Reencuentro

Reencuentro

I recently heard President Michelle Bachelet of Chile try to explain in English the not easily translatable Spanish word “reencuentro.” Her dilemma was particularly interesting to me because the Shalom Center’s motto is “Un lugar de reencuentro” which we have loosely translated as “A gathering place.” “Reencuentro” could be translated as “reencounter” but the English word doesn’t carry the rich connotation of coming back together after a long absence, of walking forward in a spiral that leads back to memories, places, experiences and people but from a different point of view, of gathering pieces of the old and weaving them into new relationships and healing. For the Shalom Center of the Pentecostal Church of Chile, “Reencuentro” speaks of a holistic reconciliation with God, self, others and creation.

I recently heard President Michelle Bachelet of Chile try to explain in English the not easily translatable Spanish word “reencuentro.”  Her dilemma was particularly interesting to me because the Shalom Center’s motto is “Un lugar de reencuentro” which we have loosely translated as “A gathering place.”  “Reencuentro” could be translated as “reencounter” but the English word doesn’t carry the rich connotation of coming back together after a long absence, of walking forward in a spiral that leads back to memories, places, experiences and people but from a different point of view, of gathering pieces of the old and weaving them into new relationships and healing.  For the Shalom Center of the Pentecostal Church of Chile, “Reencuentro” speaks of a holistic reconciliation with God, self, others and creation.   

During the month of July, 2008, I was invited to travel from Chile to Mexico by the Joint Board for Mission Development in Mexico to participate as a facilitator at the Latin American Youth Leadership Conference.  The journey for me was one of “reencuentros.” 

I grew up in Mexico, principally in Mexico City and Guadalajara, and, by the age of seventeen when I left to go to college in the United States, I had visited 29 of Mexico’s 31 states.  Since my parents and my paternal grandparents were missionaries with the Christian Church, (Disciples of Christ) in Mexico, I returned home there whenever I had the chance. Missionary families, just like families in the United States, face the normal stresses of daily life: sick children, rebellious adolescents, moves, educational decisions, worship options, conflicts with coworkers.  However, these normal challenges, when compounded by the juggling of multiple cultures, languages, and world views, can create disorienting storms of throbbing bewilderment.  At the same time that I moved away from home to start my first year in college, my parents discovered that they were in the painful and confusing process of separation.

I moved back to Mexico sometime after college and lived with my father in the city of San Luis Potosí where he helped to found the Center for Theological Studies. I saw my mother occasionally when visiting Mexico City.  After about a year, I left for Paraguay to work at the Jack Norment Camp where I facilitated the environmental education program.  A few short weeks after I left for Paraguay, the Disciples of Christ churches in Mexico exploded in an agonizing conflict that, not only split the denomination, but even divided several local churches.  My father’s missionary appointment was redefined; this time assigned to serve with the Christian Congregational Churches in Mexico, based in Guadalajara and historically connected to the United Church of Christ.

Churches and denominations overseas suffer splits much like the ones in the United States and for many of the same reasons.   Some church conflicts, however, are exacerbated by long time sociopolitical patterns set by colonialism, the ingrained inheritance of oppression, economic models that maintain broad distance between the rich and the poor, the engulfing and relentless march of globalization, and, in Latin America, the historic dominance of the Catholic Church.

The Rev. David Vargas, then the Executive Secretary for the Latin America and the Caribbean office of Global Ministries and now Co-President of the mission organization jointly created by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ in the United States and Canada, visited Paraguay while I was there, and he took time in his busy schedule to sit down for a long talk.  Pastor David knew my family situation and the scenario in the Disciples church in Mexico all too well.  He had strained to hold together the pieces until the splintered shards were forced out of his hands. Yet, he spoke that day with what, by the grace of God, would turn out to be a prophetic voice, similar in my mind to those wild Old Testament dreams announcing a future time of peace and reconciliation.  He said he prayed asking God that before he retired from Global Ministries he might witness two miracles: the healing of my parents’ relationship and the building of a bridge across the rift in the Disciples Church in Mexico.

As I said before, this journey to Mexico was one of “reencuentros.”  I visited the church in San Luis Potosí where my grandparents began their missionary service in Mexico.  I remembered the stories of my aunt who died as an infant and was buried in the cemetery of the city and how that experience stretched my grandparents’ faith to the limit.   I stood outside the colonial building in Aguascalientes where the missionaries used to live and where my father was born.  I visited the little village of Los Nogales, Zacatecas, where my father had his first pastorate and took pictures of the weather-beaten adobe house where he proposed to my mother.  I preached in the Disciples Church in Guadalajara, the church that accompanied both of my parents even as their lives took separate paths.  From Mexico, I traveled to Texas, reliving the many border crossings of my childhood, some traumatic and some verging on bizarre.  I write this letter from my parents’ home in Raymondville, Texas.  Pastor David Vargas once said to me during another visit, years after the Paraguayan one and this time in Chile that he could keep believing in the miracle of forgiveness in Christ because he had seen it in my parents. My parents today are living evidence of the slow, arduous process of reconciliation.

As I looked around the library at the Center for Theological studies in San Luis Potosí with my grandfather’s portrait hanging on the wall, I saw youth from three different denominations – some of whose parents were my friends when we were teenagers and some of whose grandparents had worked with my parents.  The youth from both Disciples denominations and the Congregational Church of Mexico had worked together to organize this “reencuentro,” making a strong and clear statement to the leadership of all three churches about their desire to face the past, learning from both the gifts and the problems, so as to now dream of a future where they would assume their responsibility to live out the well-known motto “in essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things love.”   Pastor David Vargas was there, too, on hand to add his bricks of wisdom and experience to the building of the long-awaited bridge.    God answered both his prayers after many years of waiting and before his retirement from Global Ministries!  

With Pastor David Vargas’s example, may we be encouraged to speak out prophetically in the midst of violence, disunity, and brokenness, declaring by faith the reconciliation that perhaps no one else can believe possible, and may God grant each of us, also, the privilege of a journey of “reencuentros” as described in Psalm 85:10: Love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will embrace.   

Elena Huegel

Elena Huegel is a missionary with the Pentecostal Church of Chile (IPC).  She serves as an environmental and Christian education specialist.