home on the range

i've been home for a week. I'll come back to Pasadena in another week.
Being home is like a vortex, where i am separated from everything about my life in Cali. The distance has been good. Getting my head clear about my life, ministry, spirituality-- has been essential. but i do miss you all

I got an iPod!! my new favorite toy. It hold pictures, too. really good quality ones, so i put a lot of my brother's pics of the family on it.
John was home for a few days along with me. it was great to see him after more than a year.

another highlight of the week was my 5 year high school 'reunion' I dont think i can convey to you the feeling of it. it was strange, surreal, and eeriliy familiar. Everyone talked to the same people they talked to in high school. i guess thats not unusual. But it made it feel like those awkward days all over again. i almost didnt have the guts to go. But it was great to get back with some old friends from MEChA and roll in there like the Brown Squad. Some things never change. I was happy to see some people in particular, and wished i had got more time with them before they left to their respective settlements.
i will be reflecting on this for a while. that, and looking at all my old yearbooks have made me realize some of the roots of my psycoses ;-)

King Kong was awesome, too.

Oh, and if you watch the Rose Parade this year, keep an eye out for the 1st ever NEW MEXICO theme float. It will "reflect the Native, Hispanic and Anglo heritage of the Land of Enchantment"

havent been posting the last couple of weeks.
still here, though

Things are looking up, after a rough couple of weeks.
I am looking forward to the break. 2 weeks at home (and possibly a 60GB iPod?)

here are some pictures of New Mexico at christmas time. notice the luminarias

Bakersfield

here i am at the Virtual Enterprise Business and Trade Fair Competitions in Bakersfield, Kern County California.

I have my own hotel room with king size bed all to myself.

Earlier, Sean, his mom and i had dinner at John's Incredible Pizza-- an all you can eat pizza and gaming extravaganza

Later, all the other students will come back from the convention center after dancing, karaoke, DDR and commence to do whatever high schoolers will do when they are alone with other high schoolers in nice hotel rooms in another city.


Life is funny

Thank you, Hugo, for taking care of our poor

When I read this article it amazed and amused me greatly, so I had to share it.
I have been interested in Hugo Chavez since taking Latin American history classes in college and seeing the documentary "The Revolution Will be Televised" about his coup and rise to power. I think he is one of the most interesting and important world leaders of our time.

Anyway...most of the time you hear about him it is because he is butting heads with Bush. This is very important, becasue for most of the last 40 years, Latin American leaders have gone along smoothly with neo-liberalism, global capitalism, right-wing politics and being political and military clients of the US in the region. Chavez reperents the resurgence of the Populist, leftist leader of days gone by, when charismatic and controversial figures came to power by delivering on their promises to help the poor. Chavez has been the champion and spokes person for the working poor, land reform, environmentalism, anti-US economic imperialism and every thing else that is good and decent that George Bush hates.

So here is old Hugo, ever the villian, the thorn in the side of the Bush Administration, providing a service to AMERICA's POOR! What is wrong with this picture? How beautifully does this illustrate what is going on in our times?!

Recently, the US Oil Industry has come under fire from even Republicans in Congress who say the oil companies should be accountable for the MASSIVE profits that have been made this last year with the extraordinarily high gas prices (price gouging motivated by pure greed) US lawmakers have been saying that the oil companies should be giving some of that money to the benefit of the people. now, you know the amount of money they made with the high gas prices must be obcene when you hear REPUBLICANs calling for acocuntability!

So......here is Venezuela, also experiencing a windwall of oil revenue from the high gas prices. And what do they do? in addition to helping their own poor, they gave discounted gas to heat AMERICAN poor homes during the winter!!

Love your enemies.
Amen

I think that one of the the things that Jesus wants us to understand about Him and about life is this: That there is something profound about pain. There is a way in which we can, in our human pain, really be human with (and thus, love) our neighbor.
Our pain, our longing for an end to pain is what unites us all. We spend our lives trying to hide it, escape it, numb it or understand it.
What Jesus did was come into the world's pain, and make it his own. In this way he became fully human.

How can we become fully human? How can we love our neighbor?

Every day i am around people who struggle to live through circumstances that are painful. I aid a student who was born unable to walk or move his limbs. I live in a neighborhood where people have to work very hard for the things that they need, and broken relationships result in fighting, depression, and self-destruction. I myself struggle with the sins, flaws and limitations that keep me from the life God wanted for me.

Here is where we can connect. My pain, is their pain. I can view my pain as the pain. The agony that defines our expereince as humans who are living not as we are meant to live, but marred and blinded by sin.

Truly this is the mercy that God showed us. The mercy of knowing our pain and making it his. This is my redemption, it is your redemption, it is the redemption of our communities as we go forth and do the same. You can truly love someone and serve them when you see that their pain is your pain, I think

Every person knows deep in their soul that things are not the way they should be. we wait for the Kingdom, but what does it mean to wait but to suffer-with? Com-passion

sweet

Currently Listening

I recently had the desire to explore more acoustic emo music. I became enamoured of this genre back during my freshman year of college when Joel, my friend and fellow music fanatic introduced me to such artists as pedro the Lion, Damien Jurado, Songs Ohia, Other Desert Cities and Starflyer 59 to name a few. There was a particular quality of the music that was simple and soft, and spoke to my soul's inner depths....the part of me that would just want to stare out the window and then write down some free-form poetry. It was a nice compliment to the hip hop, funk and soul that dominated my musical repertoire.
Here is something i recently picked up--"Veneer" By Jose Gonzalez-- and a quote from a Spin magazine review

"González is a Swedish-born Argentine folkie who exhales snatches of rainy-day poetry and finger-picks his guitar like he's backing a suicidal flamenco dancer. But his debut betrays no melodrama, just an exquisitely brittle, bruised articulation of how bewildering and devastating it can be to wake up every day and watch your hope slip away before the coffee is even made." A-

Other stuff....the new Los Lobos album. Some of the best and coolest Mexican traditional music performers.


And i am waiting for this in the mail--- more melancholy, poetry-inspiring instrumental/sample-based hip hop. (trip-hop, as it were). A local producer known as Dday One. The album is called "Loop Extensions"

feats of strength

Last night was a fun time. The Northwest Neighbors men all faced off one by one with Greg to honor him and his Germanic/Midwestern roots by wrestling. It was an evening of epic struggles, pitting man against man, intern against intern, executive director against intern, and people group against people group.
Props to Greg for emerging victorious in about 7 of 9 matches. His valor and stamina were stunning (or maybe that was the blow to the skull i revieved when Greg and I accidentally butted heads)

Happy Brithday, Greg

Querida

waves of grainy cumbias and guajiras flutter through the
walls and in between doorways
sad strains, with dust and shards of sunlight
a cloudy vase sits atop a thickly painted red table
only a fiery dead rose inside

the times of needing her are over
left to ponder unknown words and intentions
trapped and aching in this space
in this space
in this city
cracked concrete, smell of taqueria, cars moving
human bodies from hogar to trabajo
bungalows and apartments hiding millions of
stories under cover of sooty palm trees.
Kissing her was like kissing tragedy
like embracing something that was only a word away from
becoming a phantom
together, we forgot the path ahead of us
lived solemnly backward and backward in time
whispering echoes of chocolate,
café con leche
incense smoke
and Mayan pyramids

the needle sputters and pops as it glides over the record
I strain to hear her voice—
that sound that brought colors to life
and made all songs repeat her name,
her name

we carved our stories into the loneliness of nameless streets
walked them
made each other laugh and
sing on them
and shared the joy of watching
a neighborhood change and grow

her voice now massages fading mysteries
into my mind
her memory is a dark deer
quiet breath into chill air
a twitch
then gone
onto a mossy mountain path I will never find

hope it goes well

Tonight Teresa and I are going over to Cal State Fullerton to begin a teaching series on justice and God's love for the poor. I will be speaking for 30 min on the topic of God's identifying with the poor...
I am a little nervous about going into this. i am just not sure how it will be recieved or how well my talk presents the material i want to get across.
please pray that the Holy Spirit works through it and that people hear what they need to hear.
i like preaching to a group, but it still makes me nervous, especially when i dont really know the crowd

America, Vol 1

In honor of Dia de los Muertos

on another note...i've been wanting to start a topical 'blog series' kind of like Jason had last year about capitalism.
I've been wanting to talk about the idea of America-- The concept that America itself is a concept, an abstraction that shifts, evolves, adapts to different settings, different historical periods and different personal or social needs.
What does America mean?
what does it mean to immigrants?
what does it mean to soldiers?
to Christians?
to Muslims?
to city-dwelers? rural dwellers?

i think the discussion is important, because more and more, our leaders on the natonal level are shaping policy annd moving us in a direction that leads toward their particular idea of what America is. Call it religious conservatism, privitaization, villification of outsiders (immigrants, 'terrorists') and subversive insiders (gays, minorities, liberals, welfare mothers, teachers)
in any case, i think there is a case to be made for the idea that in no time in history has there ever been a unity, a nation or a community that could be called the United States. The title 'American' is an arbitrary, abstract one--yet it takes on meaning depending on your context and your other identities within your context.

Look at the history of America before the Civil War. What were the 13 colonies? Most historians agree that the bond between them was relatively weak until after the Civil War when Federal power greatly increased. What was America then? A Continental Army? A set of laws called the Constitution? A wealthy, landed elite maintaining power over the masses of disenfranchised or enslaved people? Or was it the thousands of stories of the mixing and melding of ethnic groups, the negotiation in homes, on farms, in the streets, on the frontiers of new and changing identities? Was it the experience of the Iroquois, the Sioux, the Cherokee? Was America the crucible for new cultures, languages, economies? Was it the destination for people who wanted to forget where they came from? Was it the goal of people who wanted to make things better for themselves and their decendants?

Remember that wars have been fought, people have died over the issue of what defines America. People have gone to their death clinging to the desire for this idea to be real. But it never was real, nor could it ever be. Humans have been creating America since day one, and we continue to create it, which is why i think we are either so critical or so proud of it. It is the best of what we can create and it is the worst.

One thing i want to throw out there is defining the most fundamental unit of social organization. As you go from Global to national to local, what is the point at which you cross over from the abstract to the real? Is there such thing as a global community? A nation? Is the most basic form of social organization the family? The neighborhood? the married couple? the Church?

What is America to the youth in my neighborhood? On one level,they are products of the public school system. The purpose of the public school system was to assimilate immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s by molding their minds around the idea that , yes, indeed there is a thing called America and here is what it looks like to be a part of it-- good citizenship, know your history, obey the rules, speak English, stay in line, no cuts, play sports, learn some skills and get a job.
Public education is the factory in which the labor force for capitalism is produced (soldiers and prisoners as well as mechanics and managers)

So....the youth in our neighborhood have some sense of a mythical and all-encompassing America. It is taught to them in the schools. But what is their experience of America outside school? That is where it gets fascinating, because they and their families are in the process of creating "America" First of all, they are "Americans" before they even crossed the borders of this nation. They come here, raise their children here, work, live, buy things, make relationships, pay taxes, commit crimes, engage in politics, re-shape the ecology, etc.
But what would they consider their community, their 'country'? Some would say Mexico, or Guatemala or El Salvador. Others would describe a 'globalized community' in which family relationships, resources and information permeate national borders and form a kind of 'third space' of identity that is not confined or defined by colors or lines on the map. Some would say Pasadena. Some California. Some would say Chicano, some Latino. Some might say 'I am an American.' ........
to be continued

Notice the rapt curiosity of the audience as i try to flesh out the contrast between the Johannine and the Lucan theologies, as they pertain to the concept of the in-dwelling "pneuma," or Spirit. The talk went a little over the 90-minute mark i had set, but i sensed from their response that they're ready for next week's systematic examination of Logos and the triune nature of the Trinity.

i think that those of us who move into the city from intervarsity and college campuses think too much and feel too much for our own good. we are desperately self-centered and ill-equipped to handle even the most routine realities of life in the city. we compartmentalize our expereinces into intellectual, emotional and spiritual categories and then think and reflect on them over and over. We are needy-- needy for people who are like us to surround us, affirm us, provide us with a listening ear, entertainment, comparison, and people to share weaknesses and insecurities with. We have not suffered, not fought an uphill battle our entire lives, we are uptight and hyper-sensitive, hyper-analytical and rigid....whereas our neighbors are more spontaneous, able to cope with living and working and struggling in real life, aged and educated by accumulated wisdom, family bonds forged in survival, migration, poverty, upward mobility, cultural adaptation...
we take many things too seriously, yet we give ourselves to very few serious things. We talk about suffering and sacrifice and community, yet we run away from discomfort and continue to be individualistic until we hit a crisis point and then we ask someone to pray for us. Our character growth is so slow because our egos and insecurities are so big.

praise God for using us anyway. he loves us so much.

love in, love out

life for me this last month has been defined by a very strong (and i think in some ways healthy) tension that i have felt every day.

In college, my leaders always had to challenge me to get up, get out and be involved with the people i was ministering to. i was very stingy with my time. These days, it is the other way around. I have been feeling a deep nagging need to get back into solitude, to take some rest and to reflect on the things that have been going on. But what i've been doing is saying 'yes' to almost everything, leaving me with almost no time to myself....On the other hand, i am really happy with the relationships that have come from my time in the neighborhood, and excited about building them up even more during the next year.

recently, i have been recieving teaching about the importance of informal relationships, and shared needs among neighbors....i love these things, and have discovered God blessing me and those around me through them. This is why i wanted to do urban ministry, so that i could see community being built and be a part of that.

But there needs to be time to pray
there needs to be time to rest
to connect with loved ones and friends in other places
to celebrate

but this leads me to another thing ive been thinking about. Jason reminded us that real community in the kingdom of God is when people can rest, celebrate and fellowship across class and cultural lines and neighbors...And I have been feeling this. Times with Reza and kids from R2R have been fun and relaxing when we take them out for ice cream and Borders. Celebrating Juan's cousin's brithday at his house, and Juan's birthday last night at another neighbor's house were both joyful times for me, that did not sap my energy that much at all.
Coming from intervarsity and the college ministry context, this is new for me. And i love it. I love that 'ministry' for me is finally flowing out of my being, and not from a burdensome structure or expectation.....

yet i am still self-centered
i still am taking more than i am giving
i still have a lot to learn and a lot to see
a lot that i want to do and see

all this to say, I am really happy with where my life is going right now in terms of neighborhood and community, but without staying connected to God in prayer and personal devotion, i feel like my life is being poured out before my eyes without being refilled. It needs to be coming from an overflow of God's love for me as his son...

what its really about

last night i took the two boys i am mentoring to shop for shoes and then to Equator, an artsy hooka-bar/coffee shop in an alley off of Colorado Blvd in old Town. It was interesting seeing their reactions to the place. It seemed from their reactions that they were a bit wierded out by the strange artwork and the employees with huge plug-earrings-- not to mention the vast menu of odd and foreign (to them) items.

They got regular hot chocolate, and we sat down to talk on the couches next to a broken pac man machine, with mellow reggae music playing sofly in the background.
it was a good time...probably one of the most restful, laid back times i have had hanging out with them. it felt like they were more mature and certainly willing to try a new experience (be "cross-cultural") and this was encouraging.

a theme of this weekend's NWN retreat was interdependent community of shared needs and genuine relationships...I feel blessed to have been experiencing the beginnings of this where i am now.

3rd post in one day!!! check the rest!

Jason and his inquiry about land grants in California has re-kindled my interest in my family tree research. During my senior year, I managed to construct a pretty extensive family tree starting with myself and going back in time. There are only some small gaps in terms of connecting my paternal line back to the first Vigils that arrived in New Mexico from Zacatecas in 1695. This (left) is the family name coat of arms from Spain. Below is just a little info i have been able to find more recently. When i go back home, i hope to bring back my file with all the information i had compiled from spending hours in the library and the state archives.


Vigil
Castilianized form of Asturian-Leonese Vixil, a habitational name from a place named Vixil in the district of Consejo de Siero, Asturies.

The name Vigil first appears in the New Mexico history in the late 1600's. Francisco Montes Vigil and Maria Jimenez De Ancizo were colonists from Zacatecas. In Santa Fe in 1695, he said he was a native of El Real De Zacatecas and thirty years old. In 1710, he received a grant of land at Alameda, but sold it two years later.

emotion

emotions have been a theme lately around here
my relationships with Juan and Frankie are becoming more emotionally involved. I have had to apologize to each of them once for small failures. Frankie's mom, each time I see her, talks to me at length about how Frankie is at home and the issues she deals with in their family. This is incredible, and really valuable to me....but after we finish talking, i leave feeling a little like i need to shoulder the burden of Frankie's emotional life with his family
and then there is just the day-to day understanding of their lives and the things they see, talk about, deal with each day, and HOW they deal with things. How they relate to girls, to each other, how they relate to me and other adults in NWN.

where is the balance between shouldering too much emotional burden and none at all?

more and more, i realize that i do not know what i am doing when it comes to this. Hopefully, prayer this weekend will remind me of why these boys are important to God and what he wants for them. And where i fit itno all that.

meanwhile, my emotional outlet has been listening to music, and writitng poetry while listening to emo-rock and classical music. (see below)