Veryser, who is the Regional Director for Tanzania and now will also be responsible for the Kenya/South Sudan Region also joined us for most of the week. On Monday we had a regional business meeting, which we typically have once a month and schedule as much as possible for times when we are all together like this. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we had an Advent Retreat, which I was responsible for organizing. On Thursday we had a Thanksgiving meal together with the Maryknoll Fathers and the seminarians. Friday was a free day with some people departing, but most like me traveling home on Saturday.
While in Nairobi, we recorded a video for Maryknoll of the lay missioners and seminarians singing Angels We Have Heard on High (or Mbali Kule Nasikia in Kiswahili) – one verse in Kiswahili and one verse in English. I can’t believe how much patience the seminarians had with us. They are all pretty good singers and several are musicians. On the lay missioner side, not so much. We practiced for a few hours for two days and on the third day recorded the video, which itself took a number of takes. The seminarians were intent on making the video as good as possible given what they had to work with. At one point, we decided to ditch the Gloria in Exclesis Deo refrain for something simpler. The seminarians came up with a replacement for it which I think makes our version of the song rather unique. Adding to the complexity of the endeavor was the fact that the notes of the melody in Kiswahili is slightly different than the way we sing the song in English. I’m guessing this is a result of the adaptation of the song to Kiswahili and the different number of syllables in the translated lyrics. Not sure. In any event, the seminarians had to teach us the Kiswahili verse and we had to teach them the English one. It was quite an experience. Again, God bless the seminarians for the patience they had with us in their pursuit of “perfection” (if I dare call it that).
As I mentioned, I was responsible for organizing the two-day retreat. I chose “The scandal of the Incarnation” as the theme for the retreat. I based this on a short meditation that Pope Francis gave not very long after becoming pope. I was able to get a wonderful Jesuit African priest to lead the retreat. He structured the retreat based on a number of sub themes that he developed from the main theme that I provided.
The scandal of the incarnation refers to the scandal of a God who became man. The creator of all that is, entered into creation and become one of us. Obviously closely tied in with the scandal of the incarnation is the scandal of the cross – that our God who became man, died on a cross. A God who gives without limit and identifies with the marginalized and poor, doesn’t quite fit in with contemporary thinking of an all-powerful God. Thus, the scandal
The reason I chose this theme is that I think we sometimes don’t quite reflect enough on the enormity of what it means that the God who created the universe, the stars, black holes, quantum particles, electromagnetism, DNA, and time itself, entered into creation in the form of an infant who was completely dependent on Mary and Joseph for care and protection. Lying beneath the surface of the warm feelings we have of nativity scenes, lies the fact that the God who created the heavens and the earth, could not find room within his own creation to lay his head, upon his birth into this world. Instead, he had to be laid in the feeding trough that animals ate from. As Pope Francis says, there will always be a strong temptation “to do good things without the scandal of the Incarnate Word, without the scandal of the Cross”. These things are uncomfortable and many times don’t fit in with our view of the world.
I also chose this theme, because it fits in well with what I view as my role as a Catholic missioner. Pope Francis goes on to say that “We can do all the social work we like, and people can say: ‘how good the Church is, what good social work the Church does!’. But if we say we do this because those people are the flesh of Christ, it gives rise to a scandal”. This fits perfectly in with why I became a Catholic missioner. Yes, I want to do good things and help people. But most of all, I want to encounter Jesus Christ in others and have them encounter Christ in me. Pope Francis continues, “The Church is not a cultural or religious organization, nor is it a social one, it is not this. The Church is the family of Jesus. The Church confesses that Jesus is the Son of God who came in flesh. This is the scandal and this is why they persecuted Jesus”. The Church is the mystical body of Christ. It is not a human institution. It is not an NGO. It is Christ himself.
Pope Francis then says “if we become merely reasonable, social and charitable Christians what will the consequence be? That we will never have martyrs”. However, when we say that “the Son of God came and became flesh, when we preach the scandal of the Cross, there will be persecution, there will be the Cross”. I don’t have a death wish or anything like that, but I firmly believe that as the Body of Christ, we can’t separate the good that we do from proclaiming in everything we do, the Good News of Jesus Christ.
As has been said, with the Incarnation comes the Cross. Even the Church is not immune to this as we are so sadly aware. However, as St. Paul tells us in his second letter to the Corinthians “But we hold this treasure in earthen vessels”. Yes, in earthen vessels. The instruments God uses, us, are human and fragile. But as St. Paul concludes “that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7) We are the Body of Christ. Christ is our head who will lead his body to the ultimate end for which it was created – sharing in the everlasting and unbounded love of God himself.
St. John Paul II said that Advent helps us to understand fully the value and meaning of the mystery of Christmas. He said, “Advent is, so to speak, an intense training that directs us decisively toward him who already came, who will come, and who comes continuously.” I pray that this Advent helps us to welcome our Savior into our hearts more fully at Christmas.
