Co-Learning alongside Young Adults by Colin Grangaard

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

– Rainer Marie Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet

I remember turning 30 in my first call at Trinity Lutheran Church in Moorhead, MN. It was right about that time that I felt suddenly and poignantly the reality that my call to young adult ministry was less and less a call to serve among my peer group. And, even though it was a bit of a jolt to me, it felt like I was realizing something that everyone else already knew.

These days, years later, my call draw me into close community with young adults through Young Adults in Global Mission (YAGM). My family and I live here in Jerusalem alongside seven YAGM and we’re particularly placed in this complicated and diverse context among the Palestinian Lutherans of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL).

As country coordinators (Jeni and I share this role) here in Jerusalem, my wife and I have a very weird job in a very weird place. At the beginning of the year, the YAGMs are usually pretty confused about what we’re doing here, too. Are we bosses? Parent figures? Teachers? Colleagues? The local human resources office?

The language of the ELCJHL schools is Arabic, but the administration speaks excellent English and is very familiar with the work of the YAGM. As we’ve increased our own language capacity, it has been fun to realize that the ways our role is explained in Arabic to teachers and students. I am al modeer min al mutatawa’een Amreeki, the ‘boss’ of the American volunteers. While I’m pretty comfortable with description provided by our companions where students and teachers are concerned, the images that are conjured by language of ‘boss’ or ‘manager’ hardly reflect the relationships we’re hoping to cultivate with the YAGM themselves.

“Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue,” advises Rilke. I love the sense of location, the posture and the approach of Rilke’s imagery.

On the road to school every morning we pass by political, historical and archaeological landmarks. A myriad of narratives dot the landscape of the busyness of daily life here. Some are as glaring as the 10 meter high concrete separation wall or Rachel’s Tomb behind it undergoing a change in ownership. Across the intersection just past the stoplight lies an archeological treasure more than a thousand years old hidden under a couple inches of sand just waiting to be properly preserved.

In the Jerusalem/West Bank iteration of YAGM, we all serve within a 6-mile radius. We see each other often. We try to stay pretty hands off… or at least try not to meddle. The year, the challenges, the experience itself does its own work on each of the volunteers – and us.

Still we gather to share our discoveries, our milestones and the newest confounding experiences. We gather for conversations with volunteers and host families to translate daily life into healthy relationships. We meet at schools with YAGM and teachers to hear about the needs and the gifts in the room and wonder together what might be possible. We gather to learn and suspend judgement in favor of hearing and living alongside the rich, though sometimes conflicting, glimpses of the yet unsettled histories and the living and changing cultures. We gather to wonder how our witness of this deep longing for a just peace in the Holy Land might lead us further into “questions … like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue”.

Community provides a great space to learn and reflect together. Our YAGM cohort in Jerusalem/West Bank coalesces with different dynamics and themes each year. Our program calendar is structured around continuing education and reflection events. We strive to invite encounters with the complexity of this place and to convene a discussion space where we can name the questions we encounter.

These days, with their orientation behind us, I’m looking forward to our first quarterly retreat. The time goes so quickly, but in just a month it will be time to mark the passing of the first quarter of the YAGM year together in the Galilee. We are trying to translate the experience here through questions like: What are we doing here? What relationships have begun to emerge? What is happening in the landscape around us? What happened (here) in the Bible? What is God up to?

Isn’t it crazy that this will be the fourth such gathering we’ve led? Isn’t it crazy that some answers have not become any more simple than after our first three months?

We use different resources to guide our conversations. During the first retreat, we use a resource by Rev Dr Mitri Raheb to organize our questions about the Bible and God’s work in this land. Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible Through Palestinian Eyes gives us a shared vocabulary to talk about these locations where we encounter the backdrop of Jesus’ life and ministry. Rev Mitri’s resource provides us with language and a broader context to talk about the questions that have emerged from months of life and work alongside our ELCJHL companions who experience the confluence of Faith and Empire each and every day.

Here in Jerusalem, our setting provides a great deal of help to shift the posture of our relationships towards co-learning. Though there are so many pressures for quick responses and snap decisions, here as in so many other places, the questions often feel vast and the answers, unsatisfying and oversimplified. We hear daily reminders of how very much of the story still stretches out before us. And, along with our YAGM cohort, we are reminded of the depth of the story we have yet to live and learn.

Pastor Colin Grangaard has begun his fourth year as a YAGM Country Co-Coordinator in Jerusalem and the West Bank. He is excited this year to have begun a new research project through the University of Birmingham’s Religion and Society department. Jerusalem has been a welcoming and complicated place to co-parent Josie and Amos with his wife Jeni while walking alongside young adults in ministry.