Application to the FTE Discernment Retreat
This past April I visited Cuba for the first time. I went with a group to celebrate a friend’s birthday and learn about Cuba. It was a beautiful place and a tragic and a struggling place as well. Lots of tensions.
I was one of three people who understood the language and the only one who possessed the stereotypical “appearance of being Latinx.” So, the people often spoke to me, directly coming to me first in my group.
I learned Spanish, possibly as my first language, as a baby and used it with my father’s Mexican family until my parents’ separation, and my separation from that whole side of my family, at age 6. In the years following that traumatic loss of a father and large family, my mother would speak shame, rejection, and disgust over any identification with him or them, with Mexican-ness or Spanish speaking. Slowly, due to shame and fear, I began to pretend I didn’t speak Spanish if anyone asked. I even went so far as to pretend I couldn’t understand if, say, a stranger approached me speaking in Spanish. Being mixed-race I also struggled to find belonging or identification with my often immigrant or first-gen Mexican or Central American peers in school. Culture was a large barrier. Greeks are quite different from Mexicans in many ways and my Greek grandmother, aunt, and uncles were the ones raising me now. Family members frequently told me I was “Greek, and nothing else.”
It wasn’t long before I rejected this whole Latinx side to myself. In college, I learned to pursue a cultural whiteness via my church experiences and white-only mentoring. A few years into that period, about seven years ago, by God’s coordination, beginning with one Sunday morning at church, I was reintroduced to my father and his beautiful family. This was an incredible and difficult experience. I knew and didn’t know my family.
At a Holy Spirit conference that spring, a deep conviction struck my heart and I repented to God for my rejection of my language and people. I wept bitterly that day.
Two years after that, through the help of a seminary course on Racism and Reconciliation, I realized that I had internalized racism and a very deep self-hatred to work out. I am still rebuilding a sense of belonging with my father and his family, and with the Latinx community. I still have a great deal of fear around not belonging to that community and around speaking Spanish, being vulnerable in those ways. I took a Spanish course four years ago, and then again five months ago.
So back to Cuba, this spring.
I was forced by necessity to speak my Advanced Intermediate-level Spanish. And while hard at first, I soon began to welcome and desire opportunities to use my language. Slowly, the sense of belonging covered me like a warm blanket, and in a number of days I felt at home. When I returned to Chicago, my physical home, I felt a deep pain. I realized that I had been, for the past five years, pursuing racial justice work, whether in the church or my community or the social enterprise I’ve helped to start, but that I was still separated from my Latinx people. I was still rejecting them, still afraid of their rejection of me. I wept in shame, in grief for the loss of connection and belonging, for the loss of years and energy, and for the pain of my community. Sharing all these thoughts with God, I felt God say that I was being called to belong. And that this would all be used, my story and truth, ultimately to serve my Latinx community. None of it would be lost. And so here I am, seeking my next steps.
I am grateful for this organization and this retreat because it integrates that faith component with the identity as a person of color, and specifically a Latinx, into the work of searching out our vocational calling. My previous church context is where I felt most encouraged to pursue my calling in service and ministry. I served twice as a community life pastoral intern there. But they did not understand my growing need to identify with my Latinidad or to call out racism as a sin of the Church or an issue of today. It was difficult to navigate that growing call on my heart in such a closed-minded context (at that time) and I ultimately left the Vineyard church for it. My next church, the Evangelical Covenant Church, was great at discussing social justice issues, racism included, but did not provide me the guidance, leadership opportunities, and nurturing I have been so desperate for. God is faithful and I do have a variety of resources from throughout the years that I do call upon as I journey along. It feels like a pivotal moment in my life right now. A moment of decision. I need more support and space and guidance. I am hoping graduate school, possibly even seminary, is in my near future. I would like help discerning that.
