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.