Hitchhiking With Drunken Nuns

I have just finished, and much enjoyed reading Emily Garcés’ Hitchhiking with Drunken Nuns. She tells her story beautifully descriptively and with great honesty, humour and insight. The blurb on the back of the book describes her as “an artist, poet, ex-missionary, and all-round creative enthusiast.” She is all of that, and so much more. We all have a story, and it is sometimes good to read somebody else’s story – and this book was one such occasion for me.

Quite near the beginning of the book she reflects on her work with and for Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and how she struggles with their ethos. She reflects on the circumstances in which she finds herself. “I am the world's worst missionary. Stopped seeing the point of evangelism. Do not see why the world needs more Christians. What changes when someone repeats a prayer just to get us to stop talking to them? Is that really all it takes to get someone into heaven? If they end up going to church, how does that help? Would rather just put my arms around them and let them know I care. Making the gospel appear like a quick fix solution for people's problems is not helpful. Truth can't be pinned down like a bug in a frame. It is a direction to run in, something to chase with a butterfly net (and maybe never catch). Not a second-hand thing. Cannot be inherited or purchased in an expensive Bible with concordance features. We cannot fake possession of it.”

She certainly plenty of adventures, one of which leads to the hitchhiking with drunken, though probably more accurately slightly inebriated, nuns that provides the book with its title. “When we kiss them goodbye, I feel like curtseying. I enjoyed travelling with the nuns far more than I would have enjoyed travelling by bus. I decide to accept this dynamic – life’s missed buses will no longer be perceived as road blocks to some allegedly perfect plan. A missed bus will become a new opportunity. When I screw up and am forced to find an alternative solution, the Great Mystery of life will cup its hands together to pool its resources. Mistakes will be bridges into mystery. Wrong turns will be roads to unexpected destiny. Failure will lead me to admit the degree to which I need other people, and the degree to which I enjoy their company.”

Needless to say, the book could have any of a dozen or more other titles as it describes so many incidents from which she could have got her headline, but, though there are plenty of incidents of equal stature, I can’t help feeling she chose absolutely the right title.

What I found particularly good was the way in which she draws out life lessons from so many of the things that happened to her. A missed bus leads to the encounter with the nuns and all that it gave her – but that includes the revelation that in future ‘a missed bus will become a new opportunity.’

I found myself reflecting on quite a few of her insights, but perhaps nowhere more than what she says about love, and where it is to be found.

“Love and relationships are two separate things. Love is not a magic spell that leaps out of the blue occasionally. Love is a constant. It does not pop out at an inopportune moment, like a fairy on a bungee rope, only to spring back to wherever it came from. Love is the eternal blanket that we are all wrapped in. The sea that we float in regardless of whether we choose to view the experience as sailing or drowning. Love does not come and go - it stays still - we are the ones who move.

The miracle of love is right in front of us - but we do not see it because we do not know what a miracle looks like. We look for love in one form and miss it when it appears in another. We look for lightning and rainbows, mountains breaking through clouds, for the perfect family home. We miss the sweetness of the grass growing up slowly and gently beneath our feet, the tired beauty of old paint flaking on a broken window frame, the old lady we walk past who chooses to give us her only smile of the day.”

God is love. Do we always see God where God is? Or are we sometimes looking in the wrong places?