The Bone Factory.

When I was 15 I went to Mexico on a mission trip with my church youth group. We pantomimed bible stories for the school aged children. I was tallest in the group so I played Goliath in one skit. Our interpreter read the story of the shepherd boy who would be king, his five smooth stones, and the horrible six-fingered Philistine. Whenever she said the name "Goliath" I would roar and raise my cardboard sword and tin foil shield and the children would squeal as one and collectively shrink back from where they sat on the dirty concrete floor.

The day before we returned to the States we drove into Monterrey. The road stretched out before us long and flat and dull, with only a few sparse shacks that barely passed muster as businesses along the way. One proffered fresh fruit, while another offered tire repair in two languages. A smell began to bring comments from our crowded van that soon turned to complaints and simulated gagging and then into pervasive nausea and noses buried in shirts or held between thumb and forefinger. The smell increased at an alarming rate until it was burning our throats and keeping us from deep breaths. Our guide informed us of the origin of the wretched stench.

She pointed to an industrial structure rising out of the dirt. It was nearly a mile from the main highway and the only brick building for miles. She said it was called the Bone Factory by the locals. It was a processing plant for an ingredient in soap. The roadkill and waste from slaughterhouses was brought there and allowed to rot in a chamber and at certain intervals the carcasses were incinerated to reduce them to bone ash. This sediment was then taken somewhere off site and added to soap as a substitute for pumice as an abrasive. We were all barely able to keep from vomiting at this point. After getting on down the road a bit and upwind of the Bone Factory I mustered a question about the workers and there ability to work in those conditions. Our guide explained that the workers along with those living in this area had lost all sense of smell and taste. We were astonished. Even more so when she told us just how bad the smell was when the factory had been in operation.....it had closed 2 years previous.

I hadn't thought about the Bone Factory in years until last night when I was reading Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel's book "Children Of The Flames" about Josef Mengele and his wicked experiments on the twins at Auschwitz. In it, one of the twins, Eva Mozes, recounts an incident that happened after the war.

"A couple of years after the war, our Rabbi in Cluj decided to hold a memorial service for all the Jews from our town who had died in the Holocaust. The Rabbi said that if anyone in the congregation had bars of soap left over from the concentration camps, we should bring it to the temple. He told us it had to be "buried" because it had been made from human flesh. It was the first time I had heard that. Before we left the camp, my twin sister and I took whatever we could with us. At a time when goods were scarce, I used the soap all the time. After the Rabbi's address, I felt terrified. I thought, "Maybe I used soap made from my family." For years, I had continuous nightmares. Every night, I dreamt I was washing myself with soap made from my parents or sister."

The "bone factories" of Auschwitz spewed the ash and stench of 8 thousand Jews a day into the German countryside. From the fires of that hell may or may not have actually come soap. Scholars and historians have come to a relative consensus that this was probably one of many lies perpetrated on the Jews by the SS to further break their spirits. (Although there have been a few documented admissions of former SS scientists who did experiment with a process of using human fat to make soap.) Nonetheless, I remember my repulsion at the horrific smell for those 5 short minutes that afternoon in Mexico, and at the thought of using soap made from rotting animals. But I cannot even begin to imagine how young Eva must have felt having lived years in the shadows of the Nazi ovens. Each day breathing in the stench of the dead, and everyday since wondering if she had washed herself with the remains of her family.

I have a very keen, borderline acute, sense of smell. Some small consolation I suppose for my almost as acute nearsightedness, but it has left certain indelible marks on my psyche. One, of course, was the bone factory in Mexico, but another this past weekend at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.. This week marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps by American soldiers. There were special exhibits and events all week at the museum. But the one exhibit that affected me the most, the one that will stay with me the longest, was the thousands of confiscated shoes of the victims of the camps.



There they were piled on either side of the walkway, boots, sandals, loafers, even what appeared to be a pair of heels that would have been worn for a night on the town. Of course the shoes were in every size imaginable, the tiniest revealing the youngest victims. As gut wrenching as the sight of those miniature shoes was, what scarred me most was their smell. I have long disdained the smell of molded, damp, leather stored in airless places. That smell gets to working on my gag reflex rather efficiently. But I am thankful now for that smell. I will never forget those shoes, the brutality of Nazi torture. They will never become just a photo facsimile shut in a book, shelved among many other books, every time I smell that smell I will remember. I will remember the ovens, the "bone factories" of the Nazi camps, I will remember Eva and the twins. I will remember what happens when the world sleeps through the screams of the defenseless.

Oh, forgive me this rant.

I was sitting in the emergency room with a friend and our seats faced the front window and the television. The program was chronicling the life and times of a fallen starlet. Her career had hit the dreaded "rock bottom", and she was slowly trying to climb back up the mountain of artistic acclaim. We watched as her limo took her from one record label to the next for them to tell her that they didn't want to release her latest album. She reminisced about her days of glory from her mansion's commercial sized, granite paneled kitchen. She was quick to mention her faith and she even cried at one point.


I'm no marketing guru. But honey buy yourself your own record label and release your songs already. Jeez.


Next up was a preacher telling us to send him a "seed" and that if we did, God would bring such a harvest of cash and possessions into our lives that we would never want again. It's the familiar shtick we've heard for years and yet the audience was full of "believers" ready to testify to the financial "miracles" that had befallen them at the very hour of their desperation when they had obediently sown a "seed" into the particular man's ministry.


Now this begs a question, at least to me anyway. Is the only fertile soil on God's once green earth the pockets, wallets and bank accounts of these snake oil salesmen? I mean not once do these men encourage the unwashed masses to sow seeds into the lives of the the impoverished around them. Never do they actually put the sowing and reaping scriptures they are so fond to preach in the biblical context in which they were spoken. Of course not. Where's the profit in that.


In the ten minutes that I've been writing this 150 children died of malnutrition. Another will die before I finish typing this sentence. According to World Legacy.org it costs 2/3rds of a cent to feed a person a half a cup of food. My 3 dollar Americanos twice a day could feed a family of 5.


Here's a few scriptures for you madam and for you preacher man.


And especially for me.

Deuteronomy 15:11 For the poor will never cease from the land; therefore I command you, saying, “You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy, in your land.”

Psalms 82:3-4 Defend the poor and fatherless; Do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy; free them from the hand of the wicked.

Proverbs 31:20 (It is said of the Godly woman that) She extends her hand to the poor, Yes, she reaches out her hands to the needy.

Matthew 19:21 Jesus said to him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”

Luke 14:13 But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.

Galatians 2:10 [They desired] only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do.

2^nd Corinthians 9:8-15 God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work. As it is written: “He has dispersed abroad, He has given to the poor; His righteousness endures forever.” Now may He who supplies seed to the sower, and bread for food, supply and multiply the seed you have sown and increase the fruits of your righteousness, while you are enriched in everything for all liberality, which causes thanksgiving through us to God. For the administration of this service not only supplies the needs of the saints, but also is abounding through many thanksgivings to God, while, through the proof of this ministry, they glorify God for the obedience of your confession to the gospel of Christ, and for your liberal sharing with them and all men, and by their prayer for you.



M.

Father Jeremiah and the Illuminati

Father Jeremiah feared the subversive Illuminati most. He said they were the shadow government behind all governments, and most of the churches. Father Jeremiah was a Russian Orthodox priest, curt with disenchantment. He had a wizard’s beard and a monk’s hooded cloak made of black wool that smelled of stale sweat and mildew. Around his neck hung relics of a dying sect, silver-plated and peeling badly. He lived alone on Mars Hill Road in an electric blue and neon orange sanctuary whose front porch frowned at passing cars under the weight of a roof unequally distributed between its two outer posts. On one of those straining supports was tied a giant gong from Ethiopia whose other end was fastened to the house by thick nautical rope. Hanging by the front door that centered the porch was a mallet that Father Jeremiah used to wake the morning and announce the Holy days. Tied to the other post was a moon-eyed dog that wore the spotted coat of its wild desert brothers. Inside was candle-lit mostly, with a few dim bare-bulbs in the darkest halls and the bath. The walls were dark earth brown, eighteenth century icons hung like windows every six feet or so. The copper and brass images of long dead saints stared into the dark rooms through these windows and flickered with artificial life from the candles that clung to the walls between each flaking frame. In every room there were ornate canters slowly smoking incense into the air, black pepper and cloves.

The air was thick with damp, mildewing, slow-rotting wood. On the dark table in the largest room, the one with the fireplace, the sole source of heat, sat piles of undelivered newspapers. In the corner was a cot where Father Jeremiah had been sleeping off January in this one warm room with its stone hearth and picture less mantle. I was there to fix a shower drain but first was taking the makeshift tour of the musty little museum, listening to its eccentric curator reminisce about Russia and his fellow priests whose exploits of faith he would never be able to duplicate. The silence of the dead saints on the walls must have seemed to communicate their approval to Father Jeremiah for his pious humility because arbitrarily he would stop before one of them and say a silent prayer of thanks for their indulgence.

We had tea as I helped him roll and bag newspapers for the paper route he ran for some spending money. He gave me stern warnings of all the clandestine goings on of the dastardly Illuminati. I sipped my tea slowly and tried to read this man old enough to be my grandfather. What if any joy had his religion brought him? Here he was cloistered away in his tiny temple afraid and alone, the Jesus frozen in a frame on the wall unable to comfort him, unable to ease his fears. We finished our tea and the busy work that kept the lulls in conversation from being too awkward. Finally we said our polite goodbyes and I drove home a little sad for my new friend. I never saw Father Jeremiah again. My mom said he came into the drug store where she cashiered now and again to buy a case of beer, but that he never spoke and rarely ever made eye contact.

Maybe this is why our Heavenly Father warns us against graven images. Maybe it’s that Jesus becomes so familiar, so innocuous, so much a fixture in a room, that He ceases to be the risen savior that kicked the teeth out of the Beast and razed Satan’s kingdom to the ground. Or maybe it’s because Jesus becomes a fixed point in space, static and powerless to overcome our fears, our failures, our loneliness, or even the dreaded Illuminati.

I always meant to go visit Father Jeremiah again, I’m very sad and somewhat ashamed that I never did. I wish that even in my youth I could have somehow found a way that day to communicate the vibrant joy that knowing Jesus gave me. Wish I could have shared the comfort of the precious Spirit. Wish Father Jeremiah could have felt the tenderness of his heavenly Father the way I have so many wonderful times. When I close my eyes I can still see that old dog with its milky white cataracts. I can still hear the deep roar of that giant gong. And I can still smell Father Jeremiah’s mildewed robe from when we shook hands goodbye.

Pancakes and Earthquakes

As I write this there are 40 thousand fresh dug graves in Haiti, at least a hundred thousand more people unaccounted for, thought to be buried in the rubble of what was once Haiti’s capitol Port-au-Prince. The pictures of devastation and destruction streaming into my safe little world are apocalyptic for sure. And I know the worst is to come; that the children and women and the feeble will be exploited for months, even years to come. Port-au-Prince looks like a war zone. And as with any war the collateral damage is always the innocent. The human traffickers will have thousands of orphans to choose from. The gangs will take their spoils of the desperate girls.

Last night, my friend Sam and I went to IHOP. They are running their annual all you can eat pancake special. For a meager sum hot, fresh, butter oozing pancakes can be had until the most ravenous of appetites is sated. All the while your cup does not empty as an attentive wait staff keeps your glass full of free ice water, clean as it is cold. People are dying for lack of water in Haiti. Gangs are killing for food.

Then Sam and I went to see the new Denzel Washington post nuclear apocalypse film The Book of Eli. It was unnerving at how the images could have been of Haiti. How gangs had taken over and resources we now take for granted were the very things that men killed for. While in Haiti, officials are watching as thugs terrorize the already devastated population. And while Sam and I sat safe and warm in a theatre, bellies bulging with buttermilk goodness.

Then we went to a rock and roll show at The Thirsty Hippo, our friend Ben Shea was debuting his new album Red Sunshine. Instead of a backing band he had a “robot”. The flashing red-eyed robot gave a running editorial on the end of the world in between songs and handled the rhythm tracks while Ben sang his angst ridden neo-grunge anthems and conjured the rock demons on his SG. When I closed my eyes, images of the gray post nuclear world and Port-au-Prince mixed with the robot’s deep mechanized diatribe and Ben’s dark, droning soundtrack. It was all a bit surreal. But I was still safe, still full.

My prayers are with the quake survivors in Haiti; with those who will be exploited for years to come. They are also with the brave aid workers from all over the world trying to mend the broken bodies, the broken hearts, and the broken spirits of those dear Haitians. Nothing like a catastrophe of biblical proportions to bring the lens of perspective sharply into focus. Nothing like a little apocalypse with a side of pancakes to make one ever grateful for even the smallest of things. And nothing like a makeshift robot to remind you what it means to be human.

M.

I Am A Stranger Here Myself

Several years back I was in Edinburgh, Scotland and I had some time to myself so I took in the four art museums that were serviced by a free shuttle everyday. I was on the longest leg of the tour between the National Portrait Gallery and the Dean Modern Art Museum and there was no one on the bus but me and a few college girls. They were busy with makeup and cell phones and chattering about all sorts of things that were unintelligible from my seat but their American accents and one particular phrase jumped out at me. The girl closest was talking about “back home” and “back home” was about 20 minutes from my birthplace on the east coast. I politely and somewhat shyly mentioned to them that I was born on an Air Force base very close to their hometown. I wasn’t flirting or trying to be nosy, just merely trying to make a connection, feeling somewhat isolated and far from home. I had only wanted to say “I am a stranger here myself”. But I only ended up feeling strange. The look on their faces was a mix of condescension and annoyance. Like when you tell a music aficionado that you like a band who’s t-shirt they are wearing and they are offended because if you know that band then that band has lost all underground credibility and has become too mainstream and therefore is relegated to the dustbins of independent music history. Ah, nothing like a little elitism to put you in your place.

I don’t know what made me think of that girl this morning as I was driving to work. I can’t remember her face, or even the city she was from, but I can still feel the slight burn of embarrassment resting on my cheeks. It’s funny the souvenirs we keep, and then the ones that keep us.

At the Modern Art museum there was an Andy Warhol Exhibit that I skipped because it was ten pounds, around 17 bucks at the time. I walked around the rest of the exhibits slowly soaking them all in, hoping I think for a little inspiration and maybe some clarity. I remember having very few strong reactions to the Art but one piece stands out, though it would anyway if for no other reason than its sheer girth. It was of the Roman god of fire, Vulcan by sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. Vulcan was the blacksmith who forged weapons for the gods and heroes and in the sculpture he is shown swinging his hammer and marching across the Great Hall. Half-man and half-machine, Vulcan is a monument to the modern age.

But what I remember most about this two story massive sculpture as I was standing on the 2^nd floor balcony staring directly across about shoulder level with the mythological blacksmith, is how when I walked across the balcony with only the weight of normal footfall, the giant metal machine-man would sway. At first I thought it was an illusion, but after walking a little heavier back in forth across the suspended balcony I saw the sculpture was indeed moving, directly in response to my steps, and somewhat more than just slightly.

So years later, thanks to a wayward thought of a somewhat snobbish coed, I am thinking of how frail that massive man/machine seemed and how it made me feel somewhat insignificant and uneasy myself. And if there has ever been a better testament to the state of the modern age, a better visual representation of it, well I haven’t seen it.

We have built for ourselves such machines as to move earth by the ton. We have built sky scrapers that seem to do just that. We have technology, and exponentially so, that allows us at anytime access the whole world from anywhere. And yet all these works of our hands cannot stop our world from swaying; cannot save us from the great clock of the earth winding down and the great cloak of the sky wearing thin.

Over and over again in scripture, God warns His creation against trusting the works of their hands. “I alone”, He entreats them, and us, “am worthy of your confidence, your hope.” Continually He reminds them, and us, that what we see, what we feel, and what we treasure here on earth is all food for moths, made for blight and rust and ruin, but the things of the Spirit, are made of such sterner stuffs from the perfect world to come. And yet still we trust in our humanity, our human “spirit”, the works of our hands, and our ability to define our destinies. And all around us, suffering, and bloodshed, and exploitation continue unabated, unaffected by our idols, mute and dumb, the most impressive works of our hands.

One last thing about Vulcan, he was lame, having been cast off Olympus by his mother as a baby for his ugliness thus falling to earth and breaking his leg, which is the reason he is aided by a support in the sculpture. We too are lame. Having been thrust out of God’s presence by the hideousness of our sin, but we are also made whole whoever would call on Jesus to reconcile them to the Father.

One of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes is “If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?” He asks in similar passage, do you find in yourselves desires that this world cannot fulfill? In essence he asking, do you feel like a stranger here? Are you like Vulcan, a man-machine, forging out your existence through self-reliance on such shaky ground or are you man-spirit, trusting in the One who made you, to deliver you, un-lame, without spot or blemish, into the firm bright bosom of Heaven, and the tender arms of Abba.

I am a stranger here myself, and I am still longing for home.

M.

That's My Soul Up There

Last night I was working late and my bookkeeping was interrupted by a spasm of fluttering wings and frantic little footsteps. It seems a bird, escaping the freezing weather and biting wind had found its way into the dropped ceiling between the floors at the retail space where I have my little shop.

I tried to ignore it, albeit with a genuine sense of concern. But birds are smart right? He found his way in, he, or she, would find their way out. But my concentration was wrecked. My thoughts were wandering across the ceiling as the little bird erratically or perhaps systematically sought a safe place to spend the night. So there I was, staring at the oatmeal colored acoustic tiles of the dropped ceiling imagining that little bird. And then I was thinking, it is a bird right? I mean it’s not possible that it is some giant cockroach, all bible black wings and oil slick eyes, staring into my soul from the shadows? But as if to calm my fears, the little bird peeped. One solitary peep that sounded to me very much like a sigh.

So I sighed in response to the bird, and back to the numbers I went, forcing myself to continue shuffling figures to and fro until some semblance of a budget was achieved. But then later, as I sat with a friend in the ER (she’s fine) I was humming a Police song, “King of Pain”, and I was changing the lyrics in my mind. I was singing, “There’s a little lost bird at the shop today. That’s my soul up there”. It was late, I was tired.

But this morning, back at the store, there is no bird sighing from its makeshift nest in the pink cotton candy of the fiberglass insulation. And I am thinking that my soul, that I, am very much like that. Always running from something, the cold of disenchantment or the bitter biting wind of disappointment. That I am want to seek refuge in the strangest of places. And yet, what the gentle Spirit keeps telling me is “Be still, know that I am God, and that my mercies are new every morning”.

We fail. As humans I think it is what we do best. As a human, speaking for all humans, and a prime example of a human myself, I fail, and often. And yet the scripture in Lamentations 3:22-26 hit me square in the chest today. His mercies are new every morning. My failures are forgotten, the precious blood of my Savior applied each day anew.

So I am trying to learn to be silent. To rest in Abba’s favor and his tender mercies. I am trying to learn to trust Him for the money to keep my little store from succumbing to this “economic downturn” or for the wisdom to know what to do next. But I am still that little bird mostly, frantic and fearful, wind weary and shivering, just trying to get in out of the weather. He is not done with me though, and tomorrow is another day.

Boat sinkin’, bailin’ water,

M.