Living Behind the Veil

I'm often asked what I wear in Afghanistan and what it's like to wear a veil. It's freedom. Freedom to have a bad hair day, freedom to arrange my chadar to conceal the curve of my breasts and backside, freedom to not be an expatriate for a little while. It means freedom to hide even on the street from the Afghan men's eyes which seem to strip me naked.
When I relax my shoulders and walk less purposefully, less confidently, my eyes downcast and covered by sunglasses, I pass for an Afghan woman. I hear the men whisper in Dari, "Is she a foreigner or local woman?" I chuckle but am silent. On the street, I'm also a free target....freely exposed to groping, sexual innuendos whispered to me as a man bicycles by, free to have stones thrown at me, freely seen as no one's wife, daughter, sister, mother, friend, or boss. I step inside my gate, and remove my chapan and chadar. Now I'm someone's boss, motherhood returns to me as little steps run to greet me, and I receive a kiss from my adoring husband. Now I'm free to his loving and gentle eyes which know and enjoy my curves, free to once again be under the protective umbrella of being a wife, mother, friend, colleague, boss, niece, sister, daughter, woman.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

I Went To The Woods





I try to pretend to settle in to middle class American life and American Evangelicalism.  But 20 years living in war zones and unstable environments continue to reap fruit on numerous levels that continues to surprise me.

I can still hear the sounds of bombs and gunfire in the distance. I vividly see my living room window go convex then concave within seconds of a suicide bomber detonating on Darulamon Road (Parliament Road).  

I  remember clearly the first time I drove slowly past a burkha-clad woman holding her baby. It was my very first day there in 2000, and she was sitting in the middle of the busy main road from Goat’s-Head corner to the bombed out Main Post Office.  She held her tiny baby with one hand, and the other she held up to cars passing in both directions, hoping for a few coins. Car exhaust belched noxious fumes around both of them.  

I remember watching discretely through a crack between the curtains as a mob progressed past my gate, chanting against the foreign infidels as they went. I reminded my children of where to run if bad people began to jump over our walls. We regularly practiced evacuation drills within our own home, in the hopes our children would run to safety if we began to be attacked.  

Visitors to Kabul were always surprised at the amount of guns around.  We had grown used to them. Kabul is a war zone, a fortified city, with the walls increasingly higher and thicker.  It’s the Nepali  and other dark-skinned guards who guard the outside gates. They are the first ones killed if a suicide bomber attacks.  Then on the inner gate is usually the white European or American guards, the specially trained ops guys working security contracts now, because it pays better.

It wasn't uncommon when traveling to the grocery shop to have a soldier’s gun pointed at our car if our driver got too close. I once looked up at my driver as I held my veil around my face.  I saw the red laser light on his forehead, and realized the American soldier riding in the tank in front of us was ready to shoot. I calmly asked my driver to slow down.  

The past 20 years have taken their toll.  While there’s been excitement and adventure, there’s also the worst that humanity, war, and militant Islam does to people.  But it has also allowed me to live life at its rawest terms, as Thoreau said, to experience the genuine meanness of it as well as the totality of the rawness of life and death. Several lifetimes wrapped into a couple of short decades. 

The distractions of American Middle Class life, the “teletubbie” existence as one pastor describes it, the focus on 1st world problems that impact less than 3% of the world's population have emasculated the American Church. It won't matter shit who wins the debate if we are debasing the Gospel by sharing the stage with a Catholic leader at a national prayer breakfast when a gun is cocked and touching our temple and we are asked if we follow Christ or not. Most are not prepared for that scenario, and are so blinded by the idol of "Evangelical Truth" that they can't see the value of loving our neighbor by building relational bridges to them.  

Increasingly, I am sensitized to the danger of only telling one side of the story, including the American theological interpretation of the Gospel.   Jesus was not white. He was a dark skinned Middle Easterner, born into the lowest minority group dominated by the superpower of the world. This puts Him on par with the Native Indians and African Americans of our day, or the Gypsies of Romania or Turkey or the Hazaras of Afghanistan.

As Dr. Nott recently said, “Extreme events, whether a war or a natural disaster, stretch the boundaries of performance and what is possible.” Living on the edge of existence where food, water, and electricity can mean the difference between life and death; where people are truly hungry for a ray of hope..this is what Liminality is – the point of time when a risk is taken and the outcome is not known. 

It is the time when one is truly alive, and even the smallest good is precious-like-gold, like a barely-dry match finally flares into flame so a candle can be lit in the darkness. Anyone desperate for light knows the overwhelming relief of the simplicity of such things. 

When life and death became precious, when resources were scarce, and a simple daily task could end in kidnapping or death, where one feels so alive: over two decades this is the place where daily my values and theology were honed.  It is impossible to change back, and nor would I want to. My world, my mind, and my understanding of God and His Word has expanded much deeper and farther than I thought possible. Living in a challenging place is fulfilling, stretching, where everything I am and am not is used, refined, distilled.

Rejections and spoken curses seek to destroy my soul. My mind overlays these with the gunfire, the bombs, the dirt, the violence I experienced, the numerous times I experienced the dehumanization of being a woman in Islamic culture, the daily occurrences of being the victim of sexual objectifying, and I am thankful.

I am thankful for all the darkness and blackness of these past 20 years.

I am thankful to know what it feels like to live continually on the edge of life and death, of rejection and acceptance, of approval and disapproval, of warmth and coldness, of laughter and deep grief when it seemed my tears would never stop. 

I am thankful to have looked at evil in the face and lived another day. 

I am thankful to have been protected by the Shadow of His Wings and for my children to have their parents alive this long.  

I am thankful to know what unconditional love feels like to receive and to give. 

I am thankful for my red chair and glass of red wine where I can now sit in peace and quiet to ponder and reflect and understand and discern.  
 I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. 
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. 
For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever.  
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) American Author


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