*The Two Gretels
by Robin Morgan
The two Gretels were exploring the forest.
Hansel was home,
sending up flares.
Sometimes one Gretel got afraid.
She said to the other Gretel,
“I think I’m afraid.”
“Of course we are,” Gretel replied.
Sometimes the other Gretel whispered,
with a shiver,
“You think we should turn back?”
To which her sister Gretel answered,
“We can’t. We forgot the breadcrumbs.”
So, they went forward
because
they simply couldn’t imagine the way back.
I discovered the poem by Robin Morgan at a coffee shop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where I live and serve as an ELCA missionary. I was sitting with a good friend, flipping through Cries of the Spirit, a book of poetry. When I came across the “The Two Gretels,” I almost fell out of my chair.
“This is it,” I said to my friend. “This is what it’s like to go home.”
There's no place like home?
The notion of returning home from international mission service is a paradox. Although missionaries may return to the same physical locations from which they left, they have been so changed by their experiences that they can’t help but see everything through new eyes. This phenomenon is compounded by friends and family who often operate like Hansel by “sending up flares,” expecting them to find their way back to the very same place from which they set out. Often times, neither the returning missionary nor their friends or family recognize that this place no longer exists. This disconnect between Hansel and Gretel, between missionaries and the communities that sent them, makes any attempt to return home precarious, at best.
Gretel moves to a castle
My name is Andrea, and in returning from Global Mission service I became one of the two Gretels. My first returning experience came at age 15 when I spent a week of service in Juarez, Mexico. I helped build a one-room house for a family of five. The day after I got back to Minnesota, my own family of five moved into a much larger house than the one where I grew up. For the first time, I had my own bedroom and it had more square footage than the house we had just finished building in Juarez. My new home felt like an extravagant castle. I cried myself to sleep out of frustration and guilt. I didn’t know how to talk to my parents about my feelings without seeming ungrateful.
Gretel meets Super Target
Several years later I returned again, this time from a summer with Youth Encounter, in Tanzania. Once home, I accompanied my mom on errands to a Super Target store, an expanded version of the typical store chain. When we were ready to pay, I noticed that only two of the 32 registers were open. I had been back for several months already, but my mind began reeling. I was trying to calculate how much one register must cost, and how many bags of rice that would purchase, when my field of vision started going dark. I handed my purchases to my mom, stumbled out of the store, and promptly threw up in the garbage can.
Returning from Global Mission service is to become one of the two Gretels—it is to find yourself without breadcrumbs, without a map, without a GPS system for finding your way back to the place you call home. It is to find yourself in the midst of a reverse culture shock, which hits without warning in the unlikeliest of times and places. It leads you to wonder if you ever really knew your dearest friends. It makes you feel lost in your own community.
Gretel returns to herself
But returning from Global Mission service is also to become the other one of the two Gretels—it is to return home by going forward, because you simply can’t imagine the way back. It is to understand your own culture in new ways, through different lenses. It is to discern more fully who you are as a child of God, and to discover new ways of living faithfully and authentically in the world. It is to re-discover kindred spirits who were there all along.
I’m relieved to say that every time I’m faced with the paradox of returning home from an intense, inter-cultural experience, it gets a little easier. I don’t expect home to be the same, and my friends and family have stopped sending up flares. I no longer expect to return unchanged, and my friends and family no longer expect to remain unchanged themselves.
And this, perhaps, is the key: just as reverse culture shock affects the returning missionary and everyone around them, so does Global Mission service itself. The Holy Spirit blows in and through these experiences and relationships, changing everyone involved, but only if we let her in; only if we expect to be changed.
As the community of God’s people, we can’t go looking for breadcrumbs, and we can’t keep sending up flares. All we can do is go forward, because we simply can’t imagine the way back.
* Copyright 1974 by Robin Morgan in her poetry collection Lady of the Beasts (Random House).
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