In January Dad bought a plane ticket...and last week he came to Tchad. It was a crazy colliding of worlds...something that I still haven’t completely wrapped my mind around. But he was here. There are pictures to prove it.
I went to N’djamena on Thursday. Dad arrived on Friday night around 9:30, and after some strategic talking and friend making at the airport, I made it to the back where he was and got him through customs with no problem. We took the bus to Moundou the next morning. Which was a pretty uneventful trip (especially in comparison to his bus trip back...but you can ask him about that one.) We arrived in Moundou around 3:30 in the afternoon and were greeted at the bus station by my brother Roland and sister Larissa. A moto for me, one for my Dad and a moto taxi for my dad’s two suitcases and we were home. Over the next few days we went to church, went to school, visited the market, visited the artisan shop (where I met a new friend and had a sitar made for my Dad in two days), walked around town, ate lots of food, and of had a lot of good time to talk...in the moonlight...because the power was cut the whole time he was here. It was a great visit. Dad stayed well, got to meet my family and friends here, and got to see Tchad. This year will be hard to explain...it’s not something that is easily put into words...so I’m grateful that someone has at least spent a few days here and seen it for themselves.
Tchad is more like a desert than one would expect. There are camels. There is sand. There is dust in the air...and it sticks to you when you sweat...so...all the time. Now we are in the midst of the hot, dry season. The water is cut a lot. Everything is dry. But there are the mango trees. Mango trees amaze me. They bear fruit in the midst of the drought. Right now they are heavy with mangoes...almost ripe. And they’re everywhere. I don’t have any philosophical meditations on the desert and the mango trees. No insights to share. Just an observation...and a window in the world I find myself in at this point and time. Last week http://sacredspace.ie’s homepage had a meditation on the desert. I enjoyed it so I’ll pass it along.
The scholar John L. McKenzie SJ describes how the roots of Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) faith grew in ‘the desert wastes of Syria and Arabia, which seem to stretch into infinity’. The Chosen People were in those wastes for forty years. Jesus himself recapitulated that experience of his people, by going into the wilderness for forty days. And Christians, following him, starting out on the forty days of Lent each year enter that desert experience too. But, in truth, our own day-to-day mundane lives often have something of that desert reality about them. What happens out there, in the real, or in the man-made deserts of today? Between the desert floor and the desert sky, life is stripped of all its artificial props, brought down to its essentials, in the effort to remain alive and avoid death. Vulnerable and exposed in that setting, we might also feel particularly threatened or tempted, as if surrounded by malignant forces in the swirling windswept sands. Such was the actual desert experience. But, more than this and above all, it was the place where the Chosen People experienced God: at Mount Sinai they were drawn into a Covenant relationship. They could never forget that. In the desert - our illusions taken away, leaving us exposed and vulnerable - we find, not nothingness, but the living God. God before us, God with us, the God of fidelity, and truth, and love. ‘Lord, you have found us in the wilderness, you have surrounded us, lifted us up, and kept us as the apple of your eye’. (cf Deuteronomy 32: 10)
I love you all.
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