The Landmines of Kamrieng Commune

It's a guy thing, this love David has for things that crash and blow up: tipping over towers of building blocks and cheering mightily as they tumble to the floor, or watching stock cars collide in flames in NASCAR race films, or hurling toy trains from toy bridges. He shares this crashing fascination with other boys his age. He loves this stuff.

But when the crashing and blowing up are over, David gets up and asks for cheese puffs and chocolate soy milk. Snacks, not catastrophes, have the final say. All this crashing stuff is a small part of a larger story in which life goes on.

On the other side of the world, in Kamrieng Commune in Cambodia, six-year-olds like him share his fascination with exploding things--with one important difference: Kamrieng is strewn with landmines once planted by the Khmer Rouge and by the government.

There, boys throw stones at what seem like toys, the winner being the one who detonates the mine. What would otherwise be a typical boyhood fascination, far from ending in a snack, can sever limbs and sear flesh. The larger life-over-death story does not emerge--at least not there, not yet. In Kamrieng, life does not necessarily go on.

Add to this the physical hunger and poor nutrition resulting from the mine-pocked fields. Kamrieng borders a jungle and the soil is perfect for growing yellow corn. But farmers can be suddenly maimed or killed by the exploding mines. So the black, rich soil remains untilled while families do without proper food.

Someday the landmines will be cleared from Kamrieng, and the larger story will re-emerge. Severed limbs, seared flesh, and diminished lives will no longer have the final say. People will regain their trust in the typical thrills of boyhood and the soil that gives life to an incredibly beautiful land. Life will go on as it did before.

But not yet. Right now, there's too much work to do.

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

A few weeks after finishing The Kite Runner, I still get chills remebering one line: "For you, a thousand times over." It is spoken by the narrator, Amir, to his newly adopted son at the end of the novel. The two of them have just won an Afghan style kite tournament by cutting the string of the rival kite and setting it adrift. "Do you want me to run that kite for you?" Amir asks his son. "Running" a kite means retrieving it as a trophy. The son nods. That's when Amir says these words to his son--"For you, a thousand times over"

When he was a boy, Amir had often heard these words from Hassan, his childhood friend and the son of his father's Hazara servant. Hassan would say them to Amir when performing one or another menial task for him--or when Amir would ask him to run a kite: "For you, a thousand times over." Even despite the two boys' seemingly vast differences of class and race, Hassan's words carried enormous love and loyalty.

But this story is about more than Hassan's devotion to Amir. It is also about Amir's cruel betrayal of Hassan. The guilt from that betrayal haunts Amir--comes to govern his life, really--and is finally purged only at great cost in one explosive scene.

Eventually, Hassan is murdered by Taliban thugs, Amir adopts his son, bringing him home to California where he shows him the same love he himself had received from Hassan. "For you, a thousand times over," Amir says to the boy just before running the kite, then adds:

I ran, a grown man running with swarms of screaming children. But I didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips.
I ran.

Amir's memories of his childhood friend have taught him how to love. Amir is now the kite runner. This story of redemption makes me want to love more fully as well--the highest praise I can give any book.

Our Parish

Over 20 years ago, when AIDS was mowing down friends left and right, I came to St. John's for the first time. I was meeting a friend who had asked me to join him for the funeral of an Episcopal priest whose name I can't remember. At the time, I was a Catholic priest, a Jesuit, and, after several years of parish work in the Northwest, was plugging away at a doctorate in Berkeley. Shortly before my coming to Berkeley, the Vatican had issued another of its searing letters about gays, one that had left me fragmented and weary and wondering where my own life was heading. Finding my way through the red doors of St. John's with my friend, I slumped into the last pew.

To my surprise, that liturgy, with its many stories about this gay priest, gave me a glimmer of hope that my own disparate life could become whole again.

Fast forward several years: I have left the Jesuits and become an Episcopalian, and my partner, Rob, and I have been together five years. A friend, learning we are moving to San Francisco, suggests we check out St. John's.

We did, and we stayed. In time, we were married here. Later, I was received as an Episcopal priest and began assisting here. Later still, perhaps best of all, our son, David, was baptized here.

I remain at St. John's for three reasons.

• The location. During the week, I'm a technical writer in the Financial District working with some of the brightest minds in the country. But Sunday mornings, on my walk to St. John's, I see life from a different angle: giggly children bantering in Spanish with their playmates; homeless people in doorways; carefree twenty-somethings wandering home from a night at the clubs; shopkeepers sweeping up the windblown newspapers, hypodermic needles, and broken wine bottles; bright, colorful murals telling the joys and struggles of this diverse and lively neighborhood. I gather up all this terrible beauty and press it to my heart on my way to the Eucharist.
  

• The people. Despite our ups and downs, the people of this parish keep inspiring me to learn more about Jesus and what it means to follow him. We try, each in our own small ways, to do this--looking out for each other when we get sick, lending a hand to struggling parishes in El Salvador, helping neighborhood kids get a jump on their math and reading, handing out food and vouchers to people off the street, or just being a little kinder, more joyful, throughout the week. We do what we can.
  

• Our seven-year-old son. He's crazy about the place. He loves his friends and the special treatment they get in Godly Play, the ladybugs and spiders in the garden, and the oatmeal raisin cookies that occasionally appear at coffee hour after mass.