The Fields of Tanis
/Dear Family and Friends,
The Haitian people are living through a fourth year of violent torment.
It is the tragic unravelling of the country, with vengeful political discord and the rule of gangs, keeping everything on a crash course.
Having been surrounded by gun battles for most of the past 7 days, and having helped many gunshot, traumatized, robbed, abused and humiliated people over these years, it is more than evident that a bullet easily destroys the whole person: body and mind, heart and soul.
So I had every sympathy for "Keket" yesterday when she, like so many, came to see me for any kind of help.
She was a strong, stocky market woman, in her sixties, until very recently when weakened by a stroke. Since so many clinics and hospitals have closed in the past years, Keket was "lost to follow up." The whole country is lost to follow up. The whole country is sick in every sense.
The stroke affected Keket's ability to pronounce words.
She speaks with passion through her watered eyes, her gestures and sounds, about the reign of bullets, and the terror and consequences for a world where every opinion is backed up only by a gun. She asked me if I could help get her to St Marc, where she grew up.
I could not understand her words, and yet I understood everything she was telling me. She used her arms, as if holding a military size weapon, and ferocious sputtering of her tongue to express the barrage of gunfire. She collapsed into dreadful sobbing, showing what this is doing to whats left of her mind.
I took the blood pressure of this once strong woman whom I have known for years. Aghast at the reading, I gave her two months worth of medicines and the money (beyond the necessary) to get to St Marc with her daughter.
I said "a once strong woman", and I need to catch my error here. This does not at all define Keket.
At first I saw only her weaknesses. Until her passions were more evident.
Her passion to LIVE,
to be UNDERSTOOD,
to RETURN to the green grass of home,
her passion to PROTEST the guns and their death rattle,
her passion for a better FUTURE for her young DAUGHTER and her children.
What a strong, strong woman.What a beautiful witness she gives with her courage.
A death machine, directed by the Lords of the Flies, is mowing her country down, and she rebels and acts with her passion.
Many mothers like Keket have lost children to bullets, husbands and brothers to savage massacres, and have been humiliated by beatings and rape,and yet they plow ahead through the darkest times with challenged courage and heroic passion.
Grace is alive here, in the hearts of the trampled. Keket and so many others choose to give Grace free reign in their hearts rather than roll over an die.
But where sin increased, grace increased all the more. (Romans 5:20)
Keket will go home, to St Marc.
I remember the song about "the green, green grass of home." I remember other songs about fields and meadows, like "Fields of Gold," and "The fields of Athenry."
These haunting songs express a deep loss and with the overriding fervent desire to find again the lost treasure.
Another songwriter, the psalmist David, also speaks of a field.
The Field of Tanis. Tanis is in Egypt, and was the place of atrocious slavery endured by the Hebrews.
A place of terrible memory, but David recalls Tanis because it was powerfully graced by the Mighty Deeds of God. This is what the psalms proclaim throughout the millennia. For the believer, the place of suffering becomes the place of the Mighty Deeds of God.
Tanis is a field of contradictions, as was the tomb of Jesus a place of contradiction. His grave. The End. His tortured, lifeless body was buried. But his very grave is also The Beginning, the place his Soul and Glorified Body were raised from the dead by God's Mighty Deeds. Tanis is a place of contradiction, where an anguished slave mother placed her tiny slave son in a fragile basket made of reeds, and sent him down river, hoping he would become a refugee in a world of privilege and power, and might know a better life than hers.
In this brave and selfless act, her son became the solution his mother longed to see. He became the slave that freed the slaves.
We should try to become the solutions we long to see, when trapped in the forms of slavery we feel we are living.
The fields of Tanis, the fields of Haiti, the fields of Gaza, the fields of Ukraine, and every field on earth that has become a killing field- are all places of deep contradiction. Grace is in superabundance, lurking every where, seeking out every open heart.
It takes time to write these thoughts, because there is no time to write them.
When I started this reflection earlier this month there was a crescent moon at sunset, and this small piece of moon, with the evening star in tow, were tinged red, as if absorbing the blood crying up from the earth.
But over these days of writing, the moon grew full and became huge and silver. The biggest, brightest moon of the year, called a super moon. One form of this heavenly light speaking of suffering and blood, and then in its fullest form speaking of light and hope, both forms shining, in tjheir time, on the same land.
What do you become, when things are very dark and overwhelming? What do you become when things are so widespread and complicated, that there is nothing you can do to solve what is happening?
David would say, and Keket would agree by her witness, that you can keep the embers of "what is right" alive in your heart, as the fire of a civilized ways of sharing life on the planet seems to die out.
You can preserve the red embers of everything that is good and holy, noble and true.
Preserve with your memory and your faith, and especially with your dedication to others who are in worse shape than you might be.
But it is not al all easy, it is an immense spiritual task, to become someone who always thinks, says and does the next right thing.
If we cannot solve the vast problems that engulf us, we can still weave baskets of reeds.
A huge and urgent goal for us in Haiti is to save this school year for our eleven thousand students, since both fundraising and the practical function of the schools are under mighty challenges.
We are very fortunate to have a handful of our schools entirely sponsored, but for the majority of our schools we have a significant deficit this year, because many other "Fields of Tanis" around the world are rightfully attracting donations that might previously be directed here. It is right that this is so. The suffering in other nations leaves us speechless.
So we send out our reed baskets, hoping they return with enough funds to keep our children in productive learning even if in the most basic way.
Let us make this ancient rallying cry of believers own:
Ad Majorem! Let's strive together for the highest values in life.
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam! Let this be how we give glory and praise to God.
My profound thanks for your friendship, shared faith, prayers and support.
Fr Richard Frechette CP DO
Port-au-Prince, October 24, 2024
