Dear readers, this selection is the fourth and final part of a sneak preview to a future memoire I think I will call "Translation Overload." To start from the beginning of this four-part series, click here.
At home in Washington State, June, 2005
“I think I have an exaggerated case of ‘reversed culture shock.’” I had just sat down, awkwardly, in the chair before the senior pastor of my church, mid-50s, balding. He’s a hiker in good shape, but has been asking the congregation for prayer over pain from a foot surgery gone wrong. It’s late in the afternoon, 4:00, and his face looks worn. Perhaps he is tired from a long day or suffering in his feet. Had I been more wise and less desperate, I would have suggested we reschedule.
I had planned my first line with him very carefully. At least this idea – that disconcerting feeling upon one’s return from a mission to another country – could be a simple way to ease into the more challenging dialogue over the nightmares and the extrasensory I had been experiencing since returning from a three week mission trip to Venezuela. I was about a month into a 3 ½ month period I would later call my “summer in the twilight zone.” My friends, unable to provide the council and support I sought had urged me to make this appointment with our pastor to receive his more expert spiritual council.
How was I to describe the remarkable myriad of the extrasensory I had begun to experience in Venezuela, then glorious, and now continuing, yet with terror? In Venezuela, these had been beautiful: the waterfall of memories from my toddlerhood in Brazil, the aurora vision, and the loving whispers of mystery. Now at home, these continue, but they are also tainted with painful memories, nightmares, migraines and vomiting, and demanding voices. While the whispers of mystery are lovingly repeating Samuel’s words, ”Karina, tú tienes el poder” (you have the power) to encourage me away from the Prozac and toward the divine forces within me, other voices in a stronger volume are sending apocalyptic warnings and ordering me to pack suitcases of supplies for immediate evacuation from some sudden disaster. Hoping Pastor Tired can reinforce the whispers of mystery encouraging me into divine strength, I forged my plan last night: omit any apocalyptic fears and begin with reversed culture shock, then move to the memories, then shift to the nightmares, and close with a request for council and prayer.
Pastor Tired looks blank. No nod. No expression of understanding. He’s led mission trips. He must know what reversed culture shock is? For all of the previous mission trips I had participated in, the leaders had prepared us not only for the potential of culture shock upon entering the country of service, but also of the common experience among many to face “reversed culture shock” upon the return. This happens when you come home from a mission trip, having accustomed yourself to the foreign country, possibly loving it and learning from it, and you return a changed person and disoriented in your own country. At 16, when I returned home from my first church-sponsored mission trip to Mexico to build houses, I felt my breath leave me as I walked up to my three-story house and opened the door to exceptional spaciousness. Our green tiled front entryway was about a third of the size of the homes we had just built, but this space before me was just an empty entryway. To the left of our entryway were two staircases, one up to the four bedrooms, bathrooms, and a small linin room, and the other down to the family room, a third bathroom, laundry, and garage. To the right of the entryway was our kitchen, ending with a space for the kitchen table. Behind the entryway and straight in front was a living room and to its right was a full dining room. Since the family room had the TV, we didn’t use the living room much, and it was about the same size as the full houses we had built for families of six and seven. Why did my family of three need this house? Some of my teammates were asking similar questions, sparing me from that lonely experience of processing these questions all alone, as we supported one another.
Today, sitting in the pastor’s
office, I am twice the age I was then, and I had accurately described my
reversed culture shock as “exaggerated.”
This time, it carries the unexpected “waterfall of memories” from my
toddlerhood in São Paulo, Brazil which I enthusiastically begin to share with Pastor
Tired. Might he perk up upon hearing of
the flood of memories from the ages of two and three that had poured into me
while I was in Venezuela?
No, he slumps in his chair with his head bowed down. Still desperate, I persist. “One memory even goes back to 22 months old,” I tell him, hoping for an eye of interest. “And all the memories from Brazil were very positive, loving, joy-filled. But now I am back in the United States, and I’m getting more memories, but these are from my childhood in California, and they are painful, making my reversed culture shock exceptionally strong.”
Pastor Tired’s head is now bent even lower. Has he heard me? I shift my body in my chair and take a breath. Everything I’ve shared he should comprehend. Wouldn’t any pastor or leader of a mission trip understand reversed culture shock? I have since discovered that many of them don’t. Four months later, this same pastor took a mission trip to somewhere in Africa, and he returned to report a cacophony of obstacles and how relieved he was to be back where the roads are paved and people don’t make a living by blocking bridges and bribing you to cross them. More open than many among the white clergy, he advocates for people of color. But in Africa, he faced no reversed culture shock. As I listened to his story, I reflected that the notion that some of us might be more disoriented upon our return from a mission must have been as foreign to him as the country he had just come home from.
The hour was getting late, 4:30; I had to get to the point. “I’m not sleeping, and when I am, I’m battling nightmares that are also haunting me during the day.”
Still slouching with eyes off to the side, Pastor Tired conveys polite impatience. I’m not crazy and have a genuine need for support. Can he please listen?
“I’m also vomiting and having migraines,” I continue. Then I add a detail I had not planned. “Until now, I had experienced only one migraine in my life: on the night of September 10th, 2001.” I emphasize the “10th” and the “1.” Finally, he turns to look at me, but with eyes of irritation and in a voice like a teacher to a middle schooler who had just misbehaved. “And what makes you think that’s relevant?”
“What I’m going through is not
normal.”
Longing to be taken seriously, I shift to the nightmare of getting lost in the lions’ lair at the zoo, the reminder of the nightmare to the prophet Daniel in the lion’s den, the name Daniel of the pastor in Venezuela I was translating for, and the attraction between me and Daniel, for which, on one day, Daniel needed to take leave for a couple of hours.
Now I have Pastor Tired’s attention. His eyes, no longer looking away, dart straight into mine as piercing swords. “You think a pastor was attracted to you?” His eyes glare at me, and he shakes his head, skeptical and annoyed. “And why do you think this?”
Why is he pursuing this extra detail to take us off the trail of our conversation? I’m feeling at least as annoyed as his darting eyes reveal him to be. I did not come for Daniel. I came for counsel, prayer, and support for the post-mission trip whirlwind. But, tinged with insulting skepticism, Pastor Tired is driving us onto an unnecessary tangent. Why had I kept this appointment?
Finally, I do what I should have done from the start. I let out a deep breath, shake my head, look at him with eyes just as straight, and reply with confidence. “His head elder confirmed it.”
He rolls his eyes, shakes his head
back and forth, and sighs with a groan.
His face scrunches up and I can see the question written all over
it. Even if true, why would the elder
admit it?
It is almost 5 pm, and finally I have some clarity about what to do. I pick up my purse, thank him, and say, “That’s not why I came. I’m praying for your feet, I’ll bother you no more, and I’ll look for support elsewhere. Thank you.”
* * * * *
I wish I could say that this misunderstood dialogue cured me of my naivete toward the thinking patterns of North American religious leaders, but my desperation for support ran too deep, and I had been conditioned to believe they were the ones to provide it. In my thinking, an attraction, especially a playful bond like the one Daniel and I shared, was natural and something to be enjoyed and celebrated, not something to fear or run away from. My heart and soul, especially with the early childhood memories confirming it, were certain that something very significant had happened to me in Venezuela, and I had to pursue whatever it was.
The whispers of mystery faithfully
carried me through that summer in the twilight zone, and the divine forces
concluded this period with yet another confirmation that arrived on the morning
of August 30: my agonized perception of a disaster occurring at that moment,
while I was camping in Oregon, away from any news reports. After we left the campsite, we learned a hurricane
was flooding New Orleans, and it was about to kill almost 2000 people. Hurricane Katrina.
That was 17 years ago. I listened to them and I learned from them,
and I have remained mostly silent about this story ever since. But that is changing. Outside this blog, I’ll begin crafting this
wild story of the summer in the twilight zone, the translation overload, and
the murky workings within the patriarchal evangelical church. I hope you’ll join me in encounters like this
with Pastor Tired, including my first-hand discovery of that odd, cultish term
I had my character Ethan explain here
in “Just like Eve”: “entrusted to a pastor.”
With each interaction with a religious leader, I continued to discover
that I was hitting an extra sensitive button for the male clergy in the
evangelical tradition. Many carry a
buried fear of what I would call a natural bond of attraction, for which they apply
a very different term: “lust.” Oh how
childlike my perception was! While their inclinations may need to be faced, for a playful bond of attraction, which
view is likely to be more natural, authentic, and grounded in truth?
Childlike I may have been, but today, sobered and triumphant over the unnecessarily
complicated “adult” way of thinking, childlike I choose to remain.
"Translation Overload" sneak preview Part 1
My other story of my time in Venezuela and the memories of Brazil
