Things Come From Somewhere

One of my friends is building a cabin with his father. This is far away from where I am now, across an ocean, on an island that I have come to love. No cars can drive there; there is no ferry or bridge. There are maple trees and pines and Douglas fir trees. There is a moon rising over the north shore mountains across the sound and waves of ocean water lapping at night. This is a place I imagine coming home to when I am working in some hot or dusty place a world away, and daydreaming. People have built cabins on the island and now my friend and his father are building one. There is a strong argument (in my books) that if they ever finish this cabin, it will be the best one of them all. My friend’s father is an artist when he builds; if he is allowed, and given time and space, his heart, his being, his worship, and all that he believes in is poured into every angle, every line and joint. In this way he makes peace with a world in which he otherwise cannot find a place, with a God for whom he cannot otherwise find a way to serve. I tell you all this because of a story my friend told me once of what his father did with a tree. I think it is one of my favourite stories.

They are trying to build this cabin without scarring the land. They are trying to add to the creation of the earth rather than subtract from it. They have poured intricate foundations into impossible hillsides and rock faces, they have hauled stones from one place to another by hand, with meticulous care. They have thought about rooflines and sightlines and how this building will blend into the landscape. And they have tried to work around the trees. The story my friend told me was about a time they had to cut a tree down. It’s a short story. My friend’s father went up to the tree and put his hands on the bark. I imagine it like a captain putting his hands on the chest of a dying soldier who had fought well. ‘I and Thou,’ he said to the tree, and then he took his saw and cut it down.

I’ve been thinking about this because of a problem we are facing here in Indonesia as we try to rebuild what was destroyed. It’s easy to forget that things come from somewhere. Living in what we now somewhat conceitedly call the modern world we are several steps removed from where things come from. For most of us, the meat in our hamburger (for example) came from Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic in the meat aisle of Safeway. At best, we’ve noticed the meat grinder in the butcher’s room at the back of the store, but for most of us things just exist, as if they’ve always been there: cars, houses, hamburgers … you know, Life and The World. These things are assumed. Until a ten metre wave comes along suddenly one sunny day and takes them all away. Then you have to think about where things come from again.

The houses we're rebuilding come from wood, and wood from trees. And bricks. Bricks come from clay, but they also come from water and from fire, and water has to come from somewhere and so does fire. The fire often comes from wood, so we’re back to the trees again. So if all of a sudden nearly 200 000 people lose their houses, you will have start thinking about where you’re going to get all of these things, and lots of them. So you have to start thinking about the trees.

For the most part, people in Indonesia cut down trees and saw them up and sell them as boards, or they chop them up and sell them as firewood, but very rarely do they ever plant them again. Land, it turns out, comes in large part from the fact that there are tree roots holding all that earth together and stopping the rain from washing it all away, into people’s houses for example. And roots – is this getting too obvious? – come from trees. No trees, no roots, loose earth, and then everything starts to slide. Of course lots of other things come from trees, not the least of which is oxygen and a good bit of the water cycle which brings rain to make the trees grow, assuming they’re there. So Indonesia needs houses now, and Indonesia needs trees, and it doesn’t seem like they can have both. Incidently, people don’t necessarily need money, but some of them also don’t need to be told twice to see that a lot of people will be needing lumber, so if they can get lumber buy cutting down a bunch of trees, they will be making a lot of money in short order. And from money comes happiness, presumably, or something better than trees, or land, or oxygen or the water cycle. Pile up enough money and you won’t see these things anyway. I guess that’s the thinking. I wish I could say it’s never my thinking.

I’m not a tree-hugger or a vegetarian. I can get behind the wheel of a big truck and just have fun without feeling bad about how much fuel I’m using up. I don’t check all my clothing labels to make sure they were made without child labour. Most of the time I want what I want, and I’m willing to turn a blind eye to where it comes from. But at the bottom of me, in a place that too rarely sees any action, I believe that these things matter. Because what if we go too far? What if we have already? We are guilty – maybe – of destroying our trees and the ground and the air we breathe, and we’ve proven capable – certainly – of killing our own neighbours with machetes and our next generations before they even have a chance. We have forgotten where we all come from, and our slide down has begun.

This is what I think of now as we try to rebuild the homes that were washed away. What my friend’s father said to the tree sticks in my heart now: ‘I and Thou.’ In the middle of our slide into forgetfulness and annihilation this story is a brief reflection of Something, like fragment of glass in a flood that catches the sun for an instant. A tall grey-haired man with his hands on the bark of a tree, whispering. It’s the hand of God on the world as it came into being, the hand of the Son of Man pinned to the beam of a Roman cross. ‘I and Thou.’ Things come from Somewhere, including us. It’s still worth remembering to act like it, even in whispers for one tree on a small island. It may be enough. There are kingdoms, I’ve heard, that were built on things like this: one Man and a Tree, the right whisper at the right time. There are worlds that have been saved.

Bowing

Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb, your loosened tongues employ;
ye blind behold your Saviour come; and leap, ye lame, for joy.

It was a tiny moment and I’m sure no one else noticed, but I love things like this. Small, desperate moments full of nobility. The warrior bowing his head to fate before the final battle, the upward tilt of a small girl’s chin before the bully clobbers her, the ringing cry in the Book of Job: ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.’ I don’t know why, but this kind of desperate belief is one of the few on the List of Things That Choke Me Up. Maybe because at the end of all my trying, I know that my own belief is like this – born of desperation, of having nowhere else to turn.

Anyway. It was at the end of a long day of meetings, and we were about to cap it off as we had begun it, as we so often begin and end meetings in Christian culture, with Opening and Closing Prayer. This is usually a perfunctory ritual for me, akin to spilling drop of wine for the household gods before setting to and downing the glass. A nod to the Lord before getting around to the real business of deciding things without him. Sometimes there is a short reading from the Bible and for that day this was it:

But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession
in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of
him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and
those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the
fragrance of life. And who is equal to such a task? (I Corinthians
2:14-16)

Our Country Director read it. Besides being a Country Director, he has a degree in Divinity. Sometimes it is hard to get the decisions you want out of this man. Sometimes, to be honest, I think he’s frustrating as hell to work with, and I wonder what on earth he’s doing in charge. But now he reads these words in the quiet, nearly incredulous tone of someone reading out his pardon from a death sentence, and he leaves a slight pause before he speaks the final question: ‘And who is equal to such a task?’ In that moment there is nothing more obvious than the answer to this question.

Not us.

We have spent all day just trying to get clear how to do work in this country, in the wake of this disaster, without tripping over our own feet or biting each other’s heads off in frustration. And we have just listened to an Oxford PhD in Disaster Management tell us all the things we still haven’t thought of yet. The collective wisdom around the table amounts to well over 100 years of relief and development experience (including the Oxford PhD consultant), and it still feels like we’re only about three inches ahead of where we were when we started all this. And I’m talking about just getting our questions about staff housing and project budgets out of the way, never mind getting houses built for the people who lost them to the tsunami. Never mind spreading the fragrance of Christ. Into this atmosphere of water-treading frustration, then, our Country Director pauses, and speaks our inadequacy: We are not equal to such a task. Let us pray.

I looked across the table just before the requisite bowing of heads for prayer and saw the Oxford PhD’s shoulders sag and his head fall forward onto the heel of his hand. He is not a small man, and his wisdom is not small either. Of all of us here, he’s the one I’d peg as someone who knows what he’s doing. And here he was, collapsing before the rhetorical scriptural suggestion of something I know for sure to be true: We can’t do it. Beside him the country director was closing his Bible and folding his hands. I realized then that I was truly in the presence of greatness. These two men, over 50 years of knowledge and experience between them, and their every gesture saying that this all was still beyond their skill. They knew for certain what so few of us acknowledge: That we can’t do it without … Help. Prayer. God. Something Bigger Than Us.

Humility is not something we champion anymore. They used to say a man is powerful on his knees, but we don’t act like it anymore. So I guess no one will understand the proud lump that formed in my throat that morning, but the truth is that I love it when humans do things like this. This is what the angels stand on tiptoe to see us do. Knowing we can’t, we bow our heads and try anyway. For all the ways we stuff it up, our greatness, if it lies anywhere, lies in this. I assume moments like this are the reason God still bothers with us at all. That is why, despite my mostly well-defended heart, these things still penetrate. This is who we really are: a little lower than the angels and crowned with honour and glory – to use the old language. It’s a mystery why we’re still allowed to be this with all our flaws, but it hits the soul with a ton of beautiful, loving, longing, sweetly sad joy when you see it.