He Is Risen! Yet, My Computer Thinks It Is More Grammatically Correct to Say He Is Raised – I Am Not Sure If I Trust Microsoft Word On This

Happy Easter Friends!

My Jordanian friend Salim asked yesterday how I would celebrate Easter. I told him that I would go to Mass and then eat a lot of food, and that was exactly what I did today.
The day was full of visits from my host family’s extended family, a lot of eating, and a very silly Mass experience.

First off, brief reflections on time spent with extended family:

I am pretty used to feeling out of place in Jordan. It has gotten to the point that when I find myself surrounded by people that look like me I feel a little uncomfortable. For instance about a month ago the bus I was traveling in stopped at a rest stop built for tourists and cleverly designed to disperse the economic benefits of tourism to the community by selling overpriced Western snack food and kitsch (not to mention your standard outrageously expensive dining room set) to the travelers who pass through on their way to Petra. The place was empty when we arrived but as I was purchasing expensive Cadbury chocolate, two tour buses pulled up and I found myself suddenly surrounded by about 70 white people, and not just anyway white people, rich retired white people… a group of people who I feel extremely disconnected from. I cannot fully explain this situation, Marx tells me that alienation comes from the ones relationship to the means of production, but in this case I had the same relationship to my candy bar as they to their t-shirts adorned with a camel and the phrase “the ship of the desert.” That is we were both voracious consumers… But I definitely felt out of place.

Hanging with the extended family typically induces a far less profound sense of alienation (the possible exception being the time my host cousin scored high enough on her university entrance exams to study medicine if she chooses, at which point one crazy uncle fired his gun in the air a bunch), but today there was just a WHOLE LOT of me sitting, smiling, and wishing everyone would talk a lot slower. Coincidently, I tended to spend a lot of time with my adorable two-month-old host niece, because to the best of my knowledge you can spend a family party watching, playing with, and talking about adorable baby-kinses in any culture. Cute babies are universal.

The other thing I spent a lot of time doing was eating. As my explanation of Easter to Salim foresaw, no matter how inept one is at discussing long past family histories in Arabic one can always put delicious things into one’s mouth and then comment on how zackee (delicious) the fatoosha wa jaj is (spicy Lebanese salad and chicken).

Lastly, I went to Mass at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Jabal Amman. But by went to Mass I mean that I arrived a half hour before in hopes of finding a solitary seat somewhere near the back or perhaps the universally dreaded by Catholics – front row. Instead I found that the courtyard outside of the Church was filled with somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 Southeast Asians queuing up and trying to get close enough to the church entrance to listen to the English Mass led by a Jesuit from Ohio. It was a strange experience. I spent the Mass standing in the hot sun, packed into a crowd of foreign workers who averaged half my height, straining to hear the good news. It was weird and fun, but I got Eucharist, and that was good enough for me.