July 19, 2010
Eat, Pray, Love, Stay? Heal?
By Enuma Okoro
(photo by E. Okoro)
Greek Portal
Recently at the cinema I saw the trailer for the forthcoming movie, “Eat, Pray, Love.” It is the screen adaptation of the widely popular memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert of her year spent traveling the world in search of healing and renewal after a divorce. Julia Roberts plays Gilbert and we see her feasting on pasta in Italy, draped in roomy linen clothes in India and cycling across wooden bridges in Bali. As soon as the colorful vibrant images of these foreign lands came on the screen I felt this all familiar ache and longing in my stomach to jump the next plane out of here, Raleigh, North Carolina. In just five minutes of a movie trailer I was already convinced that my life is boring and uneventful, and without a doubt in need of a no-holds barred jaunt to East Asia to regain some sense of much needed self-awareness and life discernment. It all looked so soul-searchingly exotic and purifying, rebelliously liberating, and definitely better than here.
Abroad, overseas, away…I have struggled all my life with feeling as though real life, the kind worth investing in is always happening somewhere else, somewhere unfamiliar and culturally colorful and rich, where walking to the open markets is part of routine errands, and ancient buildings and sanctuaries are part of the daily landscape. “Away” is a place I’ve romantically created where problems can be figured out, meanings found, and transformative relationships stumbled upon. It doesn’t matter that somehow in my picture of “away” local people are morphed into vague yet necessary topography to the cultural experience. I admit this about myself.
I also admit that wanting to see the world and explore foreign lands and customs is not a bad thing. In fact it is a beautiful, mind-expanding and soulfully enriching endeavor. As someone who has lived in five different countries yearning for new cultural encounters is sort of in my blood. But over the past few years I’ve been mulling over what effect the lure of “away” has had on my understanding and experience of life-giving community and on a transformative inner life.
I recently read a new book, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in A Mobile Culture by my friend, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. It’s a short book packed with insightful and thought provoking ideas about learning the value and importance of stability. Basically, Wilson-Hartgrove suggests that learning to stay put is good for our spiritual, emotional, and communal health because being rooted to a particular place and people enables us to truly experience the depth and breadth of God’s love for us and by extension, our love for one another. It was a very challenging book for me to read. I believe there is a lot of truth and wisdom to what Wilson-Hartgrove posits even though it is a bitter pill for me to try and swallow.
But I’m starting to believe that the swallowing difficulty lies in my own eternal deep resistance to being told what might be best for me to do, by any author or even by God. Stability flies in the face of my somewhat skewed notion of independence and freedom, not to mention my pride in my learned resourcefulness of being able to relocate and glean surface familiarity with new peoples and places easily. Being a citizen of the world is part of my identity. Thoughts of being rooted in one place for more than a few years still threaten me with claustrophobia and hyperventilation. I struggle with both wanting to relive Gilbert’s year “away” for myself, and wanting to embrace the real challenge of practicing stability the way Wilson-Hartgrove defines it. I am caught inbetween.
A few weeks ago though my eyes were opened at church to a new perspective on the gifts of nurturing stability with a particular people and place, and the gift of exposure to other cultures and people. The pastoral intern at our church this summer is a woman named Alma. She is from Mexico but is here attending Divinity school. In her sermon, Alma talked about God’s desire for all to have access to healthcare, even undocumented immigrants. She shared stories about Mexicans who while making the difficult journey to cross the border fall sick and end up being left behind by the rest of the group. Unable to continue the passage these men, women, and even children are left behind to most likely die in the hot desert.
Alma then told another story. She shared about particular men and women, legal American citizens who take it upon themselves to go into the desert on a regular basis, into that inbetween space of people and cultures, looking to bring care and assistance to those who have been left behind.
I was moved to tears by this sermon for a number of reasons. These stories witnessed to human compassion and a beautiful recognition that before any dividing lines we are so tempted to draw we are all children of God, all invited to be extensions of Christ’s healing in a broken and painful world. And it moved me to tears because it challenged me to think of the importance of stability and fostering community in a way that removes me from the center of the story. When this happens, when I am removed from the center then I more readily can see that my choices and actions always implicate the lives of others in some way. If I choose to go off and see the world I do it from a different platform than before. And if I choose to stay put and practice learning stability I do that from a different platform as well. Either way, the new platform is that of understanding myself as part of a larger whole, a whole that suggests that being our brothers and sisters keepers should redefine our notions of independence and freedom. We are free to be bound to God’s life-giving ways.
Rootedness and commitment to a particular place and people become less about “keeping me from life’s rich experiences” and more about a communal invitation to experience the richness that is bound up in the complex ways God calls us to foster life and healing.
But, I won’t lie. I am definitely going to see the Gilbert movie as soon as it hits the screens.
