From soul catcher to adventurer

By Patrick Noonan
From The Tablet

The modern missionary is someone who steeps him- or herself in new cultures and enters sympathetically in the lives of others. It is a process that is demanding and poses major psychological challenges

Missionaries are shadowy people. Hundreds of them still descend on Europe every year from the far corners of the earth. They look like anyone else emerging from airports, though their dress code probably leaves something to be desired. They have travelled from remote parts where style does not count and materialism is unknown. They bring this experience with them to home cultures they have been distanced from and homes they may not recognise. And back where they came from, few people have an accurate grasp of what their work involves.

Part of the reason for this is that so little is known about missionary history. Missionaries thumbed lifts on colonial ships. Some blessed slave ships leaving Angola. Others, later, educated indigenous populations in non-violent resistance to oppression. But the documented accounts are relatively thin on the ground. Describing his experiences in the jungle in Liberia in 1935, the missionary Thomas O'Shaughnessy (who later published Rest Your Head in Your Hand detailing his experiences) wrote, "We knew that if yellow fever happened to be raging when we arrived, our immediate death was practically certain ... It was a six-day walk to the village ... the carriers asked in each village for the path to the next town ... the whole journey lasted two weeks ... [how could this be] that I should be listening to night crickets and wading through swamps in an African forest to help a dying human being I had never known? One reflected on one's loneliness, one's exile and tried to find a remedy for gloom. Why the longing for one's country? I had few books other than the complete works of Shakespeare and G.B. Shaw. Every two or three months, the mail brought some magazines and papers that might be six months old. We had no music or radio."

That is a classic description of missionary life in the early part of the last century. At home, we knew that these were people who set out to bring salvation to the world; they established the Church in unlikely places. There was a mystique about them. Some were given missionary crosses in a public ceremony before they went. They were acclaimed minor heroes, riding into the unknown bringing the good news of Christianity. But there was another, a more negative image. Earlier missionaries were sometimes referred to as "soul catchers" and accused of hunting and baptising poor heathen children and their parents. Many appeared in a mission area all too often as "benefactors" (sometimes they still do) always handing out things. It was a feel-good experience. I felt it myself. And at times missionaries, both lay and clerical, didn't notice that their behaviour was seen as arrogant, especially when they believed that they had a duty to bring "civilisation" to Africa, Asia or South America. This was the model of mission before the Second Vatican Council, that is, before the Sixties.

Thirty-five years ago some missionaries stopped attending Irish cultural gatherings on St Patrick's Day in South Africa when we found Irish immigrants to be too insular and European in their perspective. It was difficult to cope with their acceptance of apartheid. Empowering people to savour the life and words of Jesus, we now know, is a multifaceted learning process. It is a long journey to Emmaus dotted with many breaking revelations of God.

Serious missionaries today read the novels and newspapers of the local peoples and steep themselves in their lore when possible. They learn the local language, and know in advance that their insensitivity to local cultures will be remembered and often criticised in future. This is the lot of any missionary, from St Paul's encounter with the philosophers of Athens or the first Franciscan martyrs who really didn't get it right in Morocco. They went with naive zeal to convert the Muslim infidels, who turned on them.

The long-term missionary (man or woman) prayerfully invites the faithful to interpret the presence of God in their situations and through their cultures. Softly penetrating another culture, trying to understand its beliefs and even trying out its slang language has always been rewarding for a missionary. Cross-cultural experiences change people willing to be changed. A person is drawn into questioning his own assumptions and ways of seeing things as he enters sympathetically into the lives of others.

Passing over to the wonderland of another culture can be the most profound spiritual experience of a missionary's life, a spiritual adventure. It is a continuation of Incarnation. And it includes the transforming of cultures where they might lack the love of God. And when he comes back to Europe he is not the same person. His viewpoints and insights may well have changed, broadened and become more objective.

The serious missionary learns that the people of the host culture will accept him when they are ready, once he has opened and disclosed himself sufficiently and with empathy to their world view. There is a powerful lesson in listening here - learned, typically, from people's stories as we sit crouched around a table with one flickering candle long into the African night. The missionary has a sense of being pulled emotionally in different directions by his home country and the country he has chosen to serve in. Sometimes he feels closer to the soul of his adopted country than his own country of birth. Meanwhile, responding to local needs, he is trying to be a car mechanic, carpenter, plumber, painter, electrician, accountant, motivator, problem-solver, peacemaker, organiser, secretary, pastoral priest, brother or sister all in one.

He begins to find the Christ of other cultures - "the hidden traces of God" - in other cultures. This is a hugely rewarding encounter, an experience of God in action. Previously unrecognised presences of God progressively and gradually materialise before him. This exposure to the diversity of the divinity slowly becomes his frame of reference in life. When many of his "non-missionised" colleagues, friends and family at home encounter his changed perspectives they are sometimes mystified and uncomprehending.

When a missionary returns on holidays, he must reconnect with his life story before he left. This he does through his extended family and friends and colleagues. He connects too with his sending congregation or organisation. Some religious congregations have debriefing mechanisms in place to assist their missionaries to readjust to their own culture as soon as possible after arriving home. If he is coming from a stressful situation of social or political conflict he would be advised to seek help. Here I speak from experience. I remember (with others) returning to Ireland in the Eighties for three-month holiday periods during the uprisings in South Africa. I was stressed but at the time didn't realise it. By the end of the holidays, when I prepared to return, the stress had barely dissipated.

Again - with growing exceptions - missionaries are struck by the rigid, lifeless, spiritless liturgies they so often see in Europe. The missionary, lay or clerical, like the African immigrant, notes that church life tends to have a quality which unconsciously prevents it from wanting to learn from the vibrant life of the Church in other parts of the world. It seems to have lost contact with the innovative, spontaneous energy of the Holy Spirit or ushered the life-giving Spirit to the sidelines.

While Europe has rightly given much to the younger Churches of the world, and continues to do so, missionary experience has a lot to contribute to the mother Church in Europe, and Europe has something to learn from the Churches of Africa, South America and Asia. Globally, in the area of cultural gifts and belief, the West loves to expound truth, doctrine and order; Asia still offers us the gift of prayer and meditation; Latin America preaches liberation and solidarity with the poor, and Africa knows all about community and liturgical celebration. And St Paul says these gifts are for all.

Today the African Church is booming. Thousands of lay leaders conduct priestless services every Sunday all over the continent. They have worked with married and unmarried deacons, with parish pastoral councils and finance committees. Perhaps the time has come for the Church in the southern hemisphere to come to the aid of the northern churches, and for the North to listen more keenly, more searchingly and more openly, to the Christian voices from the South.

The early Franciscans missionaries in Morocco 800 years ago learned from their experience. They changed their ways. Recently an Arab commentator said this about Franciscans in the Middle East:"Instead of engaging us [with apologetics], they quietly go about our cities, serving everyone. Once people are served they become interested in Christianity, and the next thing you know they've become followers of Jesus. Those Franciscan Christians don't fight fair with us."

Patrick Noonan OFM has worked in South Africa as a Franciscan missionary, mostly in the formerly black townships, for 35 years. He is the author of They're Burning the Churches (Jacana, 2003).

Eating addictive as sex, drugs: Study

Sex and drugs and guacamole.

According to a new study by Yale University, food can be just as addictive as recreational drugs or sex.
The hormone most associated with making you hungry affects the same pleasure-inducing, addictive area of the brain that marijuana or cocaine do, said Dr. Tamas Horvath, chair of comparative medicine at Yale University's school of medicine, in New Haven, Conn.

"And if you think about it, you need to be addicted to eating. It's a must," Horvath said."It has to be (addictive) if you consider it, because without that you would die."

The study, partially sponsored by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, will appear today in an online edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

What Horvath found in rats was that the hormone ghrelin — produced in the stomach to promote eating — is actually acting on a part of the brain, the ventral tegmental area (VTA), that has long been associated with the pleasurable effects of things like drugs and sexual activity.

Horvath, a veterinarian and neuroscientist, says an addiction mechanism to promote eating would have evolved naturally in our brains to ensure we took the trouble to find food.

"Not necessarily today, when you can open the refrigerator, but when you consider us as animals, you'd need to go out and be interested in seeking the food and to go and get it," Horvath said."Therefore, it makes sense that it has this type of reward value. It emerged to make you more efficient at survival."

The newly discovered neural pathway could lead to treatments for addictive eating, or even to "curb the munchies," said Carlton University psychologist Alfonso Abizaid, who contributed to the study.

Abizaid said that knowledge of the neurological mechanism could spur the development of drugs that would interfere with it, adding one more weapon to the arsenal against obesity.Horvath said a new diet drug, known as Rimonabant and available in Europe as an obesity treatment, works on the brain's VTA region.

1M Canadians dissatisfied with jobs, many depressed: studies

Last Updated: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 12:50 PM ET
CBC News
About one in 12 Canadians, or more than one million people, said they were unhappy on the job in 2002, and depression is a major occupational health issue, Statistics Canada reported Tuesday.

The study used data from the 2002 Canadian Community Health Survey and the 2002/2003 National Population Health Survey to describe stress levels among people 18 to 75 who were employed, and looked at the links between stress and depression.

"For workers of both sexes, high stress on and off the job was associated with depression. However, the mental health of male workers was more vulnerable to stress arising from the work environment," the report's authors wrote.
Levels of stress and depression differed between industries. For example, job strain among men in processing, manufacturing or utilities was 30 per cent compared with a low of 13 per cent for men working in management.

Employers will need to think about how to deal with the high proportion of men who are not happy in traditionally male-dominated industries, said Eilenna Denisoff, a clinical psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

Reducing stress, depression on the job
In a second study, just over one million adults, 70 per cent who were employed, reported a "major depressive episode" in the year before they were interviewed.

In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked depression as the leading cause of disability worldwide.

For women, low supervisor support was linked with depression, while low support from co-workers was linked with higher prevalence of the condition for both sexes, the study's authors found.

Enlightened employers are recognizing the costs of chronic job stress and depression in higher absenteeism and lower productivity and are trying to reduce stress for employees, said Judith Berg, a therapist in Vancouver.

In her practice, Berg said common factors among her stressed-out clients included:High demand jobs. Low control at work. Little input in decisions. Little recognition. Lack of training or poor job skills. Mismatch with the culture of the organization. Lack of communication with senior management or within the workplace.

Long commutes and communication technologies that tie people to their jobs also contribute to stress levels, Berg said. "Everyone as an adult usually knows what to do to de-stress themselves," Berg told CBC Newsworld. "That could be just having a warm bath, if you've had a bad day. It could be jogging, it could be exercise, it could be listening to music. Knitting, gardening, going for a walk, talking to a friend. It's the chronic stress that employers should be concerned about."

Job strain a factor in depression
About 27 per cent of female workers and 19 per cent of male workers reported high job strain — when the demands of work outweigh the freedom to make decisions or apply skills.
"Men in high-strain jobs were 2.5 times more likely than their counterparts in low-strain jobs to have experienced depression; women were 1.6 times more likely," the report said.

There was also a clear link between perceptions of job stress and job satisfaction. One in four workers who found most days extremely stressful were dissatisfied with their jobs. But among those for whom stress was not really an issue, only one in 15 was dissatisfied.

People who were unhappy at work also tended to take more disability days. The average number of days taken by workers who were dissatisfied was almost three times that for workerswho were very satisfied with their jobs.

Income also seemed to make a difference. About 15 per cent of men with annual incomes of less than $20,000 were dissatisfied with their jobs, while only five per cent with incomes of at least $60,000 were dissatisfied.

Seduced by Snacks? No, Not You

New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON
Ithaca, N.Y.
PEOPLE almost always think they are too smart for Prof. Brian Wansink’s quirky experiments in the psychology of overindulgence.
When it comes to the slippery issues of snacking and portion control, no one thinks he or she is the schmo who digs deep into the snack bowl without thinking, or orders dessert just because a restaurant plays a certain kind of music.
“To a person, people will swear they aren’t influenced by the size of a package or how much variety there is on a buffet or the fancy name on a can of beans, but they are,” Dr. Wansink said. “Every time.”
He has the data to prove it. Dr. Wansink, who holds a doctorate in marketing from Stanford University and directs the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, probably knows more about why we put things in our mouths than anybody else. His experiments examine the cues that make us eat the way we do. The size of an ice cream scoop, the way something is packaged and whom we sit next to all influence how much we eat. His research doesn’t pave a clear path out of the obesity epidemic, but it does show the significant effect one’s eating environment has on slow and steady weight gain.
In an eight-seat lab designed to look like a cozy kitchen, Dr. Wansink offers free lunches in exchange for hard data. He opened the lab at Cornell in April, after he moved it from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent eight years conducting experiments in cafeterias, grocery stores and movie theaters. Dr. Wansink presents his work to dieticians, food executives and medical professionals. They use it to get people to eat differently.
His research on how package size accelerates consumption led, in a roundabout way, to the popular 100-calorie bags of versions of Wheat Thins and Oreos, which are promoted for weight management. Although food companies have long used packaging and marketing techniques to get people to buy more food, Dr. Wansink predicts companies will increasingly use some of his research to help people eat less or eat better, even if it means not selling as much food. He reasons that companies will make up the difference by charging more for new packaging that might slow down consumption or that put seemingly healthful twists on existing brands. And they get to wear a halo for appearing to do their part to prevent obesity.
To his mind, the 65 percent of Americans who are overweight or obese got that way, in part, because they didn’t realize how much they were eating.
“We don’t have any idea what the normal amount to eat is, so we look around for clues or signals,” he said. “When all you see is that big portions of food cost less than small ones, it can be confusing.”
Although people think they make 15 food decisions a day on average, his research shows the number is well over 200. Some are obvious, some are subtle. The bigger the plate, the larger the spoon, the deeper the bag, the more we eat. But sometimes we decide how much to eat based on how much the person next to us is eating, sometimes moderating our intake by more than 20 percent up or down to match our dining companion.
Much of his work is outlined in the book “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think” (Bantam), which will be published on Tuesday. The book is his fourth over all, but his first directed at a general audience. It is peppered with his goofy, appealing Midwestern humor and practical diet tips. But the most fascinating material is directly from his studies on university campuses and in test kitchens for institutions like the United States Army.
An appalling example of our mindless approach to eating involved an experiment with tubs of five-day-old popcorn. Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn’t eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of other people eating popcorn and the Pavlovian popcorn trigger that is activated when we step into a movie theater.
Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness.
People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn’t stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, both groups thought they had eaten about the same amount, and 113 fewer calories on average than they actually had.
Last week in his lab seven people were finishing lunch while watching a big-screen TV. Cartoons on the TV served as a distraction so participants would not be influenced by what and how much those nearby ate.
Because he does not take money from food companies and is a newcomer at the university, the lab runs on the cheap. The menus, like the one on this day, are often built from Beefaroni, applesauce, M&M’s and Chex Mix: simple, inexpensive food that subjects are familiar with and that can be easily manipulated.
He prefers to experiment on graduate students or office workers, whom he sometimes lures with the promise of a drawing for an iPod. “It’s easy to find undergraduates to participate, but with the guys nothing makes sense because they all eat like animals,” he said.
On this day he is testing how much people eat depending on whether they have exercised. Over the past several weeks they have sent subjects, some who have exercised and some who have not, through an unlimited buffet line. By measuring the difference between how much and what people eat depending on whether they have exercised, Dr. Wansink hopes to prove that even moderate exercise makes us think we are entitled to many more calories than we actually burned.
“Geez Louise, you can’t believe how much people eat to overcompensate,” he said.
Those kinds of things — intuitive bits we know about food but think we are either immune to or don’t think about — are the spine of “Mindless Eating.” In it he outlines an eating plan based on simple awareness. Employ a few tricks and you can take in 100 to 300 fewer calories a day. At the end of a year you could be 10 to 30 pounds lighter.
For example, sit next to the person you think will be the slowest eater when you go to a restaurant, and be the last one to start eating. Plate high-calorie foods in the kitchen but serve vegetables family style. Never eat directly from a package. Wrap tempting food in foil so you don’t see it. At a buffet put only two items on your plate at a time.
His dieting methods aren’t as fast as the Atkins plan or even Weight Watchers, and have little to do with matters that consume nutrition researchers or even culinarians. Dr. Wansink is not that guy. Although he has studied to be a sommelier and keeps a mental list of his 100 best meals, he drinks vats of Diet Coke and will inhale a box of Burger King Cini-mini rolls with no apologies. He doesn’t think that his work will solve the obesity problem, but it’s a start.
“It’s like a big pyramid,” he said. “The people at 30,000 feet can look down and say we need a wholesale change in our food system, in school lunches, in the way we farm.” At the bottom of the pyramid, he said, are the nutritionists and the diet fanatics who think the problem will be solved by examining every nutrient and calorie.
Dr. Wansink does his research for the person in the middle, the guy on the sofa who can appreciate a good meal, whether it is from Le Bernardin or Le Burger King.
“Will being more mindful about how we eat make everyone 100 pounds lighter next year?” he said. “No, but it might make them 10 pounds lighter.”
And the best part, he promises, is that you won’t even notice.