Carlos
 
While forlornly adjusting back to my reality-based life here in Houston (sweet, the wiring on my garage circuit blew out, my pal Gerald nobly coming to the rescue) I’ve been savoring the Belize trip, including the–in all humility–brilliant organization of it. At least to my mind, natch. But one of the challenges of the thing is you gotta create a crew from different parts of the country via email ahead of time so that there’s at least some minimal sense of who we are together and what we’re about on the gathering day. So I cleverly appointed everyone an officer: New Testament Ray the Resource Guy; Gabbin Gary the First Mate; Silent Col the Galley Captain; Coffee DEEwayne the Medic; Match Maker Don the Chaplain; Manic George the Dinghy Guy; Duane the Red and Radio Tim the Music Guys; John of the Northlands–a last minute replacement–the Journalist. Each one of us held a responsibility upon which the rest of us depended; each one of us was crucial to the well-being of the whole body on this journey. It mattered to all of us that they did their jobs. The incarnation of Paul in 1 Corinth. 12, for the biblically inclined. Am I a wizard, or what?
 
‘Course, I needn’t have worried overly much about the initial encounter of the group down there in Placencia. Being in the last four of us to arrive eventually at 6:30 (pm), the local flight an hour and so late, natch, 60% of the crew had already been there for 4 – 5 hours, sitting in one of those beach front BAR/restaurants developing a taste for–and exhibiting the exaltation of–rum punch. By the time we got around to the after-dinner official meeting I had scheduled, people were zonking—a lá, is this gonna take long? I’m tired—so we had an abridged meeting mostly to focus on what had to happen the next morning in checking out and loading the boat and stuff. The early sleep retirement was a good thing, because the morning was a swirl of activity with charter contracts and payments and provisioning supplies and payments and boat check out and chart briefing and the couple of dozen other details which go with getting a group of ten ready to sail for a week. But the really cool thing is that all the officers did their jobs and I just did the paperwork, a lá with Silent Col the Galley Captain, “Do we have all the provisions on board? Is this bill correct?” It was so cool that we were under way about a half hour before the time I’d hoped for, which is some kind of a miracle in my experiences: nobody ever sets sail ahead of time, ’specially with a group of ten pastors. But there you go: the church when it works.
 
And it got better as we learned to live the days in the sense of Luke’s comments in Acts about the fellowship studyin’ the word and eatin’ together, both being, it seems to me, of equally powerful spiritual grace (the practice, perhaps, of word and sacrament); particularly the excellence of the meals prepared by rotating teams based on Silent Col’s brilliant menu planning which, I’ve finally figured out, boiled down to here’s the main parts and there’s a bunch of spices and stuff, so do what you can with what you have; the creativity of it all blossomed forth as each meal was pretty spectacular and uniquely delicious, and I marveled at it all, being totally unfamiliar with the happenings in the galley, the duty from which, as captain, I’ve absolved myself.
 
In fact, usually I spend no time inside the boat, save that necessary for the morning purging in a stall not built for sitting there reading; I live on the outside, in the cockpit, on the deck, sleeping under the stars, blanketed by the winds. The one night it rained hard enough to chase me in, I slept on the curved settee behind the table in the saloon (as it is called) enduring the humid stillness like waiting for the plane ride to be over, and wondered about my mates who actually preferred to sleep in their cabins; though not all, as the nightly over the rail bathroom trips would reveal bodies laying all over the place. The port trampoline up front just a bit larger than a dramatically sagging queen-size became my berth, where I was joined nightly by NT Ray and it became our berth, so that I am told, though haven’t actually seen it, there is a picture of him and me “spooning” the night it got chilly at, oh, 2:00 a.m. and he didn’t feel like making the trek to the other end of the boat for his own, grabbed half my single sheet and snuggled right up, “Can I share your sheet?”
 
Dude.
 
It gets dark down there—around 6:15—and fast, like the flickering wisp of a burning straw. In thirty minutes the stars are showing up and as time moves on the bolder ones coax out the less certain, pretty soon the underwater fluorescent shimmerers show up, and this is the meaning of the evening.
 
Or would be were it not for all the fucking lights on in the saloon and cockpit shining us up like an aircraft carrier. For one thing I gotta pay attention to electrical usage because ultimately it translates into diesel fuel costs, and besides, there’s nothing more thrilling than discovering a dead battery in the morning. And these guys spent electricity like drunken sailors. Though more importantly it messed with my night vision and intruded on the star field, so that at the height of my irritation one night, “Turn out the fucking lights, for Christ’s sake. You’re disturbing my serenity.” ‘Course all was forgiven when we went over the side the next morning, snorkeled another Eden, and later that day under sail caught a fish big enough to feed us all with the delicious creativity of the galley crew.
 
Our two-a-day discussions took shape around NT Ray’s presentations on what he only half-facetiously calls a non-religious reading of the gospel of Luke/Acts; thus, paraphrasing what I heard, you gotta hear this stuff without all the creeds and theological dogmas accrued since Constantine made Christianity the official church of the empire in the 4th century; you gotta hear this stuff with the ears of a post-war people defeated by the empire; living in poverty and humiliation, and arguing about how to live as God’s people in this slave system which kept 90% of the population at a mere subsistence level (enough calories to keep me alive today) life. It was a caste society built around honor and shame and operated on the politico-economic practice of patronage; it was a zero-sum game—you were either a winner or a loser in it all. That’s the way all human systems seem to live out: they create winners and losers, and the winners win comes at the loss of the losers. I get, so you lose; you have it taken from you. Luke’s question isn’t so much how do we change the system as it is how do we live in a system that creates winner and losers? Where, so to speak, is God, and our life with God in all of this? Instead of an issue of orthodoxy—right belief—it is an issue of orthopraxis—right behavior. How do we live with dignity and treat each other justly in a system that deforms people both ways?
 
So our discussions revolved around what I call stories and parables of Jesus and the system, a lá, say, “Turn the other cheek” being that in that society the slap—pretty much a daily occurrence—was the humiliation of a socially inferior by a superior that required the inferior to fall to his knees. To turn the other cheek meant to refuse to be part of that humiliation, to remain standing eye to eye, but also to refuse to engage with violence against it by offering the other cheek. (As with, of course, Gandhi and MLK, Jr.: nonviolent noncooperation).
 
Ranguana Cay is one of those tropical idylls, a spit of palm trees and beach maybe 30 years wide and 150 yards long that sits in turquoise clear water at the edge of the barrier reef where the waves come rumbling in from the Caribbean and the trades whistle in the fronds and those are the only sounds of activity. To them it didn’t matter that we gathered there, sat among them and talked about the parable of the dishonest steward that has given us preacher types fits forever: the manager of the estate finds out he’s gonna be fired, so goes to everybody in debt to the owner and reduces their bill; the owner of the estate finds out and—get this—commends the guy, with Jesus polishing off it about the children of this world being shrewder than the children of light. The dishonesty of it, after all. But wait: if we recall the 90% who are living at subsistence, grabbing just enough food for today, then the debt—set by the owner, eh?—of these tenant farmers is in a very real way tomorrow’s meals. The guy uses the system to make it better for them.
 
And at the same time, by the way, the guy covered his own ass for the future, because the people would owe him. He would be received as one of them. This, in fact, might be part of his own salvation, becoming part of the community. For up to now he’d gone it alone (as NT Ray: the Greek reads about him, “So I says to myself, self. . .”). He ends up leaving his station above them—which isolated him—to join with them. The existential moment of the kingdom of God, we might say, when he steps out of the system to an alternate reality: compassion and mercy wrought by some kind of divine necessity.
 
We set out from there for our last sail back to anchor in Placencia Bay in preparation for departures and boat return the next morning. The sail was marvelous and relaxed, the crew in a reflective mood. When I called (too early, alas) for the sails to be furled they went at it with casual confidence. I was scanning the beach front for the requisite BAR/restaurant before the anchor was even fully set because of one of my introverted fits of needing to get space, and thus was not pleased when Coffee DEEwayne insisted we were dragging anchor—shit, now everybody’s an expert—but he was right, though I wouldn’t be convinced without sending Manic George over in his mask to look at the anchor, his eventual call of “I can’t see anything in this murk” brought to me the realization that all the charter boats anchor there, and flush their shit overboard, for which I eventually apologized and will some day buy him a beer. I finally got to shore, and the rum punches started flowing like a rainbow; for me, because I’d gotten everybody back safe, if not necessarily sound. The rainbow led us to a magnificent crew feast, where food and drink just kept appearing, and we all yo-ho-hoed it with everybody else there, too.
 
After awhile I got tired of being with white Americans (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and so wandered away from the table, eventually sharing a beer and a smoke in the shadows of the evening beachfront, away from the noise of the dinner crowds with Carlos, a 30-year-old guy with beautiful tattoos of Jesus all over his dark body. He was from Guatemala. I asked him how he lived. I just try to make it from one day to the next. I’ve been all over—the US, Mexico, South America—to try to find a job, to make a living for my wife and two kids. Then I realized that the system wouldn’t let me. ‘Course this was all spoken in broken English with a lot of unnecessary apologies for it, but I was knocked out by what he said in light of the bible discussions we preachers had been having. Indeed, Carlos and I talked about being Christians, and he, too, was getting his sense of the system from the bible.
 
I asked what hopes he had for his children, age 4 and 6. I would like to have a little farm in Guatemala where we could live and they would know Jehovah. I don’t want to send them to school, because the school is just part of the system; it teaches them to be part of the system. I don’t want them trapped in the system. We thought about and discussed what this might mean for his kids.
 
We talked, and later I asked I suppose I look rich to you; to me you look like you’re poor. How do you see that? Does it make you bitter? We see you as well-educated and rich, sure. And we also know that we will never be either. And, sure, we get bitter about it. But not so much about you in particular, but about the system being the way it is. But when you tourists come, he said with a smile, we’ll use the system the best we can to make a little more living.
 
We talked on and on there in the shadows by the sea, until I decided it was time to head back, and we parted with an embracing handshake, a couple of momentary brothers (or perhaps more, dad and son, given the age differences). I ran into Radio Tim and Manic George back at the BAR/restaurant and we shared a few before tumbling into the dinghy for a manic ride back to the boat by Manic George. I tiptoed slovenly along the boat to my trampoline berth and managed to get on that without repeating the accidental full gainer I had done into it earlier in the week which rated a mere 4.5 from a suddenly awake Ray. I lay in the net and looked at the stars and felt the wind and knew that the bigger grace of this pilgrimage had been given in a momentary eternity with Carlos, and I prayed for him.
 
And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.