World Communion

(Read at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church on World Communion Sunday 10/4/09)

Last year, on World Communion Sunday, I took communion for the first time in Peru. And while we didn’t formally recognize that it was a special Sunday, I experienced a very real sense of world communion - to be in one place partaking in a sacred ritual and at the same time imagining our sanctuary here at Hamilton Union and all of you, taking the same bread and drinking the same grape juice and meditating on our shared devotion.

As I bowed my head in prayer in our church in Huánuco, I placed my hands along the back of the wood pew just as I do here and had that indescribable feeling of being in two places at once - a feeling I experienced many times throughout the year.

During my first few months in Huánuco, I tried very hard to be fully present in my new place. To devote all of my energies to my immediate environment. To really immerse myself - in the language and the day to day relationship building among my host family and co-workers. I consciously detached from my world here in order to adapt.

But as the year continued, especially after the celebrations of Christmas and my birthday and January, I started feeling very homesick. I longed for those who really understand me, who have known me since I was little, those who I can vent to in my own language and listen to them effortlessly without the roadblocks of translation.

I felt so frustrated whenever I was homesick. In thinking of those I missed and loved, the places I longed to return to, I felt distracted and distanced from the present. But I realize now that during those times of homesickness, I was experiencing the realities of world communion.

Like homesickness, entering world communion is uncomfortable because it calls on us to be present in our own lives and to also care deeply for those that are far from us. It is a state of being that makes one feel torn, even conflicted, causing us to ask where we belong and who do we relate to.

I didn’t see this then, but what a blessing! The blessing of being part of one community yet simultaneously immersed in another. That I might have a deep feeling of belonging in more than one place.

The blessing of feeling connected to others even while they are physically far from me. The idea that even while living in Peru, I had a home in another country, belonged to a family in another hemisphere, and shared memories from another corner of the world.

And this is, I think, where the idea of World Communion begins - the ability and willingness to physically live in one place but let your heart and soul reside in many places, among many people – to hold hands with someone from halfway across the world through a deep knowledge of their circumstances and a shared belief that we are connected through our relationship with G-d.

For me, World Communion means sitting down for dinner with my family here in Guilderland and also finding my place at the kitchen table with my host family, Pastor Abdon, Elena and their daughter Carla. One family brings into mind the other, both of which I am part of.

The conversations at each of those gathering places mirror each other, a family sharing about their day, planning for the week, and laughing about the cat and dog as they pace around the kitchen. And while I sit at one table thinking of and longing for the other, I realize that they are in fact the same table.

World Communion is sitting down at the table before me and at the same time sitting down at many tables, and then realizing it is all the same table.

World Communion is also knowing intimately the rhythms and motions of another place - knowing that on any given Sunday in Huánuco the cows at the Granja farm are being milked at 5:00 am. Two hours later, the massive Catholic church in the middle of town will blare praise songs over a loudspeaker. Later in the morning, our pastor will roll up the metal garage door to our newly painted church. And having returned from church and after eating a mountain of tallarines (spaghetti), the entire Camarena household, including me, will retire for a mid-afternoon nap.

World Communion is saying to myself multiple times a day, “If I were in Peru right now, what would I be doing? Who would I be with?"

If I were in Peru this Sunday morning, I would be at church, the Christian Mission Alliance of Huánuco. I would be standing next to Carla whispering together like two little school girls, then singing the opening worship songs nearly drowned out by the electric guitars, drum set and the woman in the front row waving her tambourine. The entire congregation would be clapping to the beat, raising their arms high. And it’s not a question of whether my friends in Peru might be doing this… it’s that they are, right now.

I don’t think we’re called to be in just one limited geographic place, whether it be Guilderland or Huánuco. I think we are called to expand what we name our community and see ourselves as part of a much larger family, sitting at a much larger table.

And it’s wonderful when everyone at that table is having a good day. But what happens when a member of that larger family is facing a difficult challenge? What do we do when a member of that larger family is suffering?

It is difficult to be home and far from those I came to love in Peru and those at Paz y Esperanza, where I worked. It was difficult to leave just as fifteen year old Gladys and her 6 month old baby Luis Migel moved into the shelter on the farm own by Paz y Esperanza. I had become very close to her and I know this transition was not easy for her. How does she feel right now? What is going through her mind?

Accepting the invitation to world communion is challenging because it means acknowledging that the realities at other ends of the table are harsh, saddening and unfamiliar. It is knowing that while I sit down for dinner in my comfortable apartment, with a big kitchen and my own bed, Talia and her brother Eliaquim are going to sleep on an empty stomach because their father didn’t sell enough pop sickles on the streets of Huánuco. The entire family will share two single beds in a closet-sized bedroom.

By entering world communion we recognize that we are from the same community and no longer are others’ struggles a distant concern. World Communion asks us to know intimately the hardships that others have endured and are experiencing at this moment. To listen to stories that are painful and traumatic marked by sexual abuse, domestic violence, civil war, disabling poverty.

By entering World Communion we must prepare ourselves for deep sorrow and ugliness.

But world communion also brings great joy.

World Communion emerged every time I pulled out the piece of orange felt with Ariel’s name on it, another volunteer who I was chosen to pray for while she served in Southern India. While I prayed for her, Celeste was praying for me in Guatemala.

World Communion emerged when I visited a women’s weaving cooperative in Lima that made the bags that were given out at the Presbyterian Women's Gathering in Louisville a few years ago.

World Communion was alive during an evening with my host family, skimming through old hymn books in Spanish, looking for melodies we all recognize.

I think part of me will always reside in Huánuco, Peru. In accepting that, I’m starting to understand what it means to have my heart in two places at once, to live here but simultaneously feel knitted into the daily life and ways of another community.

Having returned home, it is Peru that I am now homesick for. But I have come to believe that homesickness is a holy place, a recognition that while I may never be able to see all those I love in one room, I know that we are indeed at the same table.