August Newsletter

So, right on the heels of my July newsletter, here comes August. In my teaser entry of things to come at Mate Monday, I mentioned gushing over the kiddos, and sharing some wisdom picked up from Claudio. July was the kids' turn; now, it's time to recount one of the most profound conversations I've ever had in my life.

It was a few days before I left Montevideo, and I was in the Centro de Estudios, drinking mate and chatting with Claudio and Virginia. In other words, it was a pretty normal day in Uruguay. Predictably, the subject of my imminent departure came up. I expected (I don't know why) the usual spate of questions - what did you like most, what will you miss, what do you most want to do when you get home. Of course, I should've known that, with Claudio involved in the conversation, things would get deeper than that.

It started off with a fairly predictable question - what have you learned this year? I gave some predictable answers - loads of Spanish, more about Latin American realities than I ever could've imagined knowing, much about the culture of a very special country with the name of a river. These are all true statements, but ultimately stem from a fairly superficial sense of what it means to know something. I think Spanish reflects the difference well - I answered what I had to come to "saber" (know intellectually), but what interested Claudio was what I had come to "conocer" (know on a personal level). You "saber" facts and figures for a test; you "conocer" a person or a reality. Claudio wanted to know what had changed me.

I thought about it for a minute more, and I realized that I couldn't articulate what I had learned, what I had taken in over the course of a year. It wasn't a Spanish problem, either - I simply couldn't define it. So, I said so, and as the words came out of my mouth, I thought of some wisdom shared with me by a prior volunteer. He had wrestled for a while with what kind of sense could be made out of his year in Uruguay, how it mattered in the course of his life. Finally, he came to the conclusion that the year simply was a part of who he was, that he couldn't separate what it meant to be himself from the fact that he'd had the experiences he'd had in Montevideo.

I'd been struck by this comment, and so I shared it with Claudio. He grinned knowingly, poured me a mate, and said "and there it is." He told me that, after his release from prison, he'd struggled with the same question, and arrived at the same conclusion, that our identity as an individual can't be so neatly separated from where we've been and what we've experienced. Claudio's twelve years of imprisonment aren't an episode apart from the rest of his life, a lengthy parenthesis of suffering stuffed between his youth and his adult life, nor are they something he can simply take off like an article of clothing and toss aside. Claudio's inherent Claudio-ness includes all of what he has seen and experienced, and the only healthy response is to accept it as such and live because, not in spite of, life and what it's brought.

For a couple of minutes as he spoke, the world essentially stopped turning as I listened and thought. And then I wondered - how does that take shape in my life? The question stayed with me all day - on the bus back from La Obra, in my room as I began to take maps and prayers down off my wall, in the office as I checked my e-mail and listened to La Catalina. Then, a thought hit me as the closing song of the murga played and the singers remembered the hands of their fathers when they were young, the pretty little things who became their wives, the faces and laughs they'd known over the years. If Claudio's wisdom carried with it truth, this idea that who we are and where we've been aren't so easily separated and that trying to do so only serves to deny who we are to ourselves and torture us in the process, then what does that say about the people with whom we've lived?

It was a logical enough thought. The idea of leaving behind the wonderful people I'd come to love in Uruguay - Milton, Wilma, Claudio, Virginia, Seba and Karin and Alvaro, the Valdense choir, the grupo de jovenes, Ana the cook, the amazing morning and afternoon crews at La Obra, Monica, the congregation at Nuestro Salvador, my kids, the students at Centro de Estudios, and so many others - was absolutely tearing me apart. In fact, I didn't want to leave, and had it not been for a friend flying down to accompany me on my trip to Lima, I no doubt would have begun scheming as to how I could extend my time in Montevideo past the leave date I'd set prior.

And then, it came to me. If experiences are inseparable from identity, then so are other people. I can't separate my identity from my having known Milton, or Claudio, or Seba, or little Ana Karen, or any other of the people whose paths have intersected mine in the past 23.5 years. Rather, I carry them with me. In a way, I never left them, simply because I can't separate who I am from who they are, and who they are to me. I am who I am in part because of who I know.

I suppose, at this point, one could go off on other related philosophical tangents - I'd love to have the "is this compatible with the Aristotelian idea of the individual human kerygma and teleological end? (I think it is), or is it simply another way of affirming the rationalism (think tabula rasa here) of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume?" discussion sometime. But, more than anything else, I think I'd rather simply say thank you to those of you who've been a part of my journey, not only in Uruguay, but in my life as a whole. Donne nailed it - No man is an island. Thank you, to use the other half of John Donne's immortal image, for being a part of the main.