[Note: Today’s guest blogger is Theresa Tensuan-Eli. Theresa teaches writing and advises students at Haverford College and lives in Ardmore, PA, with a rotating cast of family including a playwright husband, and two kids whose skills include small household repair work and prairie restoration. She is grateful to the Spiritus community for bringing out the best of humankind (and for encouraging the practice of being both human and kind) and sends a special shout out to the Across the Miles crew and the Prayer Line posse. Thank you, Theresa!]
In the first reading for today (Genesis 17: 3-9) God comes to Abram, a man in his 90s, who with his wife Sarai had struggled to conceive a child; God says to Abram:
“My covenant with you is this: you are to become the father of a host of nations. No longer shall you be called Abram; your name shall be Abraham, I will make nations of you; I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.”
In reading this, I am thinking of a Tagalog term, utang na loob, which I understand as a phrase that speaks to an unpayable debt: the debt we have to those who have raised us, who have come before us and who have created the pathways that we travel, those whom we will never be able to repay.
In the context of a capitalist society, the notion of having an unpayable debt is horrifying: one might think of an overwhelming medical bill, mounting student debt, or a mortgage that has put you underwater, but in the context of a culture that values interdependence, to forever beholden to another means that you will always be in relation to one another – that you have an unbreakable bond.
This is something that I embrace when I think of the people whom who have supported and mentored me – Mira Tensuan (born Almira Santos); Marilou Allen (born Mary Louise Butler), and Martha Wintner (born Martha Calhoun – thinking of how the different names that women take on often mark an assumption of a new role, with different identities and responsibilities nested like a matryoshka doll), just to name a small handful of the many, many women who, over the course of their time on this earth were transformative presences for their children, students, colleagues, campers, and Girl Scouts – wide circles of community who became kin since our connection to and shared love for those who have shown us kindness and consideration became a means of understanding our own interrelations.
Considering what covenant I have with people I appreciate and love tends to flow freely. Considering what covenant I may have with those whom I feel or find myself in conflict is more difficult, however. Something that I am trying to practice (using the insights of Lori Pineiro Sinitzky, the Director of Quaker Affairs on Haverford College’s campus) is to remember that tensions, fractures, and conflicts should call our attention to what we may share with those whom we are in contention. They might invite us to consider that Venn diagram overlap where we share a common investment. May we be feeling tension because we are seeing something so close to our hearts from such radically different perspectives that we see one another only as combatants rather than kin?
Or as Bob Baker shared in this blog this past Tuesday: “ In the most threatening, inhuman circumstances, some people have chosen to focus on the needs of those around them. Can I release my fears and desires in order to be fully present to the situation that I am in right now? Can I be present not only to what I am experiencing but what the people around me are experiencing? If so, then I can see them. And be there for them, no matter what’s happening.”
Today’s verse that is to prepare us to take in the word of the Gospel is from Psalm 95:8: “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.” We are being addressed collectively to be open to the call of the divine, to soften our hearts so that the word of God can take root and come to fruition so that those seeds may nourish future generations. When Jesus says in today’s reading from the Gospel of John that “whoever keeps my word will never see death” (John 8:51) I’m thinking that he may mean that it is when we actively animate his foundational teachings such as to love one another that we participate in the divine – that as our bodies return to the earth the good that we do reverberates through the ages.