Helpless
But not hopeless
“No news is good news”, my dad used to sentence. The saying becomes painfully true when you live away from your birth country.
As anyone in the diaspora knows, there is a familiar ritual whenever your homeland appears in the headlines. Read what happened and read it again in your own national news (just to double check the facts), get the phone, call your family to check they are safe, inform the rest everyone is ok (or not).
Last Thursday I woke up to the news of the earthquake in Caracas. I immediately messaged my Venezuelan cousin in London to ask about the rest of the family. “Everyone is safe, but scared”, he said, his sadness clear for being so far from them.
For those unfamiliar with the history of Spanish migration, hundreds of thousands of Spanish citizens—including second- and third-generation descendants—have made their lives in Venezuela. In recent decades, many Venezuelans have made the journey in the opposite direction and now live in Spain. The connection is even stronger in the Canary Islands, where my extended family is. Almost half of the congregation in the church where I grew up in Tenerife is from Venezuela. Nearly eight million citizens from the Bolivarian nation have made their home around the world, making it one of the biggest diaspora movements in the planet. That means it’s very likely there will be at least one Venezuelan near you.
Trauma experienced in your country while you are abroad is a strange experience. You feel that guilty paradox of wanting to be there and at the same time realising what could have happened if you had been. Wanting to help and not knowing how. Millions of Venezuelans around the world are right now mobilizing aid to be sent to their country, perfect English speakers translating to the cameras and to the world the size of the disaster. But by the time the cameras will be gone, the magnitude of the tragedy will be just beginning to unfold. When the news moves on, the diaspora will remain. Their pain will remain. At that point, they may even be questioning themselves why they left their loved nation in the first place. There are scars and holes in the hearts that love two homes.
My personal faith can be of little comfort to those that have lost what is most precious to them in life. As a Christian, I have often found myself turning to God with more questions than answers in those situations. Why them? Why again? Where I can’t find answers, there is prayer. C.S. Lewis said: “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”
Not everyone would call themselves a person of faith. Yet interestingly most people have tried praying at least once in their lives. Whether out of desperation or the need to communicate with that invisible someone who may order the chaos in our beings, many of us feel the urge to cry for help.
In the church where I worship, we regularly pray together for the world. It’s our collective exercise of bringing the world to God. Together, we recognise we are helpless to many of the situations we pray for. Not a popular thing to admit for many people. When it’s my turn to lead the congregation in prayer, I often feel the weight of what we are asking. Peace, comfort, reconciliation… all these humanly impossible.
And yet… We pray for Iran and I see my brothers and friends from that country seating at the back of the church. We pray for Afghanistan and I think of my female friend who came to study and was never able to go back to Kabul, her little sister still under the Taliban regimen. We pray for the Ebola outbreak and I hear the children of the Congolese family playing outside. In our helplessness, God is already bringing some peace, some comfort, some reconciliation. Small foreshadows of what is to come.
If I inform my prayers only with the news, they could become an empty and pessimistic empathy effort. A sanitised worship that doesn’t bring hope. I want people, names to fill my prayers! I want to pray with hope, even in my helplessness.
“Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honour one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervour, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practise hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:9-15)
When the diaspora prays for their broken countries, let us pray with them. Let us cry with them. Let us bring hope. If you are not the praying type, maybe you can ask them what else you can do for them. Remember this is now their home as well, try to walk with them. You won’t heal the wounds but at least they won’t be alone.
Yesterday, my elderly mum was at her small local church in Tenerife. With others, she was praying for her sister in Caracas while the congregation was collecting money to aid the country. Love and prayer in action around the world.
