{"id":1999,"date":"2015-07-27T08:21:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T13:21:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/?p=1999"},"modified":"2015-07-27T08:21:50","modified_gmt":"2015-07-27T13:21:50","slug":"warren-thomas-holmes-70","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/2015\/07\/warren-thomas-holmes-70\/","title":{"rendered":"Warren “Thomas” Holmes \u201970"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/h2>\n

\"70_WarrenHolmes_N\"<\/a>Warren \u201cThomas\u201d Holmes has recently published a memoir, titled Forty Days Alone in Thailand: Jesus, the Buddha, Thai Culture, and Myself<\/em>. Thomas writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cA few years ago, I wrote a column for the local newspaper with the headline \u201cIf You\u2019re Comfortable, It\u2019s Not Multicultural\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 The piece grew out of my 25 years of experience as the pastor of a congregation near Chicago, which was 25% African American, 10% Hispanic, and 65% Caucasian.\u00a0 On top of that, we shared our building with a partner congregation, the Thai Community Church.<\/p>\n

I would explain the challenge of my job by saying, \u2018In a homogeneous congregation or community, members identify a problem and then debate the solution.\u00a0 In a multicultural situation, stake holders begin by debating the nature of the problem.\u2019\u00a0 That\u2019s because different cultures view what they see through different interpretive lenses.\u00a0 Sometimes the multicultural encounters result in unexpected gifts of grace and sometimes in discouraging frustration.<\/p>\n

In 2009, I realized that I had 40 days of unscheduled time in Thailand, between the seventh mission trip I had helped lead in the \u201cLand of Smiles\u201d and an international conference in Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.\u00a0 I was at a point in my life where I felt the need to test my two primary relationships: with God and with myself.<\/p>\n

Thai culture in general and Buddhism in particular, to me, would provide what Richard Rohr refers to as \u2018a wall to butt up against . . . a worthy opponent against which we test our mettle.\u2019\u00a0 \u2018Wholeness and holiness,\u2019 he declared, \u2018will always stretch us beyond our small comfort zone.\u2019\u00a0 The Gospel of Matthew states that it was the Spirit that led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by the devil.\u00a0 Thai culture and Buddhism certainly aren\u2019t the devil incarnate.\u00a0 It was the testing part of the story which was pushing me.<\/p>\n

I grabbed the opportunity to test these two relationships by traveling around Thailand alone\u2014with my limited Thai vocabulary and my neurological disorder \u2013 to plunge into the deep end of the cultural pool, if you will, and see if I would sink or swim.\u00a0 Before leaving, I joked with my friends and family that my only traveling companions would be myself and God, and I didn\u2019t know if I would get along with either one.<\/p>\n

I wrote Forty Days Alone in Thailand<\/em> partly as a spiritual travel memoir, but partly as a way of encouraging readers to risk moving out of their cultural comfort zones as a way of meeting themselves again as if for the first time. Bill Bishop, in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart<\/em>, writes, \u2018As Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life, pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don\u2019t know, can\u2019t understand, and can barely conceive of \u2018those people\u2019 who live just a few miles away.\u2019<\/p>\n

I hope and pray that the vicarious trip through Thailand this memoir provides will expose readers to the values, customs, and ways of life of one segment of \u2018those people\u2019, which will help them see themselves, their faith, and their culture in new ways.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warren \u201cThomas\u201d Holmes has recently published a memoir, titled Forty Days Alone in Thailand: Jesus, the Buddha, Thai Culture, and Myself. Thomas writes: \u201cA few years ago, I wrote a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[64],"class_list":["post-1999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-59","tag-news"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}