Spirit in Action
The Original Liberation Theology Story - YESHU
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we have a guest who combines lots of real-world experience with some likewise valuable imaginative storytelling. Charles David Claymeyer started his service in Latin America with the stint in the Peace Corps, serving in Peru when he was fresh out of college, but then going on to become an applied sociologist doing international development work all around Latin America. He's also been a writer, largely of nonfiction, but his latest work is Yeshu, a novel for the open-hearted. Using both imagination and creativity and drawing on a wide array of clues and documents, Chuck Claymeyer imagines the story of Jesus in a beautiful form, which is less myth and closer to our own human experience, and which therefore may be more inspirational to those who want to connect to a transformative human. Charles David Claymeyer joins us by phone from his home in Virginia. Chuck, thank you so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for having me. I'm trying to figure out, because you have such a long history of working in Latin America, how much time have you actually spent during those 50 years or nearly 50 years in the Northern Hemisphere? I've lived here most of the time, now had I think six times when I've lived in Latin America that would be in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Guatemala. Much of the time when I was working for an organization called the Inter-American Foundation, I was living in Arlington, Virginia and made approximately 100 trips to Latin America two to three weeks at a time. This was partly for philosophical reasons on the part of the Inter-American Foundation, which did not want to have a human presence right next to projects that were going on that might cramp people's style and just allow them to do their work. So we were based all of us in Arlington, Virginia and then would travel to the countries we were working in. So I would say out of those 45 or 50 years, I've lived seven or eight years that time in Latin America, and there's the time I've been traveling there. You know, I of course want to talk to you about your new book, "Yeshu." But I first want to wander through much of your life, which I suppose contributes so importantly to the book. You majored in creative writing, or at least in the creative writing department of Stanford, and then I think right after graduation, maybe you headed in the Peace Corps as a volunteer in Peru. I was, by the way, also a Peace Corps volunteer. For me, it was in West Africa. Explain for me a little bit how creative writing prepared you to go in the Peace Corps. Okay. Yes, at Stanford, the creative writing department was part of the English department, and Wallace Stegner, a famous Western writer and environmentalist, was the head of that program. So that was my major. It was my life dream to be a writer, which I think I've achieved, at least on the side. But at the same time at Stanford, I was taking lots of coursework in the social sciences, particularly in sociology. So before I left for the Peace Corps, I actually applied to graduate schools in sociology and was admitted to several of them, including University of Wisconsin, where I ended up after the Peace Corps. This was always in my mind to do some sort of development work, somehow use the social sciences to help people. I guess, you know, had I been told at Stanford you're going to write the next great American novel, I might have decided not to go in the Peace Corps of it, since no one told me that, and I knew very well that most American writers have to have another job, particularly writers who write what they want to write. They have to have some other source of income and satisfaction. So I was on this parallel social science career, then went into the Peace Corps, which was, for me, not only a way to kind of turn the tables and try to be someone who was giving two people rather than just receiving as a student, but it was also a way to get some life experience in order to become a better writer. I'd pretty much been my whole life in schools, so this was a great adventure as well as being an opportunity to try to do some good. I was in Africa from '77 to '79, I think the Peace Corps started in '61. Where did your Peace Corps service fit in that timeline? Yeah, I went in in 1966 and came out in '68, which is common as you know, to go in for two years. Were you going in so you didn't get drafted? That was, I would say, one of many considerations. I considered myself, at that time, to be a conscientious objector. I had not yet attended a formal Quaker meeting by the time I graduated from Stanford, but I had been on Quaker work projects, so I knew Quakers, but on my own was also realizing that I had a moral conscientious objection to war. The advice that I got at the time from people who were well-versed in the draft was that my draft board was in a very conservative area, and if I had not been born a Quaker or, you know, brethren or Amish Menonite, the three Peace churches, that it would be very unwise for me to poke a stick into the lion's mouth by attempting to be classified as a conscientious objector. The experience then was that in conservative draft boards, the best way of getting drafted was to write a letter to your draft board and say, "I'm a conscientious objector, either refused to go to war or I'm morally opposed to war." That was fairly certain to get the process rolling to draft you. What I'm trying to say is that it was in my mind, but the main reason I went into the Peace Corps was the positive attraction of the organization. This was the Kennedy years. There was this ethos about young Americans, you know, being able to do something significant in the world, and I wanted to be part of that. It was also the era of the ugly American, right? I mean, that's an aspect of how America looked to the rest of the world that maybe you were trying to counterbalance. I don't know. Absolutely. I read the book, "The Ugly American," and when I was, I remember getting to Peace Corps training and people would use that term fairly frequently. I guess I had higher hopes for America. And being from the heartland, I was born and grew up in southern Indiana, Ohio Valley. I knew that the average American was not ugly and was really open to people from other cultures and other countries. And when we traveled, you know, we were sensitive and appreciative of other cultures. So I knew there was something wrong there, not that the book was mistaken, but that it was not necessary for our country to have this reputation, and that if we did the right kind of work, we could countermand it. Well, I'm aware that by all the work that you've done for nearly 50 years in Latin America, that you've helped transform the opinion a lot of people would have of the U.S. Of course, we're working up to your book, "Yeshu," a novel for the open-hearted. But before we get there, I still need to understand how you get from being creative writing Peace Corps to writing a book like "Yeshu." And so one of the components of that has to be, what was your religious upbringing? You said you're flirting with Quaker ideas by the time you're in college or going off the Peace Corps. What were you raised religiously? I was what is now United Church of Christ. It started out as evangelical and reformed, and then that church merged with another church and became UCC, which is fairly, I always considered to be fairly mainline Protestant. It was by no means a fundamentalist church, but I did go through that stage that many college students go through, kind of distancing myself from formal religion. I was a bit at sea, I think, not knowing where I was headed. I do remember spending a lot of time at the very center of the Stanford campus is the Memorial Church, which is, I think it's the Romanesque architecture, a beautiful church. Inside, there are all these religious inscriptions chiseled into the walls. So I remember going in there quite often, and just reading the inscriptions and sitting and meditating. So I guess in a way, now that I think about it, I was having my own little Quaker meetings in there, most of it's silent. And then I would walk over and read an inscription, which you could see as, you know, a message that come to me from some of the source, and then I would meditate on that for a while. So, you know, I clearly was not rejecting spirituality. At the same time, I had some experiences with, I guess, guest speakers at Stanford, Alan Watts. In fact, I was the organizer of a visit week-long visit by Alan Watts to Stanford. He was a Protestant minister who got very interested in Eastern religion, particularly Buddhism. So I became quite interested in Buddhist spirituality and have been what I would consider a student of Buddhist spirituality ever since college. Now I'm a student of Tikhnathan at this point, but I never considered becoming Buddhist, but I think maybe for cultural reasons, it felt for a field. And in fact, Tikhnathan is the first person to say, "Come to us, learn what you can, take it back to your religious tradition, and enrich it, and enrich yourself." So you've written this book Yeshu, which deals with this person, Jesus, and you didn't write one on the Buddha, evidently. Did your time in the Peace Corps and in Peru and following years, did that have anything to do with your grappling with this Jesus figure? It did, and I have to say that the figure of Jesus, the teachings and the life example were always a very powerful influence on me, even as a child. And I remember very clearly, behind the altar of my home church, which is the Bethel United Church of Christ, there's a monumental, wooden, full-body carving of Jesus. But the interesting thing is that Jesus is standing on a small platform behind him, his outstretched arms, and his head is the cross. But he's not touching the cross. He's certainly not nailed to the cross. He seems to be preaching the Sermon on the Mount. So that image, that metaphor, has been very powerful for me. So I arrived in the Peace Corps having really not been a churchgoer, except for visits home to my parents, not having been a churchgoer for four years. And I met all these, very dedicated, some of them fairly radical, in the good sense of the word, priests. And these were all, they were from St. James Apostle Santiago, a post-doc, which, based in Boston, Cardinal Cushing was their leader. And they were from Ireland, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, all English-speaking priests who had chosen to go into the missions, but not to convert people, but to do good works. And I was very influenced by them, became close friends with many of them, worked on some projects with some of them, knew one who became, he joined an order called Armanitos de Jesus, Little Brothers of Jesus. And these were sort of worker priests, very much imbibed in the liberation theology. And I visited him once in Lima, and they lived in slums, and they took jobs. He worked in a factory, and they didn't wear priestly garb. But they had a house together, the several of them, in the middle of a bariada in Spanish, many people would call a slum, it's not a very nice term, but in any case, they would live right there in the middle of everyone. And they would have an open door, which was a meditation room, and every day, after work, they meditated, and anyone could walk in off the street. And they just lived their lives, sort of buried in the heart of the masses. So experiences like that were very powerful for me. I traveled with some of the priests, I would go to villages with them, they would help me with rides or whatever, and I would help them in any way I could. And I would sit in the masses, some of them in Quechua, which was also a powerful experience for me to hear the Quechua being the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, still spoken by no one knows, maybe 20 million people throughout the Andean countries. All of them of indigenous origin. And I learned some Quechua. Practicing Christianity, this taking Jesus's teachings and life example into the world made quite an impression on me. So after you finished your Peace Corps stint, 66 to 68, you went to University of Wisconsin, Madison got a degree in sociology, and then you got a PhD in international development. What were you doing in the Peace Corps that led you this way? The program I was on was called Rural Community Development. We were essentially just dropped into communities, not by helicopter, but by Land Rover. And I was alone in this small town, maybe 5,000 people, but I knew that a lot of my work should be in the surrounding villages, which might be 200 people, Quechua speaking Indians. So I learned quickly, and many Peace Corps volunteers learned this, that the true experts were the poor people. They were the ones that had been living with these problems all their lives, and their parents and grandparents had been living with the problems. They were smart people, highly motivated to make their lives better and their children's lives better, creative. I mean, no one who produces the textiles and architecture that Amerindian peoples of the Andes have produced, no one like that could not also be creative in other ways. So many of us fresh out of college, and without technical degrees, the Peace Corps is more technical today. People come out with MBAs, or maybe engineering degrees, or whatever, or teaching degrees, and they take jobs of that nature in foreign countries, but we were in the age of the VA generalist. It's a basic for your usually liberal arts college degree. So, you know, we didn't know agriculture, we weren't health workers, but what we did have was a lot of enthusiasm. We had good language training, and good cultural training, and the right point of view, and somehow I guess enough modesty, maybe by force, to realize if I don't insert myself into the daily life and the desires and the projects of these people, I'm not going to get very far. If I sit down and, you know, design something on a piece of paper, or bring some project in that I learned about Peace Corps training, and try to impose it, I'm going to get nowhere. So I quickly realize, I'm going to look around, not only the Catholic priests, but the village leaders, talk to people, find out what they're doing, and ask if I can help. So I got involved in youth clubs, in health education, in a little bit of English teaching, but more just, this was a teacher training college, but that was more to get to know teachers and what their problems and issues were. I got involved in school building, but once again, I didn't know how to build a school, but what I did know how to do, and what it's amazing, what virtually all Americans know how to do, is to be part of groups that are getting jobs done. I've been a Boy Scout, I've been in Little League, I've been involved in lots of different organizations in high school and college, volunteer, et cetera. And it's just to me, we don't realize how many skills we learn that people in poor countries have not had that opportunity to learn because there aren't so many organizations, and they haven't been taught Robert's Rules of Order, and they haven't been in leadership positions to have these learning experiences. So that's what I saw my work to do with 4-H clubs with the children, is just give them the chance to run their own affairs. And in the villages where schools were built, in both cases, the village leaders came to me and said, you know, we understand that the Peace Corps will help people build schools. And in both these cases, they had already started building the school, but they got the foundation done and had built some Adobe walls, and they had virtually no capital for roofs, windows, doors, floor, blackboard, et cetera. And so that's where the Peace Corps had this program called School to School, it was kind of a clearinghouse where schools in the United States would raise money and then let the clearinghouse know, and then the clearinghouse would be receiving proposals from Peace Corps volunteers. And the volunteer in the school would be matched, and then the money would come to the volunteer, usually $1,000 to $2,000. We built an entire school with that kind of money. And then the volunteer would make sure that the school kids wrote letters and do pictures and send them back, and then the school in America would send letters back. So it was a great people-to-people event, but it was also a time when an opportunity for the volunteer to say to the village leaders, all right, I have the capital. You tell me what you need to do next. I'll show up on the highway. Actually, I would go to the mayor's office and ask for a garbage truck on a weekend at a driver, and we would take cement out or windows or doors or whatever. And then the villagers would come down with sometimes like 100 horses and mules to carry this stuff back up the mountainside, and I would go up with them, but they were running the entire show. Like I say, I didn't even know how to make cement. Half of them did, because to earn cash, for example, to send their kids to school, they would have to go into the cities and get just manual labor jobs on construction sites. So they had all these skills, bricklaying, metalwork, carpentry. I'm not saying everybody had them all, but put a village together, and all of the building skills were there, and all of the knowledge. Of course, they had built their own villages, and they'd built their own roads down to the main roads. So it was a matter of mine being a catalyst to get all of these skills and materials organized and in the same place, so they could build their school, and when it was all over, they organized the entire project to get the school built over a number of months. And so in the future, if anyone walked into that village or arrived, let's say a school official arrived by Jeep and say, "Hey, nice school. Who built this?" They could look them back in the eye and say, "I'm getting a little choked up here," and say, "We built it. This is our school. It was built with our hands." And that was a huge thing for them in it, and it gave them the confidence and the organizing skills then to take on new projects in the future. So a simple little thing, like a couple thousand dollars for materials, and a Peace Corps volunteer catalyst went a long way to enable a village to make a huge step forward. And isn't it amazing, and I mean, I found this during my Peace Corps experience, isn't it completely amazing that in your early 20s, when you're completely at the bottom of the totem pole here in the United States, you go there, and all of a sudden you're someone in that village, and there are many people, much more knowledgeable, very capable, steeped in tradition and knowledge and all this, and you go there, and they look to you and say, "Okay, so how can we do this?" And it's both daunting and empowering, I think. Right. And, you know, as a volunteer, you learn the right questions to ask to kind of get them thinking. But also, you know, I had experience later when I was a representative for the Inter-American Foundation, doing the same kind of work, but now with a lot more capital behind me. And we had this philosophy in the Inter-American Foundation, they know how, sort of, you know, we're not the holders of all know-how, and we're importing it into these developing nations. You know, they have a tremendous amount of knowledge themselves. In one case, in several cases, actually, people would ask me, "So, how do you think we should do this?" And then I would kind of turn it back to them and say, "Well, you know, I really think that you have the knowledge and the skills, and how would you do this?" And I remember a couple times being stopped by them and say, "Wait a minute, Senor, you have traveled all over Latin America. You have met with all these different groups. You have vast knowledge yourself and the elements to judge what we're doing compared to what other people have done. You know, now give us some of your know-how and some of your knowledge because, you know, that'll help us make our own decisions." So I said, "Fair enough," and then I would, you know, give them my assessment. Or you give them a piece of it and let them fill in what's locally workable. Right. So you finished your Peace Corps experience in 1968. You had to Madison, you get your degree. I've seen it written a couple different ways on the web that you are an applied sociologist, a culture and development sociologist. What the heck is that? Good question. In fact, someone at the Smithsonian named me that and I said, "That's a pretty accurate description." You know, the social sciences, like medicine and a lot of other fields, you know, they're all cut up into these boxes. So you have anthropology, you have psychology, you have sociology, you have political science. And they all act like they're these discrete, you know, almost like nations. The truth is it's all mixed together, particularly the best social science has to be mixed together. You know, you can't just study a small group out of context as if that group has no culture, no political base, you know, et cetera. So I found the more I worked, particularly, you know, in these cross-cultural settings, that if I didn't have a deep understanding of the cultural context, I was not going to get very far with my development of sociology. So I actually sought training. In graduate school, I went into an interdisciplinary program which combined sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences, including linguistics, which I'm not sure they would consider this as a social scientist, but certainly social linguistics. Because I realized that the problems I was going to be dealing with, you know, really needed this kind of interdisciplinary approach. At the same time I was in a special degree program, a brand new degree program, University of Wisconsin, called PhD in Development Studies. And two-thirds of the students were from the developing world. So not only did I have the Peace Corps experience behind me, but I had these fellow students, all of whom had different cultural backgrounds, language backgrounds, and, you know, experiences. So it was clear to all of us that we needed to be looking at culture at all times. I just kept doing this kind of work. And then when I got particularly in the Inter-American Foundation, when I was working in Ecuador, the nonprofits that I worked with, the non-governmental organizations, had personnel who were deeply steeped in the intercultural work. Almost all of them put more than one language, including often the local indigenous language. And they taught me a lot of lessons, just like the Peruvian indigenous villagers that taught me lessons about culture. So it became more and more clear to me. I'm not just a sociologist. I'm a culture and development sociologist. And it makes all the difference. One of the things I noticed about you, Chuck, is that you seem to be kind of passionate about the natural world, about the outdoors. And looking into your history, I found that you went to Camp Carson, which I think is the YMCA, Camp Princeton, Indiana. You were a camper in 1950, and you became staff in 1962. You've got a cabin up by the Boundary Waters canoe area, that immense wilderness area on the northern end of Minnesota. You must have some kind of special connection to that. And you've done some writing about it too, the natural world. Absolutely. As I was writing Yeshu, there was something else going on in my life in that I always thought, I guess, when I was younger, that I really have two parallel religions. One is Christianity, and the other I didn't have a set name for, but it's sort of love for nature, deep belief in the sacredness of all living things. This went along like that until I got to Washington, DC, and began attending Friends Meeting of Washington. And I met some people who had started something called the Friends Wilderness Meditation Center, located out near Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, on 1500 acres of wilderness, the top of which was the Appalachian Trail, and the bottom border, which was the Shenandoah River. This organization started in the 1970s. The main goal was not only to preserve this piece of wilderness, but to enable people to connect nature with the spirit, to sort of marry their spiritual/religious background with an environmental ethic. Then later in the 1990s and the 2000s, this started to become really popular, now virtually every religious tradition that I know of has some sort of an environmental thrust to it. Some people call it creation care, they have different terms, but many of these religious traditions seem to be realizing that the natural world is sacred. And I remember writing a chapter of a book in about 1992 in which was about grassroots environmentalism, you know, with grassroots groups. And I remember starting it out by saying, we can have all the laws and all the enforcement that we can imagine, but we are not going to solve this huge problem we have, threat to the natural environment without a spiritual sea change about how people feel they are connected to the natural world. So as I wrote the issue, I realized the kind of underlying message here needs to be, there needs to be one about the sacredness of the natural world. So I did a lot of work on the nature writing, and it was actually John the Baptist called Johannen in the book, all the characters have different names because when you do a retelling, a reframing of any story, one strategy is change the names of the characters or your reader or listener will be so attached to the old name and the old images that you won't succeed in your attempt to reframe or retell. So Johannen is the John the Baptist figure, and he's the one who brings this sacredness in nature message, because, you know, I did a lot of thinking about why did John spend all this time living in the wilderness. Historians think that maybe at the age of 12 or 13 he left home and spent the rest of his life living out out in the desert and the forests and fields. So he's the one who brings the message and, of course, many mystics, many religious figures in history have gone into the wilderness. So it convinced me, you know, there is a wrong message there, and that message belongs in a book about early Christianity. We're speaking today with Charles David Klaymeyer, also known as Chuck Klaymeyer, he's author of a new book, Yeshoo, a novel for the open-hearted, and he's my guest for Spirit in Action, which is an Northern Spirit radio program on the web at NorthernSpiritRadio.org. On that site you can find more than eight and a half years of our programs for free, downloading, and listening. You can find a place to connect with our guests, so you'll find a link to David and his books on NorthernSpiritRadio.org. There's a place to post comments, we love two-way communication, post a comment, let us know what you're thinking, what your reactions are, where we should be headed. There's also a place to make donations, and we depend on your donations, this is full-time work, and your donations are what make it possible. I also want to remind you to support your local community radio station, they're an invaluable, invaluable resource, you get a slice of news and of music that you get nowhere else, so please, with your work and with your money, support your local community radio station. Again, Charles David Claymeyer, Chuck, to everyone, I think, who probably speaks to him, is my guest today for Spirit in Action. The book is Yeshoo, a novel for the open-hearted, and I want to switch gears here, David. Why a novel for the open-hearted? What are the close-hearted people supposed to do? Well, yeah, I guess I've never thought of that. The open-hearted part of the title came from a gift that some friends gave me when they knew I was writing this book. I've been writing the book for a long time, we can talk about that in a little bit. Actually, they had been to the Smithsonian, which I've been very involved with here during my now 35 years in Arlington, Virginia, right across the river from Washington. My friends had been to the Smithsonian, and they found this book called The Open-hearted Reader, and it was about writing fiction for young people. And at the time I had two young children, I was a single parent for 16 years, in fact. I had already begun writing this book, thinking it was written only for my children. Then later became an intergenerational book, but I was fascinated by this title, but that's the perfect way of describing the young and the young at heart. So, rather than calling it Yeshoo, a novel for young people, or Yeshoo, a novel for young people, and people who feel young, it just seemed appropriate to call it Yeshoo, a novel for the open-hearted. And a number of people, when I tell them the title, they focus on that word, they go, "Mm, open-hearted, that's nice." So, that's the history of the subtitle. Might it also be that it's not going to be a particularly fruitful book for those who are close-minded? Right, and I think, yeah, someone particularly who takes a very literal view of the Bible, I hope people like that will read the book, read it knowing that they don't have to agree with it, but that they might benefit from someone else's point of view. But I think many sort of fundamentalist people might object to the openness and the seeker nature of this book. And the fact that you don't emphasize that Jesus died for our sins, and that's the way to a salvation redemption. I mean, you mentioned that in the later chapters, you get toward that. I have to say something, it won't be particularly flattering. The first hundred pages of the book were not the best in my view. They were a little bit too saccharine for me, but as of about page 100, I felt more and more engaged that it was more like nitty-gritty, real. And Jesus, or Yeshu, is still this incredible person, but there's more laughing and crying in a way I could relate to in the last 400 or so pages of the book, and that's where I got captivated. Well, I totally agree with you. I've always thought and felt a little uncertain about the first hundred pages thinking, well, it's introductory, it's very low key, and it is, in a way, it's directed to a younger readership. And part of that is historical in that that was the first part of the book that I wrote, which I began this book in 1984. You're saying you're a slow writer, are you? I'm a deliberate writer, but also, this was a lifelong project. At the same time, I was traveling four times a year to Latin America, and I wrote four non-fiction books in my work, plus a collection of short stories about Latin America. But Yeshu was always there on the side, always part of me. You know, I considered, before publishing it, redoing the whole first section, therefore, four sections of the book, and the first section is 98 pages or something like that. But in the end, I decided to leave that because the narrator is so young at the beginning of the book, he's under ten years of age in those first hundred pages or so. So it seemed appropriate in terms of how his mind might be working. You know, when you're writing a book like this, you make decisions, sometimes you come to a work in the road and you say, well, I can't take both forks, so I'll take one, and the other one will just be there behind me. Given that you've been writing this book since 1984, clearly it's some kind of an obsession with you, a dedication of your life, something in that arena. Why? I would say it was a calling. As I say, I began writing it for my kids, and let me just tell you that story because I think it's very revealing. When they were my older kids, I have now a younger child, 12-year-old, but when my older children were about 12-years-old, 10-12-years-old, we were going to quaker meeting. And as is true in many quaker meetings, the biblical training was not very strong in first-day schools, under school. And I wanted the kids to be, since I had this strong connection to the Jesus story and to Jesus as a teacher and a life example, I wanted my two older kids to learn something about that. So I thought, you know, I'm going to look for a book aimed at young adults and probably fiction that will really turn them on to this Jesus saga because it's a great story. I think it's easily as exciting, if not more exciting, than Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or any of the other books that kids read. But I also wanted a book that did not do what Sunday school literature did to me as a kid, which was to turn me off, push me into daydreaming, make me yawn, or to even make me think, "Ooh, that's just so whatever." I think a lot of that writing is somewhat uninspiring and pushes kids away much more than it draws them in. So I started looking for that book, and I looked and looked, and one day on the aisle of some library or bookstore, it suddenly struck me. I'm not supposed to find this book. I'm supposed to write this book. So I started writing. You know, over time, I actually slowed the writing down in many ways. And I've had readers tell me, either halfway through your book or I'm at the point in your book where I'm slowing it down because I don't want it to end. And I had the same feeling. I didn't want my writing to end. It was total surprise to me. But a lot of people spend their entire lives doing spiritual journaling. In a sense, I realized after the fact that I'd been doing spiritual journaling for 29 years in fiction, which was a total shock to me. I never set out to do that. But at the same time, it was a strong calling for me. There's been a few times in my life when I really felt called to do something and knew that this is one of the reasons why I'm here and I must do this. A little anecdote to maybe illustrate how strong this calling was. You know, when you work overseas, I'm sure you had these experiences in Africa. You're sometimes on airplanes that are pretty rickety, or you're flying in weather that's pretty challenging for the pilot. There are times you get into really rough weather and the plane starts to bounce up and down and the adrenaline flows and you get sometimes a real scare. And in those cases, I had two quick thoughts. My first thought was, I cannot die. I have to take care of Vladimir and Joshua, my two kids. And I cannot die because I haven't finished writing yet. So that just kind of reveals how good this was to me. In the meantime, I was showing pieces of it to people and getting such enthusiastic feedback. I thought, you know, I think there's an audience out there, so I kept at it. Even though we're concentrating on your book Yeshoo Today, Chuck, I want to mention that you've got at least five other books and one of them is a collection of stories. So this whole tradition of storytelling, maybe it starts in the US, but did it also originate in Latin America? What did you learn there? It did. I've been a performing storyteller all my life, starting in college and then developing it more in the Peace Corps. But when I got to Latin America, when I returned to Latin America after the Peace Corps and began working in development projects, I began to learn just really powerful lessons about storytelling. You know, many of these, particularly among the poor people, these are oral cultures, traditions, and they have great skills in telling stories. And, you know, I'm thinking as I'm writing Yeshoo, I'm thinking this man was one of the premier storytellers in world history. I mean, how many people, 2000 years after they have died, people still telling their stories, even things like the Good Samaritan law. This comes from a story that Jesus told two millennia ago. So a lot of my storytelling voice comes from all those years working with especially indigenous people and African diaspora people in Latin America. And many of the projects that I was able to get funding for had to do with people collecting stories, getting them back into schools, getting them printed in bilingual publications, and really using those stories in their development work. And this all had a very powerful impact on me and made my Yeshoo book, a book by a storyteller, about a storyteller, telling the story of Yeshoo, this historical great storyteller. Do you think that the Jesus that we see in Yeshoo is compatible with the Latin American Jesus in some people's imagination? Or, you know, what percentage of people might say, "Okay, I can relate to this Jesus?" Well, my hope is that the book will get translated into Spanish and be published there, and I'm convinced that many Latin Americans will resonate with it strongly. Having said that, I think it's a very different Jesus from the Jesus you usually see in Latin America. You walk into most Latin American churches, and there's a very prominent crucifix, which in many cases is really hard to look at. You know, the level of suffering and the wound, open wounds, the bleeding, thorns, you know, the crown thrust into the skin, and the look of agony on the face of Jesus is, in my experience, pretty hard to take in. Another aspect, it always surprised me in my time in Latin America, and the places, you know, I've lived four or five different places in Latin America, that the big religious holiday of the year is Good Friday. Easter is big, but not really as heavily celebrated and as momentous, apparently, as Good Friday. Christmas, you know, of course, I remember most of the places I live in Latin America have been, you know, Christmas is like springtime, you know, it'll be 70 degrees out or something like that. But Christmas is, you know, I'll ask people, so how was your Christmas? Oh, like any other day, you wouldn't see much in the streets or in the churches, not much going on at Christmas. You ask people about their, you know, what do you do at home at Christmas? Oh, well, we maybe have a little tree or a little, they would have these, like, a birth scene on a table or something like that, but very low key. And, gee, for me, Christmas has always been the big day. And when you really celebrate the, you know, the birth of this wonderful human being, and the death is, you know, it's there in your mind. And yes, he was a martyr, you can't deny that, but the fact that he lived and how he lived, in my mind, takes precedent. And I know I'm being very sort of ethnocentric at this moment, but I live in my own ethnicity, so that's my right. So I think in many ways, this will be very different if not shocking depiction of Jesus. But I hope pleasantly shocking, like, wow, to have known this man and to have listened to him and to have tried to follow his example, you know, must have been a fantastic experience. And one of the things that you include in the book, which I don't know if there's quite historical record for or not, is the Yeshua villages that start cropping up at the end. Is there some kind of documentation that proves that that's how it kind of formed? There's some documentation of communities that were formed after the death of Jesus, certainly not to the level that I'm describing, or as widespread as I'm describing. I mean, that for me was more of a vision, a wishful vision of the future and of our own future. But this may be why you asked me the question. This goes now directly back to my Peace Corps experience and my later experience working in development, mainly at the Inter-American Foundation, where villages were the basic unit for moving forward, for community, for problem solving. And many of us were devoting our lives to enabling these villages that were, let me emphasize, all the inhabitants of which were devoting their lives to strengthening these villages as living units that would help people realize their possibilities and their talents and decrease the amount of suffering in their lives. Are there other sources? One of the things that you refer to in the book, which I assume kind of connected with the Gnostic Gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, other things, you have allusions to writing down this story and then hiding it, burying it. Is that meant to be references to that kind of, a lot of the literature that we've lost, or that has only been reclaimed over the last 50 years? Absolutely. In Elaine Pagel's book, the Gnostic Gospels, a big impact on me, particularly what he says about Mary Magdalene, that Jesus says she is one of my main three disciples, and among them she knows the most. So I really tried to develop a Mary Magdalene character that would be true to that statement. I guess I was kind of fascinated by this idea of old documents being found in caves and buried urns and that sort of thing. When you develop Mary Magdalene as such a strong character, which I understand from the portions of the Gnostic Gospels that I've read, I can understand why those things kind of got edited out of what we call the New Testament. Strong women. Is there a strong role for that in Latin America where you were living? Do women get that kind of power or are they, because it's Catholic Church, pretty typically is kind of the prototype for Latin America? Right. Yeah, if you go deep into particularly Andean history back into the pre-Columbian and even pre-Inka times, the role of women was much stronger than it is today. Many of the leaders of rebellions against Spanish occupation were women. Louisa Stark of an anthropologist argues that actually Western development diminished the role of women in the Andes that they had a very equal role in pre-Columbian times that went along with this kind of duality in the Andean cosmology and culture. And I just, I met so many powerful women in my development work and as time progressed and as women got more opportunities, many, many of us working in development began shifting our focus, sometimes almost exclusively to women, which, you know, I would not argue for doing that either, but in my mind, the major untapped resource throughout the world is the power of women. So development projects that empower women and enable them to have opportunities have top priority in my view. Because the book, I guess, is liberation oriented, it's strong people oriented, because it takes Jesus as a real person as opposed to this mythical character, I imagine there's a lot of people who are very attached to the mythical idea of Jesus who would be upset with you. So have you been accused of being a heretic by anyone who wrote it? Did you get that reaction from anyone or maybe you didn't show it to those folks? I haven't gotten that reaction yet directly. I keep waiting for it. And in fact, the third word in the title, the issue, a novel for the openhearted, was always planned to be my first line of defense. You know, I could always say, "Look, folks, I say it outright. This is a novel. This is not a history book, not a book of theology. It is fiction. It's imagination, and it needs to be read that way." But I could see how people could be offended by it. There's no virgin birth. There's no physical resurrection. I don't think these are spoilers. I also promote the book as a Quaker retelling, so I think at least in the form of Quakerism that I think you and I are part of. I think that people will realize, "Okay, we should necessarily expect virgin birth in a physical resurrection." And one of the things, this is also my devotion to children and their spiritual development and my own personal experience just made me adamant about not portraying a Jesus that was so supernatural and so sort of magical that he became inaccessible and untouchable and unreachable for the reader. You know, when I was a child, there were a lot of things that I was taught. I mean, you started out by talking about original sin. I remember being very young, thinking, "That is preposterous. I don't know if I used that word, but you know, I don't believe what I'm whatever. Seven years old or eight, nine years old." I've committed sins that would cause Jesus, this incredible figure, to be killed. You must have been a very bad seven-year-old. Well, you'd have to be to have that much sin. And of course, you know, one of the, I think, beautiful aspects of Quakerism is, in my experience with Quakers, there's not this concept of original sin that people are born with that of God in them, not full of sin. And our mission then, with children and with all people, is to seek out the God in each of these individuals and to relate to those individuals in a way that enables that of God in them to grow and to strengthen. And if that happens, you know, you won't have to worry about sin. It's, you know, like when Yeshu says, "Love your neighbor as yourself. Love your enemy." You don't need the other laws. If you just follow that, you know, it's that kind of a philosophy. You know, if you put all your efforts into the positive and into the God within, you'll lead a righteous life. And this book does help move us in that direction. One more question, Chuck. And that is, did feeling this calling to write this book, did it end up changing your relationship with Jesus? I would say in many ways it did, but also the core that was there when I was a small child. I think coming from the examples I had, my own parents were showed very Christian examples to us. Some of the people in my church who worked with either in Sunday school or choir master or whatever, some of these people and some of my own relatives, you know, I still look at them and I say to myself, if I've met 10 true Christians in my life, you know, this person or that person and I'm remembering, you know, my Aunt Lula or the Dowsman couple, they are among those true Christians. So I carried this for a long time and during graduate school, I actually considered going into seminary and I applied for Rockefeller Brothers Fellowship that would allow me to go to seminary. The idea was they were giving fellowships to people who normally would not be going to seminary, but with the fellowship it would convince them to do it. And I remember the interview, which was, you know, 45 years ago or something, being asked, so why do you want to go to seminary? And I said, well, one reason is that I think I have this childlike love for Jesus and it seems like it's time for me, you know, at the time I was whatever 24 or something like that. It seems to me that I need to mature this childlike love for Jesus. Later, I realized that, you know, like a lot of things in your inner child, as people like to say today, there are a lot of aspects of that that it would be a shame to get rid of, you know, and that growing up doesn't mean suppressing or killing the child in you. So much of my point of view in the book, I think, reaches back to this original childlike love, you know, projects it into the Davi character who is the narrator. It's a wonderful book, Chuck. We've been speaking with Charles David Claymeyer, also known as Chuck Claymeyer. He's author of a recent book, Yeshoo, a novel for the open-hearted. He's an applied sociologist or culture and development sociologist for almost 50 years in Latin America. An incredible amount of good work, including passing on the stories of the people there, as well as development work and writings that have made a big difference to that area. Again, the book, Yeshoo, a novel for the open-hearted. Chuck, it's been great getting to know you. I'm so glad to know of our common paths on different continents with respect to the Peace Corps. And for your nurturing of that calling within you for all these many years that have erupted in the world in the form of Yeshoo, a novel for the open-hearted. Thanks so much for writing the book, for being true to your calling, and for joining me today, for spirit and action. Well, thank you for having me, Mark. It's been a wonderful conversation. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit and action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. You
In Yeshu: A Novel for the Openhearted, Charles David Kleymeyer re-sees and re-tells a well-known, sometimes culture-limited story, but this time with eyes and tongue influenced by decades of experience in Latin America.