By Leslie Leyland Fields
I’m taking a holiday from the media and the news these next two weeks. You will not find cynicism here. Or hate or despair. This week, grateful tidings and a call to a Revolution. It begins here.
The best Giving-Thanks meal I ever had was in a kitchen in El Salvador, the kind with dirt floors and a wood fire and plastic chairs. *Anna was not who I expected. Neither was her husband *Alberto. I had expected homeless people to be . … something less. Alberto was handsome, articulate, gracious. They welcomed me because I am the mother of the gringa they love.
We sat in their kitchen with their six children, a girl and 5 boys–the exact echo of my own family. My daughter told them we had already eaten, but Anna could not invite us in without feeding us. Under the piece of tin roof, our feet on the dirt floor with bony dogs at our legs, she made us tortillas and rice and beans and an egg, a feast, the most and best and all that they had, and soda too.
I knew about this family for a year, since the flood that filled their pieced-together tin shack with muddy lake water. 10 days of relentless torrents sent them and 60 others into a shelter where my daughter met them. She and a host of friends raised enough money to buy them something unthinkable—a house. A house with concrete walls and a tin roof that did not leak when it rained and that would not wash away in the next rainy season. Alberto would stay up at night when it rained and would fill the holes in the tin with soap, because that was all he had. He sold soap, toilet paper, whatever he could buy cheaply and peddle in a basin with a shout between the cement row houses. There are few jobs here.
He was in the army for ten years, fought in the revolution, on the side of the government because they told the soldiers if the guerillas won they would kill their children or make them slaves to the government. He fought against his own countrymen believing he was protecting his family.
“I saw terrible things. I slept all night next to a dead man. I saw massacres.” He shakes his head, his eyes penetrate mine. He looks at me and does not turn away for any of his story. I do not take my eyes off him. I give him everything I can right now: I eat his food, I give him all of my ears, my body is still, listening. I want to cry but I know it is better to keep listening, even when my own heart is cracking.
He tells us more, about jail, and an unjust prison system, how his family was alone for 6 years without him. He leads us down to the lake that has flooded. He shows us where his house used to be. He shows us where they lived in the street. My daughter would come and sit on their sidewalk shack made of plastic shopping bags.
They offer us orange drinks we cannot drink, made with untreated water. We politely decline, then they bring more soda instead. How can they afford this, I wonder. I know a little about this. I grew up in a family with little. We had barely enough for ourselves, so we had nothing to share. The table was narrow, the plates were small. Poverty doled out a thin gruel that never fed us—or anyone else. We didn’t know about Christ. We didn’t know about love.
This family too has nothing, but this year they have a little more than nothing: they have a door this year, they have a door to a house. And that door opens to their table, to feed any who come, poor or rich. Over the door of their 3-room house, where nine of them live, they show us the Scripture verse they asked my daughter to paint, for all their comings and goings:
“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.”
Here is the revolution I invite you to join this season: The Revolution of the Open Door and Table:
*That we open our doors to those who knock, and those who do not yet dare to knock;
*That we fill our tables with good food, but more, with hungry people;
*That we open our cupboards and serve the best of what we were keeping for ourselves;
*That we sit and listen to one another tell about the hardest and best things that have happened to us;
*That we do all this in the strength and the love God gives.
I’m off now to Walmart to buy some folding chairs and an extra table.
Happy Thanksgiving!
