The Return and the Dream
It has been a couple of days since I returned to the United States. Laura surprised me by picking me up at the airport in LA; she was supposed to be in Texas at a concert for her birthday. Its really good to be back, to see friends, etc., but its completely different than what I've gotten used to in the last couple of week
Traveling throughout the Middle East, we went to Jordan, Syria, Israel and most of the West Bank. We were studying both the geography (through a class taught by New Testament professor Bruce Fisk called Jesus and the Land) as well as the modern conflict (through a class taught by Psychology professor Tom Fikes called Culture/Narrative Psychology of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict). It's unreal. The stories we heard, the places we saw. It's so weird because this place, Santa Barbara, is so far removed from the world I've been in.
Out of simple curiosity I looked on Google Earth this morning to get a number for how many kilometers we were from Santa Barbara, and when I hovered over SB I told Google Earth to 'fly' to Jerusalem, the motion Google Earth took to 'fly' to Jerusalem was astounding. We were on the other side of the planet.
How does that happen? It's easy to get in a plane and just go. Anyone can do that.
But what does it do to the mind? To be able to completely transplant oneself into a different world, do we even think about these things when we travel? I have this feeling of surreality, like its all a dream. But why is it a dream? Because the world I've grown up in is not recognizant of other worlds?
I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable person: I watch the news, I read as much as I can. I always considered myself to be a cultural person, at least ideologically. But the last five weeks was a practical outworking of my ideological mind, and I learned that you can't be an ideologically cultured person without experiencing culture on the ground, in its raw and real form. There's something that's inherently different about being on the ground in a different place. Breathing the air, touching the walls, looking people in the eye.
You can't get these things by reading books and watching the news. It is my hope that everyone in their life is able to experience culture in ways that leaves them confused. But this confusion is not disorderly, it leads to something else entirely.
Grace and Peace,
Wesley
