Lara Glass, MDiv '17 and a student program fellow at Memorial Church, delivered the following remarks at Morning Prayers in Harvard's Memorial Church on March 2, 2020.
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I begin today with a quote by Arundhati Roy, Indian writer and political activist, from her 2002 lecture entitled, "Come September." In it, she poignantly connected horrors of U.S. foreign policy, destructive powers of large corporations, and the dangers of nationalism. This passage fell toward the end of her post-lecture conversation with Howard Zinn.
“There are other worlds, other kinds of dreams, dreams in which failure is feasible, honorable, sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors whom I know and love, who are more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less successful in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled. The only dream worth having, is the dream that you will live while you are alive and die only when you are dead…To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
Almost exactly 8 years ago in my last semester of college, I learned that I had been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in rural Nepal. I had only applied for two things my senior year, with a back-up plan of moving to Chicago where my sister lived and getting whatever job I could find. Having been rejected from Teach for America, which had been my first choice of a next step, I thought I didn’t really have a chance of receiving the Fulbright. I had applied because I knew I was interested in teaching, and was full of romantic notions of an international adventure.
Fulbright is a vestige of the Cold War Era, like the Peace Corps, designed to send young, bright eyed and bushy tailed Americans to remote places in the world to do aid work, so as to create affinity for the U.S. Participating in this program placed me squarely, if unintentionally, within dehumanizing neo-colonial projects. These were not things I had much, if any grasp on before I left for Nepal. They are still phenomena that I wrestle with and try to make sense of.
I spent a year living in a small community outside of Kathmandu, assisting Nepali teachers at a K-7 government school. I lived with a young Nepali couple and their 15-month-old son. I slowly learned Nepali language, and adjusted to living with limited electricity and no heat or hot water. I learned that I loved working with students, and how to care for a baby. I learned how to make roti and that milk straight from a cow tastes indescribably delicious.
I learned that while the extraordinary natural beauty of Nepal attracts a robust tourist industry which boosts Nepal’s struggling economy, it also leaves immense destruction in its wake. I learned that while many in Nepal live in remote locations which can make accessing health care incredibly difficult, some of these communities have also managed to harness the natural forces of sun, wind, and water around them to have electricity 100 percent of the time. This is notable in a country with widespread regularly scheduled power outages. I learned that while there are effective, integrity-affirming aid programs functioning in Nepal, there are also aid organizations that exploit Nepali communities for their own gain.
When I returned home from Nepal I never quite knew how to answer when people would ask how it was. How do I describe my gratitude to the community I lived and worked in, without romanticizing it? How do I express the complexity of my time there without negating the simple beauty and joy I experienced as well? Every time I try I end up complicating the simple and simplifying the complicated, which feels like a disservice to all. But as I wrote this to share with you today, it occured to me that perhaps the only honest way to talk about this experience is to resist the urge to provide a neat package of lessons tied up with a bow.
So instead, I will close by repeating the words of Arundhati Roy that I began with:
The only dream worth having is the dream that you will live while you are alive and die only when you are dead…To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
May we each have the courage today to wrestle with our own paradoxes of experience, so that we may better honor the complexity of life and love one another.