The
Hard Road Back
One
September I traveled to Denver to spend ten days with a group of priests,
religious, and laypeople with whom I share a common life experience. We were
all missionaries who served abroad and then “returned home.”
Well, you
may say, what’s the big deal about returning home? And I say: It’s a bigger
deal than the process of actually “going to the missions”! Let me explain.
When I
went to Uganda in 1967, I expected things to be different over there —and they
were very different. When I came back home, I expected things to be the same as
I had known them—and they were not.
The
country had changed, I had changed, my friends had changed, the Church had
changed, the language had changed (when I left, the word turkey only described
what we ate on Thanksgiving Day!).
It has
been said that you never return home, but rather you rediscover home. It’s a
shock and there is a name for it: counter-culture shock (CCS for short). The
folks I met with in Denver were having a serious case of it. To make things worse,
many of us witnessed enough violence to give us at least a minor case of PTSD.
Let me
describe to you some of the symptoms of CCS. I returned to Cincinnati with the
bare minimum. After all, I was returning to the land of plenty. So the next day
I went to the mall. I spent most of the morning there and…bought nothing. I was
overwhelmed by the variety of choices, by the abundance of everything. How
could I possibly pick a shirt, a sweater, or anything out of a thousand? I had
to go back with a friend the next day.
I stopped
at a gas station to fill up. Surprise! Gone were the attendants. They had the
do-it-yourself thing now. I parked in a corner and observed customers for a
good ten minutes before risking to make a fool of myself.
I visited
friends. Grandpa had died and Grandma’s memory was a little blurry. With whom
was I going to discuss world problems now? The adorable little kids I once knew
had grown into pesky teenagers who hardly gave you the time of day. On the plus
side, the pesky teens of years gone by were now reasonably well-adjusted young
adults.
On my
second mission tour I spent five years surrounded by indescribable violence.
Safely back here,
friends took me to a huge fireworks show. I hated it. Bang-bang
noises made me jumpy and zip-zip noises made me want to duck. I still don’t
particularly enjoy hearing fireworks, if I can’t see them. And I hated military
uniforms with an irrational passion. I had my own near-death encounters with
them and saw the mayhem, destruction and horror they left behind wherever they interacted
with local people.
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Uganda 1979: Idi Amin's damaged tank |
Returned
missionaries face a lot of disappointments. We have stories to tell about the
wonderful people we lived with, about the plight of the poor and the
dispossessed, how they cope and survive, about what makes them poor and what
could be done about it. Above all, we have stories of faith and hope, stories
of human solidarity that defy belief. But most people, even friends, don’t really
care that much. You are in the middle of the story and someone calls them on
their cell phone. Your saga just went down the tube.
Perhaps
you lived in a Church where laypeople are in charge and you are their shepherd,
where human touch, friendship, and affection are the rule, where everyone knows
everyone, where anyone who wants to talk to “father” gets to talk to father.
And now you are back in a stiff medieval Church run by clerics, stuck in a mega
parish where you have to dial six digits before you can talk to a human being.
Add to
this the inevitable hurts of living anywhere —mission lands included. Add your
own doubts and fears. The picture is rather dismal.
So it was
that in the early 1980s a group of missionaries decided to do something about
it. We founded a group which is now a national Catholic organization called
From Mission to Mission (FMTM). As a first step, we devised a ten-day workshop
on “Transition: A process of Death and Resurrection.” Experts in psychology,
social sciences, and theology are called upon as resources, but they themselves
must have been missionaries abroad.
We spend
almost two days listening to individual stories. It’s a draining experience
where things come out that you never even told your mother (especially your
mother!) or your best friend. It is sacred ground where people can make peace
with the past. It’s so overwhelming that we take a half-day off, just to catch our
breath.
Then come
the experts to tell the group where we stand today as a country and as a
Church. It’s a primer on social analysis. Finally we bring in resource people
who will help our charges figure out how they can redirect their skills and use
their past experiences in the here and now.
We want
these returned missionaries to contribute their wider worldview to their home
Church and society.
They are
now missionaries to their own people. We like to think of ourselves as the
thorn in the side of our society’s and of our Church’s complacency.
That’s
what happened in Denver all those years ago, when just two of us “old hands”
ran the program with the help of local experts. Now, the organization has grown
and adapted to better serve the changing face of mission and to reflect our
expertise in dealing with all kinds of transition, not just reentry. No matter
how often you do it, every workshop is always a unique experience. Do we have
all the answers? No, but we like to think of ourselves as wounded healers. God
will do the rest.■