Martin & Hazel Frost

After some five-hundred years of largely unchallenged supremacy, it is probably hardly surprising that Catholicism is so embedded into Argentinean culture that that which passes for Evangelical theology here is frequently little more than a reactionary attempt to define ourselves as “not-Catholic”, a fact which was illustrated to me once again this morning while I was teaching the older kids at Sunday-school.
First indication; opening a group discussion on the life of Jesus quickly turned into a discussion on the person of Mary. Second indication; every child had an opinion on the person of Mary whether from their parents or their previous Sunday-school experience.

Thus we abandoned the plan in order to explore a range of intriguing questions from the floor; Did Mary really exist? Was she a real person? Was she really the mother of God? If Jesus was in her tummy, then she couldn’t be a virgin could she? (Cue exegete of Matthew 1:18-20 combined with impromptu sex-education lesson). But my favourite of all was:-
“If Mary used to be a real person then why has she turned into a statue now?”

I’ve been fiddling round making the video mode work on my new camera, I even had to read the instruction book, imagine. Then I had to go and find and download a free video editor; Virtual Dub small and effective, and not beyond the reach of the non-geek user. Then I had to join Youtube and figure out how to put the edited video up there, and then lastly I had transport it back into the blog. And this is the result. It’s probably mostly of interest to the grandparents and other long-distance relatives but it’s been fun playing around making it work.

Not remotely related to making block-busting movies, I also made seven pots of strawberry jam, which actually set, despites my fears. And now the men in my life are muttering about scones, so that’s about to be my next project.

These hot light mornings, our small human alarm goes off way before his parents had planned to be on the move. By the time he goes into nursery at nine we have built a train track on the floor, watched some Thomas the Tank engine, read a story, squeezed the orange juice, and even been to play on the swings in the plaza. Luckily he has taken to having two-hour siestas to make up, so it is just a case of juggling the day around a bit to make it all work.
Today I did the usual pre-nursery stuff, followed by gratefully handing him over for a couple of hours, followed by driving to Quebracho Herrado to see the head of the primary school, followed by driving home again and starting on another powerpoint that I need to put together (should have been done a week ago really but…) followed by making shepherds’ pie while Martin went to collect Joni, followed by clearing up and watching some rubbish TV while Joni had his siesta, followed by driving to Quebracho Herrado yet again to do some work with a couple of little first graders, followed by taking Joni to the plaza, followed by nearly managing to get in the car and go home except that someone came to see me so that was delayed by nearly another hour, followed by driving home and throwing Joni in the bath, followed by jumping on the bikes and going to the Bible Study group that Martin was leading tonight. I have to confess I spent more time playing with the kids than I did in the pursuit of scriptural enlightenment. I could pretend I was performing a useful service but it was more a case of the failing brain-cell.

And now it’s bed-time and there’s a dramatic storm happening outside so I’m off to watch it.

Yet another look at organisational politics, now I’m not as annoyed as I was yesterday. Cryptic? Hopefully enough to save me from the thought police.
We know we’re not the only ones on the wrong side of organisational politics; a squint at some of the other blogs we are linked to will give an abundance of examples of organisational politics getting in the way of people working effectively in any number of fields. Our friend Simon’s latest blog even begins with politics:

I did a report a while back for a major church about how they could be and should be using IT in their mission. Politics took over and they rejected the report…

I suspect our organisation isn’t the worst. When I was thinking about signing up, I sent my CV around to 12 organisations, and eventually came to the conclusion that ours was the “least worst”. The voluntary sector in general is a strange beast, but having operated in various voluntary organisations, both secular and Christian, I am convinced that the Christian voluntary sector is measurably worse than average.

Why is this? Two things spring to mind. One, we operate on a shoe string: “If you pay peanuts you get monkeys”. But that was also true of the small secular voluntary organisation I last worked for peanuts for, but politics didn’t seem to be a major issue there (apart from when we had to deal with social services, and then the bad politics were all theirs). And two, “All institutions are oppressive”; because by defining a system you are either bending the exceptions to make them appear to fit, or excluding them altogether. But that is also true of any defined system including those of the secular voluntary sector. I promise I don’t have rose tinted spectacles, there are some pretty bad, patronising, plain nasty voluntary organisations out there, particularly in the field of disabilities, but if you’re looking for case studies of poor decision making, you’ll find the Christian sector hard to beat. Why is this?

Would you buy your aspirin from a pharmacy called Pervinox?

We have been married five years to this day, and so far I don’t think we are doing too badly at it. When we were thinking about getting married, a friend of Martin’s gave him this scientific piece of advice;
Ask yourself which would be more likely to jeopardise your happiness; marrying her, or not marrying her.

Might not have been my style, but it seems to have worked out!

We went out for a quiet meal in our favourite bar last night, sans boy. Going out without ones kids is a very strange idea to the culture here, and there were several running around the bar last night, but every so often we reserve the right to act like life-forms from another planet and pay our favourite teenager to babysit.

In between driving up and down the road to Quebracho, and putting power-point presentations together, and parenting a two year old and the other minor interruptions of life, I’ve been boning up on the Reformation. The first thing I learn is that it is complicated, people have devoted their entire lives to the study of the Reformation, there are whole institutes dedicated to it. So my ninety second overview is going to be a sketchy one, but that’s OK because that’s all the occasion requires, so quite a lot of what I have been reading is interesting background but surplus to my requirements. They say the best way to learn is teach.
The best quote I have found so far is this from BBC History:
“The culmination of centuries of Catholic corruption, or a bit of a fluke? The consequence of a European power vacuum, or grand theological debate? So much in history is a bastard child of both long-standing, simmering emotion and the opportunistic seizing of a moment.”

Possibly the best source of easily digestible material neatly organised for the novice information-seeker can be found at Reformation Happens On this site, I found a host of useful topics such as key people, events, and the wide social factors influencing the Reformation, from the printing press to the Black Death.

I believed, along with lots of others I guess, that Martin Luther was the main protagonist, although it is obvious really that Luther didn’t operate in a vacuum, and neither did he come out of one. Arguably, he was the key player, but he had been preceded by a long line of worthy characters, probably pointing back as far as Wycliffe and Hus in the 1300’s. Wycliffe believed that a return to Scripture was called for, and that the Bible should be made widely available, and thus translated the Latin Vulgate into English. However, Luther in the 1500’s had the advantage of being able to disseminate to a much wider audience through the printing press, so although the nailing of the 95 Theses to the door is the event that captures our imagination, it was probably his published pamphlets that had the greatest effect.

Anyway, most of this is outside the scope of our ninety seconds, so what exactly do we need to include? I think I’m trying to put across the notion that we share the same roots, that the Protestant church came out of the Catholic church, at least partly as a result of Luther’s excommunication from the Catholic church in 1521. I think I also need to show that there might have been valid reasons for at least some of the criticism levelled at the Catholic church at the time. Actually, I think the laity in Argentina might spot some interesting modern day parallels with the suggestion that the Medieval Catholic Church had become rather too deeply involved in politics (of Western Europe) resulting in scandal, intrigue, political manipulations, leading to the church’s increasing power and wealth, and culminating in moral and spiritual bankruptcy in the eyes of the people.

Today I heard my two year old count from one to ten in English, and then coolly follow it up with uno to diez in Spanish. When did he learn to do that that I hadn’t noticed?
His normal favourite phrases at the moment are “naughty daddy”, which is the standard reaction to having his nappy changed, being put in his bed, not being allowed to watch another Thomas the Tank film; and “pash a tone” (splash a stone) which is one of his favourite pastimes anywhere where water and stones might potentially be found in the same vicinity. I did have to get a bit firm on the subject of bombarding the goldfish in the garden centre the other day.

The first Christmas after Martin and I were married, we went to see the Reduced Shakespeare Company perform the Abridged Bible in ninety minutes, which was both clever and funny.
My latest challenge in the style of the RSC is to write and “perform” the abridged Reformation for Beginners in ninety seconds, which doesn’t have to be clever or funny, but it might help.

Today brought me a little revelation when I realised that the average Catholic here has absolutely no idea who the Protestant church are or what we believe. I mean even less idea than the average Protestant… really absolutely no idea at all.

I was at a regional training day for Scout leaders. In Scouts in Argentina a lot of the kids are as “secular” as anywhere, but historically Scouts have been linked to the Catholic church, so to this day a lot of the leaders are believing and active Catholics. This was the second training day I have been at, and on the previous occasion I didn’t have a uniform, so I could have just been passing through on a visit. Now I have a full uniform complete with the appropriate badges to suggest that I have made my home in a particular Scout troop in San Francisco. So I might be perceived to be “one of us”. On the other hand, when it comes to the opening and closing ceremonies, I don’t join in the reciting of various prayers, not because I’m particularly against most of them, but because they’re not the prayers I have grown up with and I don’t know the words. I also don’t cross myself, not because I have anything against those who do, but it’s just not part of my expression of worship, so I’m “like us but different”, and people are starting to get brave enough to express their curiosity.

Expressing their curiosity involves casual questions over lunch such as “What does your church believe?” “Do you have saints?” and most impressively “Do Protestants believe in Jesus?” Which is what made me realise that the overwhelming majority of Catholics here have absolutely no idea at all what the Protestant church looks like; we literally could be an obscure branch of moon worshipping Buddhist-Muslims. And of course there is a good reason for this; South America was largely invaded pre-reformation, and the Spanish weren’t exactly renowned for being pro- the reformation when it happened, so it is only in the last fifty years or so that the Protestant churches have really arrived here at all, and they are still a tiny minority without any great impact on the wider society. So, while most Protestant/Evangelical Christians in Argentina have experience of the Catholic church at the very least through folk beliefs, civic ceremonies and religious education at school, the reverse is just not the case. And the teaching by the one church on the subject of the other is often at best, subjective. Many evangelical churches teach that the Catholic church is “of the devil”, while the Catholics if they feel the need to mention Protestantism at all, would probably leave it at “sect; best avoided.”

So today having given a potted summary of my beliefs regarding virgins and saints, and having listed some of the bedrocks that we have in common, namely “Jesus saves” and “The Bible is the word of God” (whatever that means… open for discussion another time…), I decided that one thing that might be helpful to be able to do is an overview of the reformation; when, why, who and its legacy; preferably in no more than ninety seconds.

My trusty old rucksack has just come back from being fixed yet again. This is one of the things that we really like about Argentina; there is a whole industry of people dedicated to fixing stuff that in other societies would probably have been long ago binned. In some ways we have better carbon footprints just by virtue of living here. The challenge will be to harness and maintain some of that advantage as Argentina and Argentineans become richer, and they are. What happens today as a matter of necessity will be abandoned tomorrow as a matter of choice unless the economic growth is accompanied by a corresponding increase in education, awareness and commitment.

While we are on the subjects of green things and domestic minutiae;

Our orange tree is busily re-growing its foliage after being literally stripped to bare branches by our huge and marauding ants. At the moment it rather resembles a Mohican, but at least it’s still alive and making a valiant come-back, hopefully still in time to have some oranges next season.

Still on killer ants, I’ve moved my strawberry plants to a thus far ant free zone after the second time of having them razed to the ground. So far the ants don’t seem to have found them, long may that continue. I’m all for organic gardening, but there are limits to my compassion. War may be declared.

Last year I planted tomatoes, which spent their entire lives on the brink of dying, required stupid amounts of care and attention, and in the end produced a paltry two tomatoes for all my loving labours. So this year I put in peppers instead. This caused mutiny in the TU (tomatoes’ union; this is Argentina, everything has a union) and they’ve decided to seed themselves in the sandpit just to prove a point. I’m hoping that if I continue to ignore them, they might just go on to become healthy fruit-producing plants, can’t do any worse than last year anyway.