confessions of a theologian's parrot

Dena,
I had planned to e-mail you my response. I would rather e-mail you my response, to be honest. But here I am on the blog for all to read. Here is what I would say if I was talking to this year's MESP females. It is not a one-line answer. I hope you don't mind. :o)

1. The most important thing I learned from Egyptian men was from the way that I dealt with them. I learned about the depth of hypocrisy in my own heart. The sense of self-dignity and respect that I was raised with was wounded by being overtly treated like a slab of meat. Or a piece of ass.
And so my response was ugly and vitriolic at times. Some of my female comrades on the trip could employ laughter as a form of defense. I chose to scowl acidly and let hateful feelings fester inside...sometimes these overflowed and my fellow MESPers--male and female--got the benefit of hearing indignant tirades, or I would coldly shoot down a flirtatious vendor.

A degree of righteous anger at gender inequality may have its place. But I wronged people with my judgementalism.

I think it is important to acknowledge when things that you see or hear upset, anger, or frighten you. It is important to process them with people on the trip who are sympathetic. For me it was not helpful to be told that at least the majority of Egyptian men were respectful, that men all over the globe did and thought terrible things about women all the time so it wasn't that much worse here, or that taunts/grabs/etc were merely playful and all things told rather pathetic. Those things didn't matter. The point was that I was offended by what happened to me and my friends at times. And that was okay to feel.

It was difficult for me process so much spiritual, cultural, and academic stuff at MESP and in addition deal with gender issues experienced on a personal level. It may not have been as big of an issue for every female on the trip, each with her different life experiences and different personalities. I can't speak for them, but I can say that at times I was offended and hurt by Egyptian men. And again, those were okay things to feel.

My response was not okay, though. It showed the conditionality of the love in my heart. It seems as though the most rudimentary lesson of a Christ-like life must be something to the effect of: you can't control how other people are, you can only control how you respond. We can't simply love the people who treat us with dignity with wild abandon and then hate those who humiliate us. It is our instinct to do that. But it is not the right way to live.

To be cliché, I invoke the out of context but so apropos lines from a Lewis poem, "All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you. I never had a selfless thought since I was born.....I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin." I like this because I am just walking around in circles, parroting back the maxims and mandates of Christian spirituality if I talk about universal compassion and then, when offended, respond with sentiments of superiority, pride, and hate.

So my advice to you this semester in Egypt if you are having difficulty relating to Egyptian men is try to change yourself. I struggled back and forth my whole semester between anger and compassion. Pray that God will help you to feel his kind of love for the men that may offend or wound you. This is going to be hard. Sometimes when you pray for patience, it seems like irritating situations seem to veritably fall in your lap left and right. If you pray to have unconditional love and compassion for people who hurt you, there will still be days that you want to haul off and deck them in the face. Do not haul off and deck anyone in the face. Keep trying to do things that will release you from taking offense and that will set you free to love. I think a good way to do this would be to lean on your flatmates and friends at MESP--both female and male. Listen to each other when you are frustrated but keep each other accountable when frustration starts turning vitriolic. Pray for each other to have non-conditional compassion. That is a good thing to pray for.

all the best,
Chelsea


Dena---whoa, I knew I had more than a line to say, but I didn't mean to compose a long letter. Now that I have written this, I am going to post it...I don't feel like abridging it because it is as much advice to this semester of MESP people as it is a confession to our spring 2005 crew. Feel free to condense the sentiments here to a line or two for your gals to something like this:

" It is okay to feel hurt by overtly being treated like a commodity. Pray that God will help you to feel his kind of love for the men that may offend or wound you. Lean on your male and female MESP-mates to hold each other accountable and support you." That pretty much sums it up.

Everybody-- As I began writing what I meant to be a brief paragraph, I realized that there was more to process there than I realized. I wanted to post it for anyone who cares to read it can do so because I want to apologize for the attitude I held a lot of the time in Egypt. Although some of you have not seen me since we parted at JFK or in the good city of Cairo, fortunately live human beings are not static characters. God help me, I am realizing how I am so judgmental and uncompassionate inside. "All this flashy rhetoric," indeed!

However imperfectly it may be, I do love you all, and trust that you are also dynamically changing and growing up too.

Oh, and in the name of a little comic relief (some things don't change), my answer to question number two:

2. Best quote: "Sex? Sex? Fuck?!!" -- expectantly and a little excitedly from a toothless, bedraggled 90-year old man stopping to proposition me on the street in Alexandria. What can I say? Sometimes even I had to laugh. Dena, you might want to censor that for the MESPers in your charge.