By Gretchen Keiser

(First In A Series of Four)

It is Advent – a time to wait for Jesus to be born.

Before that day came his parents had to travel from their home to another place in order to comply with a demand placed upon them by the government. This meant that they were traveling while Mary was in the later months of her pregnancy. Joseph must have been terribly worried about her safety. At the end of the journey, they would find, just in time, a place for the baby to be born – a place which must have been dirty and smelled like animals and the rotting of grain that was used to feed livestock.

The rawness of that journey and of the destination – a stable – often escapes us today, seemingly cut off from the experience of simple people. But the same invitation is extended again and again – not to escape from it, but to travel the narrow road of God that we too might, at the end, find the Holy Child born in our darkest place.

Perhaps they leaped into what others only grasp by degrees.

When they heard that parable of Jesus talking to the rich young man – the one who went away sad because he could not sell everything he had and come and follow the Lord – Jack and Georgia Howard were graced with a greater fear of not following the Lord than of losing everything they had.

It was about a year after they had experienced a real awareness of the Lord working in their lives, which began when they went through a Life in the Spirit seminar given by a charismatic prayer group in their Williamston, Mich. parish. They’d been married for 11 years and during that time their family had grown with the two children, Chris, 11, and Leslie, nine, they had adopted during the first years of marriage. Materially, “for the first time in our life, things were pretty nice,” Georgia recalled with a smile, describing their home which must have been planned with great care, carpeted in powder blue with white furniture. Over the years they’d acquired three television sets, a sign that they were like most other couples in their thirties who started out with a little and acquired here and there over the first years of marriage.

A Vietnam veteran, Jack had a supervisory position in social work with the Headstart program, a family-oriented government aid program. Both their families were nearby, as they’d stayed close to the Michigan communities of Lansing and Traverse City where they each grew up.

In the midst of this, both had a strong sense of an invitation – the same one given to the rich young man – to leave it all behind and go on a journey into mission work. The call had to it “an excitement … yet it seemed to be very fearsome,” Georgia recalled. She had only been to Canada and Jack to Vietnam. Yet, inspired by the Sunday homily of a priest raising money for the missions, they wrote to a diocese in the African nation of Zambia seeking acceptance as lay missionaries for the Church. “Then we got a letter saying, sorry, no possible way, especially with children,” they said. The sense persisted and, four weeks later, another letter appeared. “Circumstances have changed,” it said and the family would be accepted at St. Daniel’s Mission in the Diocese of Solwezi, Zambia.

Although it was in the midst of the real estate freeze of 1980, when not a single house in their neighborhood had sold in a year, two pieces of property they owned, including their home, were sold in six weeks, the Howards said. They gave away and auctioned nearly everything they owned, saving only some clothing, books for the children and pots and pans to ship over to Africa. After paying plane fare and purchasing a bond for each child to be held until they were 18, they gave the rest of their money away to the missions and departed. They never expected to come back to the United States.

The Journey

Something else happened, however. Over the next 18 months in the bush country of the poorest area of Zambia, they suffered the loss not so much of their material luxuries, but of cherished ideas about themselves and a stripping away bit by bit of much that seemed so real but turned out to be illusory. In late November 1983, they would be, not in Zambia, but sitting around a kitchen table in a house outside Cumming, Georgia, sharing a steaming cup of soup and a pot of coffee as they consented to try and put their experiences into words.

Zambia was formerly northern Rhodesia and is peopled, the Howards said, by hunting tribes who live an extremely simple life. Only one road traverses the country; all other travel is made on bush trails that are tracks cut into the wilderness.

People live in huts with mud floors with a few changes of clothing. This great simplicity moved them, the Howards said. They also saw great poverty, particularly among the thousands of refugees who would come across the Zambian border fleeting civil war in Angola, Zaire and Tanzania.

Missionaries

In the midst of such simplicity and poverty, the Howards said, one would suddenly come upon a mission compound, with convent, buildings and church inside a fenced enclosure, built in the style of a European complex, sometimes with fine mosaics and stonework. The complexes stood in painful contrast to the lives of the Zambians, the Howards said. One of the great struggles they saw among missionaries, and which they fought with themselves, was to resist the temptation to be cut off from the poor and be become protective of what they had in the midst of great need. By contrast, a Swedish missionary priest they met had been in Angola for 25 years and was moving with the refugees from Angola and Zaire, ministering to 12,000 people and living in huts with the people he was ministering to. Witnessing those differences in the way people were able to be missionaries was one experience that brought about a painful awareness of their total dependence on God. Failing to see Christ in the poor “can happen to all of us,” Georgia observed.

When He came “as a nobody, as a humble man” many people didn’t recognize Him, she said. “We’re doing the same thing now because we’re not looking for Him where He said He would be – in the poor and the homeless and in prison.”

A Gradual Change

In the mission compound, the family lived in a 22-room convent. Jack, who worked on construction that was taking place, traveled in the bush a great deal to gather supplies which were scarce. The family was 250 miles from its source of supplies. Georgia and the children spent most of their time at the compound, the children going to school in a mud schoolhouse with Zambian children. They began to assume the simple way of living they came to. The staple of the Zambian diet is a grain called “enshima” and it was supplemented by vegetables traded in a marketplace like tomatoes and cabbage. Meat was such a rarity that there was only one word to describe meat of any kind.

The contrast with American plenty was not just a surface difference. It went very deep into inner attitudes, Jack said. To the Zambian people he worked with and came to know, differences among food was a foreign concept, he said. “It doesn’t matter what goes down. As long as your stomach is full, you’re satisfied,” he recalled. In their simplicity, people were more free, he said. “They have beautiful hearts,” he said. “If they are hungry and they haven’t eaten for three days, they’ll give you a smile.”

The inner differences were the most painful to recognize and brought about great changes. Georgia said that traveling to Zambia “I thought I was a nice person, a good Christian.” She visibly winces now as she tries to describe how mistaken an idea that was. She first became aware of the reality of her own attitude as she sat with Zambians in a crowded church, among people dressed in rags and smelling the stench of unwashed bodies in the heat of the day. She says that she confronted a prejudice within herself so deep that she was shamed. Much later, she remembers equally well a day when she stood in the crowded butcher shop aswarm with flies, waiting with everyone else to receive “four kilos of meat” and experiencing not a separation but a kinship with the people around her. “It was the most beautiful, freeing feeling,” she said.

Jack said that his preconceptions were not the same as Georgia’s, but that he thought that as an administrator he would make a contribution and bring order to the operations. He went “thinking I was somebody” and waited month after month for the opportunity to do what he thought he could do. Jack said that he worked with the technology he knew, but became awed and overwhelmed by the patience of the Zambians who worked with him. On the construction site a giant anthill as tall as a tree blocked progress. It was an insurmountable obstacle. Yet, day after day, workers came and removed it by hand and, with patience, after some weeks it was removed. “I tried to work alongside them many days,” Jack recalled, “but I never could at the pace they did all day and I was much healthier, much better fed.”

The Lord’s Strength

As a family, Jack believes, they had to confront themselves as they were at the time and come to realize that they were loved by the Lord exactly as they were. Cut off from the noise of the American world and from the blizzard of activities and decisions and choices, they struggled with a deep silence in which, Jack says, he found himself in constant prayer, a conversation that wove through the day’s unfolding. They clung to the Eucharist and daily Mass, which was profoundly alive and a source of essential strength and unity even when they felt divided. They struggled with the pain of the Church trying to live the pure message of love entrusted to her and falling so short.

Against this background, they saw tremendous grace and strength in the suffering of the poor. Georgia recalled an Angolan woman refugee dying of cancer, all alone, lying on the mud floor of a hut, yet without anger or self-pity. “The dignity that woman had and the beauty,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “How many of us could carry something like that? We couldn’t carry what they’ve had to carry all their lives.

Returning

Although they had hoped to stay in Zambia permanently, after one year, the living allowance they had been receiving became too much for the mission to pay and circumstances were changing. For six more months they stayed, Georgia trying to earn enough money to buy food for the family since Jack worked all day. But the diocese eventually decided to send them back to the United States, turning the convent to other uses. The Howards found themselves coming home with virtually no possessions and facing confusion and lack of understanding among the friends they left behind. Gradually weaned away from American culture in Zambia, the return was harsh. Jack put in about 30 different job applications but his former position as “missionary” discomfited those he asked to hire him. With less and less to go on, the Howards began to drive from their home state of Michigan to the south, waiting for the destination that seemed to be the Lord’s. A stopover in Kentucky, with a childhood friend of Georgia’s, told them of Cumming, Georgia, where the Dominican sisters were running an outreach center called The Place. A few days later, at The Place they found that there was an opening for a man needed to work in outreach with other men at the woodshop. Jack made his application and, while they waited for a decision to be reached, they camped out.

In Georgia

Here, they have a new home. They have come a long way.

“We always thought we lived a simple life before, but we didn’t,” Georgia said. “Since we’ve come back (from Africa) there have been times when we’ve really experienced poverty … It makes such a difference in understanding the pain and humiliation of being poor. I always felt before a little bit on a different level. I no longer feel that way. I don’t feel like I’m looking down anymore or looking in. It feels like I’m in there too.”

Using the bonds held for the children, they managed to make a down payment on a house outside Cumming, an extraordinary accomplishment since the money shouldn’t have been enough. For three months they slept on the floor while Jack built the simple furniture that is in the house, including the beds. A “house shower” at The Place has provided blankets and other essential items. There isn’t a lot, but somehow each time there has been a critical need it’s been met and there is enough to share.

It’s hard to put into words how rich they really feel. “God’s been good to us in the way people can’t see and I can’t explain,” Georgia says, trying to express it. “He gave us our family again and He gave us knowledge of Him. It’s a beautiful feeling to know we are His children and we have a loving Father.” They emphasize that it was the lessons they learned that mattered, not where it took place and that the same lessons are taught in an infinite number of ways and places by the Lord.

In the evening as Georgia goes off to a part-time job, Jack puts pancakes on the stove and talks to the children about school and their day. There is a deep simplicity in the house and the family, and a shyness. It will take time for trust to grow again. The return to America was more harsh than leaving, in the crush of materialism, of too many choices on supermarket shelves and no words to express the weight of God’s love for all His children, His silence and His waiting: His presence where, still, no one expects Him to be.