God Bless Bolivia, this Motherland of My Love

When I first got to Bolivia, I was tired by all the endless worship services with five or six hymns stuck between each prayer, each Bible reading, each sermon—in effect, what seemed to me like five or six hymns for each time someone coughed—but instead of growing more tired of it as my time here passes, I've started to like it. Now I'm the one who requests just one more hymn before we get to the sermon—the one where we "jump like lambs," please, because what is praising God without cheesy hand motions to accompany it? I also find myself walking down the street or washing my clothes and singing Bolivian hymns to myself, surprised to realize I can recite many from memory, because we've sung them so many damn times.

This is something that the Bolivian church does way better than the Methodist Church in my country. Back home, we have all these complicated hymns with perfect poetic meter and surprise half-step melodic changes, and we sing different ones every week, but I think the only thing I can sing from memory out of our Methodist Hymnal is "Amazing Grace." On the other hand, in the Bolivian church, sometimes it seems like we sing the same ten hymns every worship service, but I'll be darned if we don't sing them well. Plus, this repetition facilitates my ability to wander around my daily life in La Paz singing such inspirational motifs as: "Aunque un ejército acampe contra mi, no temerá mi corazón" ("Even if an army rises up against me, my heart won't be afraid"), and "Cristo te necesita para amar, para amar / Al amigo de siempre dale amor / Al que no te saluda dale amor / Al que vive a tu lado dale amor / Al que viene de lejos dale amor" ("Christ needs you to love, to love / Give love to the bosom buddy and to the one who doesn't greet you / Give love to the one who lives beside you and the one who comes from far away"), and of course, the anthemic: "Bendice Dios a Bolivia, esta patria de mi amor / pues ella sigue esperando un futuro promisor / En la montaña y el valle, la llanura tropical / El pueblo sufre y anhela justicia y libtertad" ("God bless Bolivia, this motherland of my love / because she is still awaiting a promising future / In the mountains and the valleys, in the tropical plains / the people suffer and long for justice and liberty").

My memory has become so friendly with these hymns, in fact, that it can even throw around a joke or two in their revered presence. Once, while we were cooking in the hospedaje kitchen, I was singing a hymn that goes, "Search for Christ, search for Christ, while you still have time, search for Christ" ("Busca a Cristo, busca a Cristo, mientras tengas tiempo, busca a Cristo"). Without thinking about it, however, I replaced one word and effectively made the line: "Search for Christ, search for Christ, when you have some extra time, search for Christ" ("Busca a Cristo, busca Cristo, cuando tengas tiempo, busca a Cristo"). I realized what I had done immediately after the words came out of my mouth, and after I straightened myself out from doubling over with laughter, I recovered my cool by explaining, "I've decided to invent a new form of evangelization: the Laid-Back Method."

That's another thing that Bolivia does better than my country. Laughter. I don't know what it is about me and Bolivia, but we crack each other up. A possible explanation that comes to mind, however, was articulated by the janitor at an advertising firm in Detroit where my brother once did in internship. Apparently this guy was always laughing heartily about everything, sometimes even for no apparent reason, and when my brother asked him once why this was, the jolly janitor offered simply, "Sometimes you just gotta laugh to keep from crying." Perhaps amidst the struggles, uncertainties and sorrows experienced in the poverty, political unrest and freezing altiplano nights of Bolivia, people have to become remarkably proficient in making life funny, or else they would drown in tears.

As they say, when in Bolivia, do as the Bolivians do, and I have taken the example of my hermanos and hermanas in the church to construct something of a comedy routine out of my daily life here, or at least learn to laugh at the ridiculous jams, pickles and other sorts of canned quandaries in which I find myself.

For example, a complicated string of misunderstandings started a joke going around that I was dating the national coordinator of the Federación de Juventud Metodista (FEJUME, Methodist Youth Federation), who we’ll call Hermano J. Consequently, because Hermano J. shares the name of the Bishop, it turned out I was dating the Bishop too, and had multiple boyfriends named J., until pretty much anyone who shares the magic name was a possible spare boyfriend on hand. Many have become keen on the idea of the Hermano J. and I, as they see that I need to find a Bolivian husband in order to definitively secure my eventual return to Bolivia. Others have doubts about Hermano J.’s ability to fill this job, however. On a long drive back from a youth encounter, in which I was squished between Hermano J. and Eddy in the backseat of a pick-up truck cab, the director of a church-owned high school counseled me: “You need a Bolivian husband, but you’d do best not to marry one of these two”—he gestured back to Hermano J. and Eddy—“they’re bien flojos (too lazy).”

“I know,” I said. “They haven’t even once taken me to the discoteca (dance club).”

At this, an indignant Hermano J. shot up from his sleepy stupor and proclaimed, “I’M NOT LAZY. I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU TO THE DISCOTECA.”

A few days later, the same director of the high school was seated across from me at a gigantic, elegant party thrown in honor of the birthdays of the Bishop, the National Director of Services, the National President of Laymen, and yours truly. Because of this, I was seated beside the Bishop in a row with the other birthday celebrants. The director of the school decided it would be a good time to ask me what the name of my boyfriend is. Hermano J. was seated too far away from me to make a good show of our farcical couple-hood, so for convenience’s sake, I turned to Bishop J., patted him lovingly on his stiffly padded suit coat shoulder, and said, “My boyfriend’s name is J., of course!” Inevitably, the dedication of a love song I sang to the Bishop followed. Then, after “biting the cake” (morder la torta) in that wonderful collision with copious amounts of frosting that Bolivians offer their birthday celebrants, everyone demanded a kiss in the glass-clanging style of wedding parties. Who am I to deny the people what they want? And aside from that, Bishop J.’s left cheek was lacking full frosting coverage.

One doesn’t always have to take the initiative in making a fool of oneself, however. Sometimes it happens by pure grace. Once, when standing in the church's accounting office, a young man I had met a couple times came in to talk to the accountant, Hermano E. The young man and I exchanged formalities, asking each other how we were doing. “I’m good,” I said, “but my legs are a little sore.”

“Oooh, have you been sinning?” he joked.

“No!" I said. "It's because I went to the church fast yesterday and hiked up a mountain for three hours. Besides, it’s not a sin, it’s a natural pleasure that we share as men and women.”

Hermano E. agreed. “It’s a gift from God, right?”

I laughed and said, “Exactly.” Then, having completed my business with an hermana who works in the office, I said I best be going, gathered up my things and moved to say goodbye to the young man who had come in. I bent over him where he was seated to give him the customary kiss on the cheek, and I had somehow forgotten that I had just unscrewed the top of my water bottle. And I promptly poured my water ALL OVER HIS CROTCH.

“Whoooaaaa!” said the young man.

“Funny, we were just talking about that!” said Hermano E.

“Ahm, can I just crawl under this desk here for a little bit until I am brave enough to face the world again?” said Sari.

However, I don’t always have to be the center of attention (i.e., the laughingstock of the Bolivian Methodist Evangelical Church) to find the humor in life, however. For me, seeing cholitas in their polleras kicking butt in a soccer game, even with those tiny, pointy-toed plastic shoes that they seem to have the inexhaustible endurance to walk around in everywhere, is enough novelty to make me giggle like a baby. Meanwhile, the sassy, bold tomboy gringa went to sleep in the bus, complaining meekly that I was exhausted from waking up at 3:00 in the morning. On the other hand, my dear FEFEME hermanas, who had gone to sleep even later and woken up even earlier, played a soccer match like real women.

But in my defense, now that I have bought my own pollera outfit, and worn it while leading gender workshops and participating in worship services all weekend long during the 17th National Methodist Youth Encounter in Bolivia, I know a thing or two about getting down to business de pollera. I don’t even have to be fully dressed to kick out some bad dance moves as a cholita paceña. In nothing but my petticoats and blouse, which kept riding up and exposing my faja (a, thick woven strip of cloth that cholitas wrap around their waist to diminish the strain of the heavy skirts on their hips), I demonstrated for Hermano J. and Hermana G. the dance I would perform during the youth encounter, to the “indigenous music” of my beloved Motown (namely, Diana Ross and the Supremes singing "You Can't Hurry Love").

And this is only with the four layers of petticoats that go under the pollera, not to mention the heavy, pleated pollera itself, the ornately beaded and fringed shawl, and the bowler hat that would top off my official performance as the first ever cholita-gringa-soul-music-dancer.

But I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that the National Youth Encounter, or any of my work here in Bolivia, is all just fun and games for me. I worked hard alongside Hermano J. and other FEJUME coordinators and helpers in an effort to pull this encounter off. And not simply to pull it off, or to boost our own egos and goals, but to make something bigger than us, something that might allow for God to enter and move amongst the youth gathered there in ways that our own, limited agendas couldn’t necessarily encompass. Thus, in the weeks leading up to the encounter, I would go down most days to the office of the hopelessly disorganized but very hard-working and devoted Hermano J. to lend a hand in the planning in various ways.

In particular, I took it upon myself to use my connections with Methodist Churches and friends and family back home to help fundraise for the encounter, as well helping with Hermano J.’s fundraising process in general. The inevitable worries that accompany fundraising were made much worse by a surprising (for me, anyway) lack of support from other national church authorities. Thus, while working towards the encounter, I was also going about trying to understand the politics of the situation, and in this process, heard and observed various things that left me painfully disillusioned with the church’s administrative structure, and with churches as institutions in general, being that I knew corrupt and callous tendencies amongst powerful authorities are not special defects only pertinent to the Bolivian Methodist Evangelical Church. One day, after some particularly disheartening conversations, I almost wanted to just throw in the towel. I knew I believed in and wanted to support the grassroots of the church, but the power-down structure just felt too overwhelming to handle. Honestly, I wanted to catch a plane back to Detroit and go visit my mommy in Ann Arbor, then go to church on Sunday and sing the impossibly complicated classical compositions from our hymnal, and afterwards go downstairs to eat carrot sticks and cantaloupe cubes with the delightful older ladies I always sit next to in the front pew.

But as they say here, ni modo, hay que seguir adelante (It doesn’t matter, you just have to keep moving forward). Even when I doubted internally, I remained unflagging in my reassurances to Hermano J. that we would bring this all together somehow, that God would take this encounter out of our hands and make it into what it needed to be. As my deeply spiritual godfather told me at one point during the preparations for the encounter: “The Lord will take a willing heart and use it in ways which cannot even be imagined. All that’s required is our ‘Yes’ answer—in advance.” And he was right. The help I received from my church, family and friends was overwhelming, and far more than I had even optimistically estimated we might receive. Combined with funds from the Methodist Church in Switzerland and the funds from the national church, we were able to pull of everything we’d planned, and it felt like a true miracle.

Yet the question for me throughout this whole process—even as I went out jogging in the mornings and dedicated prayers to the National Youth Encounter with each breath I took—was what, exactly, I thought this encounter "needed to be." I felt a deep commitment to it without even fully understanding why, and the same goes for the commitment I feel to the Bolivian church in general. The thing is, before coming to Bolivia, I was never even a big fan of the idea of “evangelization.” I am highly critical of the universal truth claims of Christianity, and the ways in which Christian evangelization has almost never been a politically neutral process. I’ve always said that the only thing I would want to evangelize is the idea that we all would be better off with spiritual practices and some sort of connection to the transcendent, but that I’m just as happy if you join a Buddhist order or become a whirling dervish in Turkey as if you start going to my church.

With that said, I do believe that authentic, sincere religious commitment as a community effort can have remarkable power on our lives and on the rest of the world. I also think that when the precepts and cultural context of a given religious community demand a more intentional and devout approach to spiritual cultivation, it has all the more transformative power. Because of the marginality of evangelical faiths (i.e., Protestantism) in the predominantly Catholic Bolivia, the members of such congregations, by default, enter through the “narrow gate” of religious commitment (“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” Matthew 7:13-14). In more New Age-friendly terms, we could put it something like this: spiritual cultivation ain’t no walk in the park. It requires a very intentional, disciplined dedication, which the majority of people don’t have the guts to take up. In this spirit, Bolivian evangelicals challenge themselves, as "Christians," to stand apart from your average partying, binge-drinking, promiscuous, nominally religious “Catholics” (which in this case really refers generally to anyone who’s not an evangelical Christian). And indeed, some of the practical and spiritual benefits of a more disciplined lifestyle and a more demanding commitment to God are evident in my Methodist brothers and sisters here. Yet I’ve also heard many times some variation of the lament, “I would expect that kind of treatment from some person in the street, but he/she is Christian; a brother/sister of the Church!” This evidences to the contrary: the rhetoric of a demanding, refining spiritual path doesn’t necessarily mean the average “Christian” is really any more spiritually developed than the average “Catholic.” Moreover, what will probably always discomfort me about the worldview of the Evangelicals here is that setting oneself “apart,” religiously speaking, can ultimately entail setting oneself and one’s religion above others, which a far too arrogant leap for me to make as a Christian.

Despite my liberal North American Protestant’s critical eye towards religious plurality, however, I’ve found myself investing a surprising amount of trust in the evangelical project here in Bolivia. I’ve found myself writing in a fundraising request letter things such as the following:

I have found amongst the youth [here] a passionate spirit directed toward the work of God, but…without a sense of support and fortification for the youth, and without effective, sensitive and passionate evangelization, the youth will disappear from the church. [This] means that in the end, the church itself will disappear, or if not, it will become a 'dead sect,' as our church's founder, John Wesley, wrote was his only true fear in terms of the destiny of the Methodist Church. From my perspective, [the National Youth Encounter] will be crucial in encouraging the unity and spiritual dedication of the youth of the church, and I have faith that in spite of the diminished support from the national authorities, in some way we will manage to carry out this encounter in a manner truly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that the youth who come will be able to feel this and will return to their districts, their churches and their homes with this spiritual fortification.

Likewise, I kept praying on my morning jogs leading up to the encounter, “Lord, that you may truly transform the hearts of all the youth that come for the encounter, and that you may send them out into the world to manifest more of your love, your justice, and your hope all around them.” But what does this really mean? It sounds very pretty, but love, justice and hope aren’t anything without concrete actions to go with them. For example, love could be truly loving and learning from people who don’t share your religious orientation. Justice could be working for the equal dignity and equal rights of the gay community, even though many Christians would claim that God “abhors” their lifestyles. Hope could be serving as a beacon of acceptance and support for single mothers who are condemned for their sexual promiscuity. These are some of my conceptions of love, justice and hope that might not mesh with the conceptions of numerous brothers and sister in the faith here. So I have to ask myself, is the church really working towards what I believe in? On the other hand, how do I know what I believe in is right? Who or what forces will get the final say in the effect the Methodist Evangelical Church has on individual lives, on society, and on what we ambiguously refer to as “the work of God”? In the end, who wins?

For some leaders and members of the church, this is all blessedly clear. On the last day of the encounter, the national Pastor of Life and Mission preached a sermon designed to end with an invitation to all those who had not yet accepted Christ into their hearts to come down from the bleachers, come forward and kneel before a long line of pastors ready to pray with them and bless them as they go forth into the world born anew as Christians. This, for many present, was the ultimate goal of the whole encounter. But of course, as I watched the youth gather in droves before me, I had to wonder: Is this what I had in mind as the purpose of the encounter? Is this the radical transformation of their hearts that I had prayed for? Will they truly go home to their respective communities after this and dedicate themselves to creating more of God’s love, justice and hope in the world? Or is this just another conversion based on fear of not "running the race and reaching the goal," as the pastor preached, in order to enjoy eternal pie in the sky? Is this just another response to a shallow, feel-good God rather than the God that turns our lives upside down and shows us what being human and loving others truly means?

But then as I watched those kids kneeling down before their God, I remembered the one thing I do know: if we’re all running a race to try to figure out what God is, and to figure what we’re ultimately supposed to be reaching at the end, then the only one that can really win in this moment is God. Because God is the only one who knows. That's the beautifully equalizing force of Absolute Mystery. So what else could I do but stand up, bow my head, hold out my hands above the mass of kneeling figures, like the pastors and the charismatic woman who had been sitting beside was doing, and pray for those kids. I prayed that God truly had transformed their hearts, whatever that means. Which is to say, it’s not up to me what it means. It’s up to God.

I have learned a lot here in Bolivia about the eminent wisdom of offering all the mysteries of the universe up to a higher power. That’s another thing Bolivian Christians do better than us North Americans. They pray together like crazy. And it’s rarely the typical North American scenario of some pastorly figure reciting eloquent-sounding petitions aloud while everyone else bows their heads and silently agrees with the prayer, their only direct communication with God being something like, “Yeah, good idea. I second that.” No, when Bolivians really want to get down and do some praying, they let loose their tongues. They find their own words, their own worries, their own joys and passions, their own deep longings to voice. They sometimes drown out the voice of the supposed leader of the prayer, but even when they’re not loud, you can still hear and see many of them whispering to God, as if creating a little chamber out of their folded hands or their hunched shoulders, a little space in which God can slip in and listen just to them. It seems when this space is truly created, when there is a sense of entering some altered realm in which communication with God is fluid and personal, tears often flow from their eyes, streaking like rainwater down their faces and barely leaving any trace when they stop praying and stop crying in the same instant. In this space, one can desahogar (unleash) every bit of pain one carries, with the trust that God will collect it all in God's own cupped hands and make living water out of it.

When I first got here, I wondered about the different reasons that some people pray out loud (and loudly), while others pray softly but still speaking, and still others silently, and if perhaps the approach changes in different moments for different people. After having asked various people in interviews about their prayer lives, it seems that the common consensus is that even if one doesn’t pray aloud, for self-consciousness or laziness or whatever the case may be, it is still ideal to pray aloud. Why? My favorite answer came from a man I admire as a authentically spiritual, charismatic lay leader, who told me: “Why would you listen to the guy who’s leading the prayer when you’re supposed to be praying, too? It’s time for you to talk to God, not listen to someone else talking to God!” Well, gosh, that makes so much sense. Why didn't it occur to me before? Now, like the bad anthropologist I’m becoming, I don’t even try to listen and observe those around me when we pray. I just start talking away with God like the rest of them, and sometimes, I even cry those free flowing, freely given tears. There are some things that just make more sense to me here than they ever did “allá” (way off there) in my country. Now, when I sing, “God bless Bolivia, this Motherland of my love!” I am starting to really mean it.