When I was 12 or 13, I was introduced to The Mask of Zorro at my Uncle Buddy and Aunt Janna’s house. My world was never the same afterwards. Along with an entire generation of boys, I wanted to be Zorro. I wanted to stand bravely against injustice, ride a black horse through the desert, successfully swordfight two men simultaneously, have a secret underground lair with a mysterious and stern but wise mentor who could help me realize my destiny. And, of course, I wanted to marry Catherine Zeta-Jones.
But perhaps the biggest impact this film left on my life was a throwaway line about halfway through the film. Alejandro, who is the young Zorro (Anthonio Banderas), arrives incognito to a party thrown by the villain, Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson). He introduces himself by saying that he has come from Spain and been told that California is a land of opportunity for a man of vision.
Montero asks him, “Are you a man of vision?”
“I am a man,” Alejandro replies, “in search of a vision.”
When I graduated from college in 2008, with the old dreams dead but nothing new to replace them, this seemed to be an apt description of me as well. In many ways, it still is.
For much of the last part of my senior year of college, I felt like a hapless canoer who had lost his paddle as the boat headed inexorably towards a waterfall. I didn’t know what lay on the other side, and like a child projecting monsters through the open door of a dark closet, the unknown beyond the diploma terrified me.
Immediately after I graduated from college, I had been asked to join my mom and youngest brother as a Spanish-English interpreter on a short-term mission trip to Rosarito, Mexico, to partner with a local church to do a children’s outreach program. I was excited about spending some time with my mom and brother. I was also excited to go back to Mexico. I had done two trips with this same organization when I was in junior high and high school and been strongly impacted by my experiences there and our interactions with the people that we had met through them.
I was less excited about the “mission” itself. As a conscientious young evangelical, I had always felt a bit guilty that I did not possess the talent or skill for “evangelism” that was held up as a spiritual ideal at youth group. My story did not neatly fit into the “once was lost, but now am found” framework to which our personal stories or “testimonies” were meant to conform. I could not pinpoint with any certainty the moment of my “salvation” (which necessitated quite a few repeats of the “sinner’s prayer” in the hopes that one of them would take.) Even if I could overcome these testimonial deficiencies, I did not possess the acumen for selling anything, including God.
What was more, I did not want to conform to the well-worn but often accurate stereotype of short-term missions as a combination of religious tourism and cultural imperialism: taking a week to go and save some exotic souls by selling them on Americhristianity and then stopping by the flea market to practice my haggling skills on the way back.
My reservations about the mission were not assuaged when I met our speaker for the week. His name was Brad Buser—a former aspiring professional surfer from California who had felt the call to the mission field and spent two decades in Papua New Guinea among the Iteri people. He had been the speaker for the missions trip that I had been on in high school, and his message had seemed to me at the time both theologically dodgy and emotionally manipulative. If you were not on the mission field, he proclaimed, unless God had given you a specific dispensation not to go, you were living in sin. (Basically, picture a jingoistic marine recruiter in the height of World War II, slap a Jesus fish on his uniform, and you wouldn’t be far off the mark.) I braced myself for another weeklong harangue.
And yet, my low expectations were not fulfilled. Perhaps Mr. Buser’s message had mellowed a bit in the intervening decade since I had last heard him. Perhaps I just heard him with different ears. Perhaps the experiences of that week gave me a different lens through which to view his words.
YUGO’s missions model is to partner visiting churches (generally from the United States) with local evangelical churches to run children’s outreach programs like Vacation Bible Schools. Our partner church on this trip was a Pentecostal church (as most evangelical churches in Latin America tend to be) called “La Mano de Jehová”— “Jehovah’s Hand.” It wasn’t much to look at. Members of the congregation had built it out of cinderblocks. A corrugated tin roof covered it. A rough wooden stage and roll-out carpet to cover the dirt floor completed the facilities. The pastor—César—lived in a single room behind the church, which he shared with his wife and three young children. It had a bunk bed and a couch: the two boys took the top bunk, his wife and three-year-old daughter took the bottom bunk, and he took the couch. It was a living situation that made any college bach pad I have visited look luxurious by comparison.
Yet César did not seem in the least disturbed by his circumstances. He was excited that we were there. On our first day, he took a bull horn and went around the dusty colonia, inviting all children to come to a program at the church; the gringos in matching tee shirts were the bait to sweeten this invitation. And the kids came. All week, our kids arrived at the church every morning, played games with the kids from the congregation and those who were drawn by the invitation of the bullhorn, sang songs that they had practiced in halting Spanish, told Bible stories that my other translators and I attempted to translate. In the evening, we came back for a regular church service, with some of the most enthusiastic and ear-splitting singing that I have ever been a part of.
On the last day, the church pulled out all the stops to overwhelm us with Latin American hospitality, inviting us to a dinner that they had prepared that, with benefit of hindsight, they had probably skipped meals to feed us. It was one of many times (the most recent being our car fiasco a few weeks ago) that I have been humbled by generosity that I did not expect and did not deserve.
Another (less welcome) surprise came earlier that day, when pastor César told me that I would be delivering the sermon for that evening’s service.
I was terrified. Though I had done speech and debate and was generally comfortable speaking in front of a crowd, the notion of trying to prepare and deliver a sermon in Spanish in the space of a few hours was decidedly out of my comfort zone.
Nonetheless, I took it as an opportunity to be stretched (one of many on this trip), and decided to talk about I Corinthians 12, where the apostle Paul says that in Christ, we are like a body with many parts. None of these can claim autonomy: each needs the others, and each should care for the others as for itself. As different as the congregation at the Mano de Jehová was from anything that I had experienced or been a part of, they had something that I needed: a vision. They knew what was really important. Compared to this, everything else—the dusty road, the single room, the heat—faded into insignificance.
I don’t know if anyone else got anything from the sermon that night. But I did. And in the light of this understanding, Brad Buser’s sales pitch sounded different to me. It was not—or at least, did not have to be—a guilt trip pitching a chance to gain atonement for sin by throwing one’s life away in a latter-day Crusade. It was an opportunity to be a part of the only story that mattered: the chance to join with other disparate members of the same body to realize the mystical union that Paul had described. It was a chance to throw away the distractions that occupied nearly every waking moment (and most sleeping moments) like so much σκυβαλα (“shit”, as the salty-mouthed apostle Paul put it) and be a part of something bigger than I could have asked or imagined.
It was a vision.
But what it meant in practical terms remained—and, to a large extent, remains—a mystery.