Place of blood and mourning

They told us we would be given the kingdom of heaven.

They (the children of God, the elite chosen to bring heaven to the heathens) would put us in pick up trucks and drive for hours, days. We’d start in San Diego with skyscrapers and electricity, malls and people, then go through the heat of Arizona, Texas. White hot expanse of desert. Cross the border with the federales and their black ski masks and AK47s, taunting me-- sitting in the back of the pick up truck, very blonde and very white, reading used books and pretending to not understand Spanish. We’d drive for days down the hot freeways coated in trash, smaller houses, less development. Mexico.

We’d drive back in time. Back beyond modernity into the Sierras, with Indians squatting outside adobe shacks, gaping at the gringos. I’d ride in the back and sing to myself, mutter to myself, and learned how to shed the external reality of my life, float away from it.

Finally, after a few days of pick up truck and heat, we’d reach a cliff with a few houses. When we first got there, we didn’t have internal walls, or windows, or a floor. Just dust, silence, old men in loin cloths. Silence and slow time.
What do you do, when at fifteen the world you know dissolves, again (fourth time around in missionary-land, a different place each time)? Wake up to silence, and dust. Sleep to silence and dust?

We were the elite of God, of course. My body was a living sacrifice to a silent God. I remember running a razor along my wrists, ankles, just to see color, to see life. Stared at the blood—some ineffable form of companionship. Blood of Christ, shed for me. Blood of Christen, shed for the Tarahumara. 15 year old blonde girl, sitting in a cement and wood cubicle, razor to skin, in the service of the chosen people.
No electricity or development means no tv, less music, few cars. It means internal sounds rise to crescendo, and then, interestingly, after a bit they lull to a calm, deep silence. External silence seeps in, and after the horror and pain and loss, there is emptiness. Silence, weight.

When silence like that closes in on your mind, on your choices, something else is born. Something ineffable, balanced between sorrow and freedom. Something envelopes your senses, your mind, like a lead blanket.
Ten years later, I still carry it with me. I’ve made it out of the mountains, out of the silence and dust. I was taught that I was “not of this world”. So what streets do I walk down every day? I was taught the glory of predestination, of being the chosen, of carrying out the greatest mission of God on earth. I was taught the necessity of sacrifice; the beauty of laying down your life for the cause of God. For I have been crucified with Christ.

My neice and nephew live in the mountains now, tiny blonde people in the midst of Indians. I talked to my apple-pie American sister-in-law, gently, about what living there will do to them. I said: they will never be the same. She said: I know, with a gleam of pride of being chosen in her eyes. I said; don’t presume to understand them, you’ve put them in a world that you can’t understand now. She said: I know, with the satisfaction of holy sacrifice in her eyes. I told her: it can be very painful. And she hesitated, then asked me to tell her more. And I tried.. to form words from that silence ten years ago, from the blood and dust. I couldn’t say what of course I needed to say: are you willing to give the hearts of your children for the souls of these Indians? Are you willing to cut your child, in the future, off from a sense of belonging the world? Is the happiness of your child the price you’re willing to pay for your own sense of being a savior?

But of course I couldn’t say that. My parents are still missionaries, and I am loyal to their loyalty to Christ, still. Something like holy Stockholm Syndrome. I’ve done research, as an adult into the experience of other kids raised in other countries and couldn’t find too many similarities. I could, however, find painful familiarity in the stories of kids raised by cults. But majority rule can make a cult a religion, and something like child abuse a holy act.
I brought it up to my mother recently and she said “You have no idea how HARD it is to choose to raise kids on the mission field.”I wonder if she knows how hard it is to be 15, alone, suffocated by silence . Or 27, the child of a dead god.
So this is the kingdom of heaven.