Jasmine's Journal: Liberating Eve

Dear friends and readers, the concluding selections to Just like Eve are now back.  If you are new to this series, you can get an overview here, or start at the beginning, or start at the recent set of selections between Jasmine and her friends for her most recent discoveries. 

Colorado Springs, CO, August 5, 2012

“The wise or knowing nature” of the “healthy woman” is to speak and act on one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible.”

(Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women who Run with the Wolves, p. 10)

"To retain as much consciousness as possible.  Jasmine records the final phrase a second time into her journal, after quoting Estés’ classic, recommended to her by Gabbie.

“To retain consciousness or gain it back?” Jasmine writes into her journal.  “Didn’t I have consciousness and then lost it?  When I was chided for ‘thinking at odds’?”  Jasmine lifts her pencil and wonders whether “retaining consciousness” means triumphing over conditioning. 

Perhaps a very few brave or lucky children never lose it.  But Jasmine wasn’t among them.  Over the years of her adolescence, chided for thinking at odds, or seeing eyes roll over for her questions and insights, or scolded for being just like Eve, little by little Jasmine permitted herself to be conditioned into silence. At first, it wasn't silence but delayed speaking, carefully considering her words and delaying her insights.  She still saw heads shaking and shoulders shrugging and eyes rolling, and she trained herself into silence. In time the silence of her mouth also grew into silence of her mind. She coached herself to quit thinking at odds.

In college, away from her family, Jasmine began to think at odds again, and sometimes, she made the error of speaking her thinking.  Remarkably, among some of her college friends, that was okay.  She could speak her mind. But perhaps their encouragement gave her too much confidence and she forgot, and spoke her mind again at home or at church, and this time, the chiding turned to scolding. She's a young adult. Shouldn't she know better by now what she can and cannot say?

So Jasmine rebuked herself, vowing to think at evens, yet unsure how she could learn such a trick.  Then she met Tim, the archer, who was very good at thinking at evens, and he liked her too, and his body felt delicious as he stood right behind her, touching his whole body to hers, teaching her to position every limb and every part of her body for perfect aim.  With him, she could shoot that arrow straight into the bullseye.  With him, perhaps she could also think at evens.

And now the very quality that drew her in is sending her away. Tim may have succeeded for a time to help Jasmine think at evens, but such an target, that he didn't even know he’d been given, and nor did she for that matter, carried with it a deadly side effect: the loss of Jasmine's own wise and compassionate consciousness. 

Then Davie came along -- after Jasmine had already married Tim, and after Davie had already married Pam.  But Davie helped Jasmine recover her own consciousness, her thinking at odds that he loved.  As Davie’s celebrated her thinking, Jasmine could see the loss of her consciousness began with her inquisitive and compassionate spirit.  She had wished to know why Noah let God drown the world: a question of compassion, for which she had been scorned, called “just like Eve.”

She and the church, Jasmine has come to realize, have differed on their fundamental value system.  The church values obedience at all costs to the authority it believes in, while Jasmine has valued compassion and has questioned the value of obedience without it.  Of the church, however, she remains perplexed.  If the churches truly believe in “obedience,” would they not wish to obey their master?  Jesus?  “Wasn’t it Jesus who said, ‘Ask, seek, and knock’? And didn’t the writer of Hebrews call for us to discern between good and evil? 

“Isn’t Elohim, who forbids such knowledge, inconsistent with them?”  Jasmine has already learned the character called ‘God’ is Elohim in Hebrew, with its feminine root, “power” and its masculine plural to translate, essentially, to feminine and masculine “powers.”  Once again thinking at odds, Jasmine makes a radical break from her tradition and reads this figure as a simple character in a simple story whose name is Elohim. 

Their own church, terrified by the attraction between Jasmine and Davie (Pastor David), sent Jasmine out of church and ordered Davie to quit attending their Mixed Doubles group.  Now that Jasmine is out of church, she figures they think however they do; they can think Elohim is “God” and stay blind to the inconsistency of this character with the one Jesus calls “Father,” who encourages questions and compassion.

For Davie Jasmine longs every day.  Her divorce with Tim is almost final. She prays Davie returns to their tennis group.  But even if he does not, and even if he stays with Pam, Davie has given Jasmine a priceless gift: he has given her the key that opens the door to redeem her consciousness.  And now Clarissa Pinkola Estes is walking with Jasmine through that door, confirming to her that she has found the right place, and that many have gone before her.

Through myths and legends, Estés relays the stories of the feminine version of the hero’s journey, and Jasmine decides to read Eve’s story the way Estés reads the stories she relates.  The myth most like Eve’s is called “Bluebeard,” after the groom who woos the youngest of three sisters.  Soon after they wed, he departs for a trip, hands her a set of keys, and tells her she can use all but one, which, of course, is the one she most wishes to use.  When her sisters come to visit, they make that their mission: find the door that uses this key. When they finally succeed, they find a room full of corpses: Bluebeard’s ex-wives.  With the help of her two sisters and their three brothers, the young bride’s next task is to escape before he kills her too, and she succeeds.

“’Bluebeard forbids the young woman to use the one key that would bring her to consciousness’ (Estés, p. 47).  Isn’t that what Elohim did?” Jasmine asks into her journal.  “Forbid Adam and Eve not only from knowledge, but also from something Eve perceived would come that is far more valuable?  Wisdom? When I read the story of Eve in its plain text, its message is clear, but disturbing.  But only if we think the figure who forbids is ‘God.’” 

Jasmine smiles at Estés’ analysis of Bluebeard, who looks very much like Elohim, both of whom forbid consciousness: “If she attempts to obey Bluebeard’s command not to use the key, she chooses death for her spirit.  By choosing to open the door to the ghastly secret room, she chooses life (p. 47).”

“She chooses life.”  Another final phrase gets written twice into Jasmine’s journal, first from the quote and second from herself.  “Is life also not what Eve chose?  Elohim said eating of knowledge would bring death, but wouldn’t both choices bring death?  Either extermination or non-life in blindness, lacking in wisdom?”

Jasmine sets down her pencil, reflecting that not only compassion, but also wisdom, are values far higher for her than mere obedience.  She beats to a deeper drum.  She, too, wants wisdom.  So she asks questions.  Starting to feel vindicated, Jasmine adds into her journal what Estés says about questions: “Asking the proper question is the central act of transformation—in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation.  The key question causes germination of consciousness. . . . Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open” (48).

            “For Eve, the question was prompted by the serpent, who told Eve she would not die for eating the fruit,” Jasmine writes into her journal.  “He suggests Eve does can choose life.  It will come at a cost: her ‘eyes will be opened’ to her vulnerable nakedness and to evil and to suffering.  But she will also gain a real, authentic life with wisdom.”

            Who is this serpent in Hebrew? Jasmine wonders.  She’s already learned the Hebrew word translated as “God” is Elohim, and the word translated as “helper” in Gen 2:18 is ezer, better translated as “life saver,” and the word for Eve is Havah, or “life-giver,” making Eve’s name and title a play on words that has been lost in translation.

To understand the serpent in Hebrew, Jasmine knows she must turn to Jewish resources, and from the Jewish mystics, she makes an astonishing discovery: the serpent, nachash in Hebrew, shares an energetic affinity with messiah, mashiach in Hebrew, in their system of gematria. In Hebrew, every letter is also a number.  Scholars add up the letters of a word to form a number, and words of the same number share an energetic affinity.  Nachash (Nun, 50 + Chet, 8 + Shin 300 = 358) and mashiach (Mem 40 + Shin 300 + Yod 10 + Chet 8 = 358) add up to the sa energy of 358.

“The serpent carries the energy of the messiah?” writes Jasmine, stunned.  If any biblical figure is more demonized than any other, it would be this serpent.  But Jewish mystics connect this figure with messiah.  Thinking very at odds, Jasmine continues journaling: “Like a liberator? I suppose so. He liberated her from the non-life of blindness into an authentic life, one with both pleasure and pain, with joy and suffering. For better or for worse, the serpent-messiah offered Eve a full, authentic life.”

Jasmine wonders why this remarkable clue into the serpent as a messiah figure is not well known.  Then again, she remembers even the second two curses to Eve, written clearly in English, without errors of translation, are also not well known. 

Perhaps later Jasmine will also connect this nechash to the saving force Moses calls upon for the Israelites in exile from Egypt, or to the one Jesus tells Nicodemus must be lifted up to enter the kingdom, or even to modern medicine’s familiar image of the caduceus with two snakes wrapped around a pole, representing the kundalini energy that heals the body and opens the mind.  But today, Jasmine is early in her discoveries.

It will also be time before she learns that her quest, like that of Eve, is that of the sages of all time, like the Norse god Odin, who sacrificed his eye for all-seeing wisdom.  Nor does she know that many who have gone before her have been persecuted.  Those in power, perhaps not consciously realizing it, are threatened when people start thinking for themselves.  They might lose their positions of privilege and authority.  Hence, many of the texts that liberate into consciousness have been lost, buried and burned, most infamously in 48 BCE from the fire of the library in Alexandria.  Meanwhile, many of those retained, either written or oral, have been carefully repackaged to undermine liberation and embolden the authorities of the world.   But the mysteries can be unburied, as Jasmine has done.  Many scholars have interpreted the story of Adam and Eve in many ways, almost all of which are far more rational than Augustine’s, villanizing Eve, that still permeates Jasmine’s tradition.  

But Jasmine need not examine those, for her journey has been for those like her: raised into the paradigm of her religious tradition and its reverence for the Bible and methods of reading it: literally, but consistent, and with a study of the words and meanings in the original text.  Hers is a simple quest: to see the ways this story interpreted as she's been taught is not only internally inconsistent and harmful to wisdom, but even relies on the mistranslations of its principle characters and concepts from its original Hebrew text.  In essence, the evangelical interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve violates the very rules the same tradition teaches to read the Bible.

Into her journal entry, Jasmine concludes, “The church leaders might have intended an insult when they called me ‘just like Eve,’ but now I see a woman who bravely risks her life for something more valuable: wisdom.  Her ‘eyes were opened,’ and, therefore, she suffered.  Truth is painful, and so is wisdom.  We don't see without a cost, but it is worth the cost to suffer and live.  Perhaps Eve still should have done as Abraham: challenge Elohim for a better deal.  But if her only two choices were existence in blindness or wisdom with open eyes and suffering, Eve made the better choice, and I find her vindicated.”

Jasmine closes her journal, deeming herself also vindicated.  No longer insulted by centuries of misunderstanding, Jasmine is grateful to be just like Eve, to think at odds, to be a ball rolling down a hill, and to beat to a deeper drum.  Tim, her family, and her church can join a marching band together and drum in obedient conformity, while she strums to her own rhythm.  A sly smile comes across her face, one that can be seen only by others who also beat to their own drum.

Continue to Davie's Return, Part 1 

Start at Jasmine's newest discoveries

 © 2022 by karina.  All rights reserved.  Please ask for permission and/or link to this blog post.

Jasmine's Serve

Dear friends and readers, the concluding selections to Just like Eve are now back.  If you are new to this series, you can get an overview here, or start at the beginning, or start at the recent set of selections between Jasmine and her friends, or click the hyperlinks within the text for the selections referred to.  

Saturday, June 30, 2012.  Glendale Racquet Club, Colorado Springs, CO.

             “Tim and I have made a decision.” Jasmine is bouncing a ball onto the court she’s walking onto with her racquet.  She and her partner Mindy are switching court sides with their friends and opponents, Kristin and Gabbie.  It’s Jasmine’s serve. 

Mindy smiles.  She knows Jasmine’s news, but their opponents, Kristin and Gabbie, are waiting in anticipation.  Could she be pregnant?  Moving?  Splitting up?

At the baseline, Jasmine adds that she and Tim have been to seven marriage counseling sessions.  She positions herself behind the baseline, bounces the ball three times, says, “We’re getting a divorce,” bounces the ball one more time, announces the score 5 to 4, tosses up the ball, and serves a fast spin to Kristin’s backhand.  Kristin can’t reach it with any part of her racquet.  An ace.

            “What?!” Kristin shouts.  “You can’t say that and then serve one of those!”  Mindy chuckles, Gabbie smiles, and Kristin groans.  “Can she re-serve that point, Mindy?” 

            “You could have returned that serve, Kristin?” Mindy catches the ball Gabbie has just tossed back to her.

“Too good.”  Gabbie shakes her head.  “Your point.”

            “All right.”  Kristin relents.  “A round of daiquiris on me, Jasmine, if you give us the full scoop at The Alley.”

            Perhaps having thrown off her opponents, Jasmine serves a love game, winning the set 6-4.  Kristin has no complaints, just curiosity.

 The Alley, Glendale’s sports bar

             The friends find seats at their favorite table at the back of the sports bar.  Kristin orders a round of drinks and turns to Jasmine.  “A divorce?  Are you sure?  How do you feel?”

            “Relief, mostly.” The sweat on Jasmine’s face after playing tennis seems to reflect her relief after the uphill battle of her marriage.

            Kristin enjoys breaking rules in the religion that raised her but knows that’s not Jasmine’s habit.  “Are there any more surprises? Kristin asks, “even like you and Davie getting together?”

            “I haven’t seen him since February.” Jasmine reminds her friends that Davie is a youth pastor, still married, has been ordered out of their mixed doubles group by Quail Canyon Church, and she’s been ordered out of Quail Canyon altogether for the kiss they shared.  “I’d say that adds up to . . . probably not?”  Jasmine looks at each of her friends, hoping any of them might challenge her “probably not” reply.  No.  They each offer an ever-so-slight nod, more with their eyes than with their head.

            “How do you feel about being single?” Gabbie asks.

            “If I think about it too much, I’m terrified.”  Jasmine’s voice is now lower, slower, somber.  But when she doesn’t think about it, she feels peace.  Her chest isn’t tight and her breathing comes easier.  “My body is responding to my relief.”

            “I get it.”  Kristin replies quietly.

            Jasmine can see in Kristin’s eyes she really does understand, possibly in a way Jasmine has never really understood.  In a way, Kristin had “divorced” herself from her parents, rebelling against them when she refused their plans to continue homeschooling her in middle school.  Kristin was so young.  She must have been terrified.  How did she muster the courage?

Gabbie leans into the table and asks Jasmine what she and Tim learned from marriage counseling.

“That we are two different souls on two different paths who cannot forge a ‘truly new new.’”

That’s their marriage counselor’s term for couples with no glaring issues, hurts, or mistakes.  He says it’s unusual, but has seen it before, and has created for a goal for such couples: to forge a “truly new new.”

“Cool.” Gabbie nods.  “I like that.”

“Me too,” Jasmine nods with Gabbie.  “Not Tim.”

“Tim the Rock didn’t want a ‘truly new new’”? Mindy smiles.

“I, the rolling ball, love it, and he, the rock, hates it.”  Jasmine chuckles.  She reminds her friends that she was drawn to Tim’s rock-like nature and his archer qualities.  Jasmine’s friends all know that Tim’s training to her in archery has given her an edge in tennis.  She’s told the story often of how he wooed her with archery, standing behind her so close their entire bodies touched, as he trained her to position every part of her body to aim for perfect precision, a skill she has transferred to her own sport of tennis.

“That straight-shooting archer can hit a bulls-eye on anything.  As long as you don’t make it too complicated for him,” Jasmine chuckles, “like trying to create a ‘truly new new’.”

            “But he stuck with your marriage counselor?” Gabbie asks.

            “Yes, because I liked him so much.”  Jasmine honors Tim’s willingness to accept a counselor she likes, even if he had to consider creating something new.

            “It was my mom who really wanted us to get a new counselor, though.  A Christian one.” Jasmine tells her friends her mom reminded her of what Jesus said about divorce.  Jasmine smiles and moves in closer to her friends to tell them how she replied. “’To the male religious leaders in the first century, Mom?  You really think that’s what he’d say to me?”  Jasmine shakes her head as she recalls the conversation and relays her mom’s reply that Jesus’ words were “timeless.”

            “I said, ‘Some of Jesus’ words were timeless.  Some of his words were cultural.”  Leaning on her right arm on the table, Jasmine tells her friends what she said Jesus did say that was timeless.  “No one can put new wine into old wine skins.”

Mindy is sitting fully back into her chair with her arms are folded in front of her chest.  She smiles at Jasmine with a single soft nod.  Jasmine can tell her singer-actress friend is imitating Simon Cowell, with his classic look of “Well done.  I didn’t think you could pull it off, but you did.”  Still mimicking Simon Cowell, Mindy moves forward into the table, rests her crossed arms onto the table, and looks straight at Jasmine.  “Is it actually ‘new wine’ if you’re returning to the person you’ve been all along?”

“The true me,” Jasmine nods.  “She’s hard to find beneath all the layers of what other people say I should be and what I should think.”

“Have you found her?” Kristin asks.

“I haven’t known her since I was in the fifth grade.”  Jasmine shakes her head.  “I let my family, my church, and my community define who I am, and I married into that definition of me. That’s who I call ‘old wine.  With each layer I peel off, I find another.  It’s just as Alice says of her Wonderland: ‘curious and curiouser’ this rabbit hole is.”

Mindy nods, soft, quiet nods, all Mindy.  No more Simon Cowell.

            “A rabbit’s hole is windy and unpredictable,” Jasmine continues.  That’s a game an archer won’t play.

“The rock archer probably doesn’t play divorce either,” Gabbie says.  “What made him decide he wants divorce too?”

            “He heard my heresies.”

            “Heresies?” Mindy scrunches her eyes.

            “That’s what he calls them.”  Jasmine tells her friends she decided to be no-holds-bar open with him and told him what she was learning about Eve, women, the church, what she’s found the Bible to actually say, and about God, even the sinister way God is portrayed in the Bible.  “I told him in fifth grade I wanted to know why Noah let God drown the world, and that I gave Joshua got an ‘F’ forcommitting genocide.

            “How did he take it?” Mindy asks with sensitivity.  Simon Cowell has left the room.

            “He asked me who I am.  Said he doesn’t know anymore.” Jasmine takes a sip of her daiquiri.  “I asked him if he loves the new me.” 

“He took on Rhett Butler’s voice and said, ‘Frankly, my dear, no.’” Tim shook his head, closed the door, and went for a walk.

A week later, Jasmine confessed to Tim that her questions were deep, and to be married, she needs a man who loves her for asking them and no matter what she finds.  “Then I told Tim I know of one, Davie, and that I’ve fallen in love with him.”

            Jasmine takes a long sip of her drink.  “Tim was hurt and cynical.  He said Davie would never come back and I need to get over him.  I said even still, he’s sparked something in me that isn’t going away.”

            The friends sit silent.  “He went to shoot some arrows and was gone at the archery field all day.  They close it at sundown, and he didn’t make it home until one in the morning.”

            Tim might be stubborn, but he’s a good guy.  Everyone likes him.  Kristin says quietly, “This must be hard for him.”

            Jasmine nods, feeling grief.  She wants him to be okay, and she wants to be okay too.  Could there be an easier way?

To be with Tim, Jasmine has to stop caring about what’s deepest in her heart.  Tim thinks he is supposed to be deepest in her heart, but he isn’t.  Even Davie isn’t.  She longs for Davie, but there are passions within her that run deeper than both men.

“Remember my obsession with that curse to Eve, ‘you will long for your man’?” Jasmine looks Mindy, who nods.  “And I thought the curse is the woman thinking she needs a man to be complete?” (Explained more in her journal here.) Mindy nods again. 

“I know the key now: know myself and live it.”

“That’s profound,” Kristin nods, “but I understand.  We’re incomplete when we try to be someone else.”

“We need to quit trying to please everyone else, like me listening to my mom who wants me married by 30.”  Mindy muses.  “I wonder if my mom doesn’t feel complete herself and has never realized that a woman can be complete without a man.”

“Harmonizing our inner masculine and feminine,” Gabbie nods, reminding her friends of what she’s said about the harmony of the individual human’s inner masculine part with the inner feminine part.  “Our problem is everyone else keeps telling us who they think we’re supposed to be, so we can’t merge these two parts of ourselves.”

            “If I can do that,” Jasmine muses, “Can I know myself and live it?”  

           "You sure can," Gabbie nods.  "Read Women who Run with the Wolves.  You are running, Girl!  With the wolves.  Keep on running, and don't turn back."

           Jasmine opens into a triumphant smile.  She hasn't heard of the book Gabbie just mentioned, but she she'll check it, and she knows her friends understand.  She can think at odds with them, discover whatever she does, and they will always be with her.  She might still long for Davie, but, with or without him, she know herself, live as herself, and be complete.

© 2022 by karina.  All rights reserved.  Please use with permission and/or a link to this blog post

Continue to Liberating Eve

Start at Jasmine's recent discoveries

Follow Davie's story: here 1st, here 2nd and here 3rd 

Misunderstanding with Pastor Tired (Part 4 of "Translation Overload" Sneak Preview)

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 10^th, 2001.”  I emphasize the “10^th” 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.”

 He releases a tired sigh.

 He thinks I’m wasting his time.  How can I prove my need for support is not superficial, but genuine?  Now at home, speaking English to an English-speaking pastor, I should no longer be suffering the translation overload I was in Venezuela, where I was translating for teammates who wanted me to translate culturally inappropriate messages or at times when the culture calls for silence.  While there, I coined that term, “translation overload,” though I never defined it like that for my teammates.  I just apologized that I had “translation overload” when I refused to translate.  But now, speaking English, I realize I can also suffer from translation overload in my own language. 

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.

             My perception of Katrina was the final one of a visual or physical nature of that summer.  But the whispers of mystery have stayed with me ever since, and during that summer, they were faithfully reassuring me, especially with the echoes of Samuel (Karina, tú tienes el poder) and Daniel (Karina, soy tu pastor!).  Daniel spoke in jest when he called me his pastor, to prevent me from telling his friends the English word “skinny,” a word they intended to taunt him with.  But now, the same words, Karina, Soy tu pastor were whispered in truth and with tenderness by my own divine forces.  To them I was to turn, and to the scriptures, as a solitary seeker.  

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 

 Part 2 

Part 3

My other story of my time in Venezuela and the memories of Brazil

Remembering with Mom (Part 3)

Part 3 of "Translation Overload" sneak preview.  Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

May, 2005, home in Washington State, talking on the phone with my mom, in California

            “You remember that?!”  Mom applies strong emphasis to the “mem” of “remember” and I can hear the shock in her voice.  I am now home from the mission trip I had taken to Venezuela, where my “waterfall of memories” poured forth from our life in São Paulo, Brazil, where we lived from the time I was 6 months to nearly four.  I’ve just shared with Mom my memory of the lead up to my graduation from my crib to what she called my “big girl bed.”  Mom is stunned, almost shrieking in disbelief.  “But you were only 22 months old!”

            I’m not crazy.  My friends doubted the auditory and visual extrasensory perceptions, but what about the “waterfall of memories”?  Did they think I been making those up too?  With this confirmation from my mom, would they listen to the rest?

Most of us can remember only back to about the age of four.  That had been true for me too, and my parents had returned to the United States in time for Christmas in 1975, and therefore, just before my fourth birthday two days after Christmas.  Any faint blurs I may have had from our life in Brazil were little cloudy bubbles.  Nothing distinct.  Then I went to Venezuela, ate those black beans at Samuel’s home, and the catalana de recuerdos – waterfall of memories -- came gushing out, in detail.

On the phone with Mom, I describe the inside and the outside of our house in São Paulo, our neighbors’ sticks and plywood shelters across the street, the house of our close friends the Williamsons, and my preschool, both the outside playground up a gravel hill from the little classroom, and the one room classroom, where both the floor and the walls were made of basic wood beams.  I relate with joy the memory of driving the toy push cars at the Williamson’s home with their kids, eating dinner at their home, our maid painting my fingernails in the front yard of our house, Mom reading Monica to me at the little table in our kitchen, and this memory, the earliest, of the big girl bed, at 22 months. 

I tell her I recall being in the back seat behind Dad driving and Mom in the passenger’s seat.  We were descending down a great hill at night time into a glorious span of lights in São Paulo in the “il-bu-car” (toddler for “little blue car” for our VW Bug).  Mom turned around to tell me we’d be going out to dinner and I could order my favorite grilled cheese sandwich and fanta l’arange (orange pop), and “and then we’ll come home and you’ll get your ‘big girl bed’!” 

Mom, astonished, says the memory is returning to her, and she fills in the details: the hill into the city with its “city yights” (toddler for “city lights”) was the return drive from the university Brazilians affectionately call “USPi” (pronounced “oo-sp-ee”), the highly acclaimed University of São Paulo, where my dad was teaching.  We had only one car, which my mom needed, so together as a family we made the daily trek to and from his work.  Sometimes, instead of coming straight home, my parents would stop at the Clube de Campo (Country Club), usually for their monthly payment.  Then they’d stop to eat at the snack bar.  Mom laughs that my memory from toddlerhood recalls the snack bar as “going out to dinner.” 

Home now from Venezuela, more memories are coming, but this time from our early years in San Jose, California, and, unlike those from São Paulo, these memories are hard and tighten up my chest.  I don’t share any of them with Mom this day.  I like our bonding, and I mostly need confirmation that the memories are true, and I am not crazy.  Because I’m still seeing visions and hearing voices, but some severe, and having nightmares too.  A few weeks later, I would also be vomiting and suffering from migraines, unusual for me, and I would soon be calling these three and half months from mid-May to late August, 2005 my “summer in the twilight zone.” 

But this is late May, before I conceive this time as a twilight zone, and what I most need is strength to make it through the nightmares and their chilling daytime effects.  In one nightmare, my feet had been tied up and roped to the back of a car speeding down the highway.  I woke chilled, associating the nightmare to end times persecution within my then-Evangelical consciousness.  I woke with a recollection of a prophesy I thought was in Revelation of two prophets dragged through the streets behind a chariot driven by charging horses.  Perhaps my perception of such a prophesy came from a commentator embellishing an image from Revelation out of a similar image from the prophet Nahum.  I can’t find the prophesy now and don’t know if it exists, but the image fit into my terrified consciousness of the time.

 In another nightmare, a few of us are at a zoo, had gotten lost, were now in the grounds of the lions, and we were trying to find our way out before the lions noticed our presence.  I awoke, sweating, and connected the dream to Daniel, the pastor I had just connected with, and the biblical Daniel, deemed by many to have been another apocalyptic prophet.  Daniel in the lion’s den. What about the young pastor Daniel I just left in Venezuela?  With whom I shared special a mutual attraction?  Is he okay?  What is happening to him?  I became terrified for him, and I kept seeing the vision during the day, and my mind kept expanding upon it and increasing its terrifying nature.  This vision tormented me. 

 These nightmares threw me into Evangelical apocalyptic terror.  Today, I mostly see apocalyptic imagery as metaphor for an internal transformation, akin perhaps to what I was going through at the time.  But in 2005, my evangelical consciousness held too much stock in a great global apocalyptic catastrophe.

 What a time in my life to be gripped by such fear.  Evangelicals have been trained to know the group of people expected to face the worst: pregnant and nursing mothers.  The account in Matthew said to be from Jesus describes climate disasters, wars, the call to flee, and the warning to the most dire group to face that time: “But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing in those days!” (Matt 24:19) 

 Perhaps, I muse today as I admit this fear with shame, that I might have needed to have that consciousness quite literally scared right out of me.  I wonder if that’s what I had needed more than the Prozac, prescribed for my overwhelmed angst, which my doctor had diagnosed as post-partum depression.  The nightmares were purging out of me this internal terror I didn’t know had been gripping me.  Could my anxieties have had less to do with post-partum depression than to evangelical terror of an apocalypse? 

 And this was the life moment to grip me with the greatest terror.  I had weaned my little girl only six months earlier.  Two of my friends in my moms’ support group were pregnant.  Two others were nursing.  All with little ones, once a week, we met at church, chipping in to a pool of funds for two babysitters to watch our toddlers and preschoolers, keeping the babies with us, while we talked, prayed, and helped each other through the drama of raising little ones.   I could not tell them about my apocalyptic fears.  Either I’d contaminate them with my terror, or they’d really think I was crazy.  Probably the latter.  But I needed help, and they were the friends I had been bonding with at that time. 

 “You haven’t been sleeping,” one of them replied to what I had just shared of a couple of memories and, without any details, that I was seeing things and battling nightmares.  “It makes sense that you may be seeing some pretty crazy stuff.” 

 “And you went off your Prozac.  That can throw you into some really wild places,” added another with tired nonchalance.  Really wild.  Maybe that can explain some of the nightmares, but it can’t explain the rest . . . ?   “How about you double up on your meds?”

 A third, who had been listening intently with compassion in her eyes, scrunched her mouth, a little worried over these replies, especially that last one.  Will she understand?   She seems to get that this is real.  Can she offer support?  She took a deep breath, affirmed that I had obviously encountered some powerful experiences, and even ones that had brought me back to childhood. Can she help them see that this is real and I need support?  “I’m not sure we can help you,” she said, shaking her head.  “I wonder if you could find a counselor, even one who specializes in childhood issues?”

 I sighed, frustrated.  I didn’t want a counselor.  I wanted a friend.  But this was my support group for new moms, and what I needed went pretty far beyond how to handle the terrible twos or how to potty training while nursing.  I wanted to know how to manage confusing world of the extrasensory, how to confront the nightmares, and how to honor the “gift” Samuel said I had been given, if that was true, and without getting swept into its never-neverland.  Most especially, I wanted them to affirm that I wasn’t crazy.  But I couldn’t tell them any of that.  So I paused in silence, and then said, “I hear you, but I want the spiritual strength to get through this.”

 The friend who had suggested I double up on my pills nodded.  “How about talking with our pastor?” 

 If they don’t understand, how will he?  That’s what my husband had been wanting me to do too, but I was recalling one of the pastor’s recent sermons when he was preaching on one of those passages of the Spirit’s move among the prophets, and he began fairly apologetically.  “Now we today probably don’t understand this very well, because we don’t see it ourselves, but . . .” and then he continued with the visions of the prophets.  If that’s what my pastor believes, how could he be of help?

 I gave a slight shake of my head and remained silent.  I could think of only one person who could really help.  And he was in Venezuela.  Samuel.

 I had already reached out to Samuel, twice, first in an email, to which he replied with encouragement, and then, in a moment of desperation, at 10 pm on the phone the other night.  He listened with understanding, assured me that Daniel was okay, offered his encouragement, suggested I find a local spiritual mentor, and said that I had the divine strength within me.  “Karina, tu tienes el poder.”   Karina, you have the power.  He spoke with conviction.  Whatever is happening, he understood.  I said I doubted my strength.  Then he spoke again, still in the same warm, soft voice.  “Karina, son las tres de la mañana.”  Oh goodness.  Valencia is five hours ahead of Pacific Time.  It’s three in the morning.  I was horrified.  How could I wake him like that?  I deeply apologized and wished him a very good night sleep.  That conversation at 3 am for Samuel had been about three days earlier, and, as it turned out, it was my last contact with him.

 Hoping to find confidence in the memories, I’m closing my conversation with Mom with a description of our home in São Paulo.  I start with the kitchen, since that’s where we always entered the house, and describe it from the view walking in.  Our small, square kitchen table is to the left, against the wall, with three short, steel chairs on each side.  Our sink is in front of us and the stove is to its right with a kettle sitting on it.  The oven is beneath the stove and I see Mom pulling out pots and pans.  Mom laughs.  “That’s right!  The oven didn’t work!”  The fridge is set against the wall to the right.  Down the hallway to the left was Mom and Dad’s room and to the right was my room, which I also describe with its “big girl bed” against the right wall, a little nightstand next to it, and the closet chest on the left side with my toys at the bottom.  Then at the “back” end of the house was our little living area with a tweed tan love seat and a big black chair with a cushion that sunk down so far that we didn’t use it much.

          “Wow.”  Mom can utter only one word.  She is silent.  I have one final question for her.  All of the homes we entered in Venezuela opened at the front door to the sala, a little living area, small like ours, and then led to the kitchen at the back door.  “Why did our front door open into our kitchen?  Was that normal in Brazil?”  Mom laughs.  “Our front door didn’t work!”  The door had been damaged and got stuck.  Their landlord had warned them that if they tried to open it, they wouldn’t be able to close it again, and if my parents did that, their landlord said with a smile, they would have to pay for a new door.  Mom chuckles, remembering the smile.  It was like their landlord was hoping they’d mess up, try to open the front door, and have to buy a new door for that house.  “So we always came in through the back door!”

             My mom laughs again, goes silent, lets out a deep sigh, and speaks again. “Wow.  I can’t believe you remember any of that, let alone all of that!”

 I’m not crazy.  What a relief.

Continue to Part 4: Misunderstanding with Pastor Tired

Return to Part 2: Understanding from Samuel

Start at Part 1: Translating for Daniel