As jet lag from the thirty-hour journey wanes, you find a new rhythm to life. It is life in community, where the bishop’s house is home not only to his own children but to any number of others whom he has taken under his wing—some from early childhood to becoming adults. All of this is in a life uncompensated by the artificial notion of salary.
Somehow travel expenses are met in a busy global ministry; schools are expanded to accommodate increasing number of students; and solar panels are the building blocks of their own electrical grid. The great gift of water—clean though not yet “running” except to its five points of distribution around and outside the Cathedral compound. This is a Cathedral and Diocesan staff that lives together in community, in a growing village of “tukols,” or huts fashioning an intergenerational homestead.
Is this a way of life that commercialized urbanization has never reached or has left behind? Or is it an ongoing, ancient choice of how to live that we have forgotten and lost to our sorrow? Certainly it is a choice seeking best of all worlds as modern technology increases its reach. Laughter rings out from morning to night. Children lead prayers, and people know how to welcome strangers and how to open their lives to say thank you for being with us.
I have just enjoyed two days of workshops with the clergy of the Diocese, tackling the thorny question of blending Hebrew and Christian scriptures on the first day, and going deeply into the Lord’s Prayer on the second day, showing how to use it as a faith telling course for baptism and confirmation preparation. And now we have begun to experience the open and honest accountability sessions which make up the Nzara Diocese in Synod.
In the meantime it has been a joy to see the Iowa team absorbed in their specific work here – helping the Mother’s Union find the confidence to make their own uniforms (Abigail and Marci from St Timothy’s West Des Moines) or exploring the set up of creating their own diocesan pineapple wine for communion (Mel Schlachter). This is about capacity building—and saving the expense of Ugandan imports for both entities. And yet everything is done around prayer and singing, laughter and joy. And if we wonder how is all this possible even as the clouds of civil war have barely broken open to let in sun rays of peace, well I think the clergy group know the answer—for do we not pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done—on earth as it is in heaven?” Live as in heaven, and seek to bring its reality to this land surface of ours. That is the secret of this place. We might almost say “Is this heaven? No it’s Nzara!” But they live as if it is so!
+Alan
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| Photo Credit: M. Mordecai |
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| Photo Credit: M. Mordecai |
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| Photo Credit: M. Mordecai |
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| Photo Credit: M. Mordecai |
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| Photo Credit: M. Mordecai |
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| Photo Credit: M. Mordecai |
