The Etiquette of Heaven

The story goes like this (A man named Tarpeh related it to me as we drove in convoy with our armed UN escort to the village of Dorpa. What’s written here is my summary. He, of course, told it in his buttery, circular Liberian English with the details slipping around and whole consonants disappearing altogether):

A man from the village of Kwendin went hunting near the village of Torpa and he stayed with another man there. Then someone from Torpa went hunting too, and shot the man from Kwendin. Perhaps it was an accident, but the killer hid his deed. Eventually, though, it came out and the men from Kwendin came as a mob from their village to Torpa and burned the houses and looted. The Torpa people fled into the forest. That was last week. Tearfund works in both villages, teaching them to use latrines and wash their hands and grow better food and work together, and suddenly they are attacking each other in what counts for justice in these parts, despite what the Suits in Monrovia try to tell you about rule of law coming to Liberia. That’s not to say everyone’s not trying, just to say the devil still erupts in the hearts of men, and too often here it looks like this.

We organized an emergency distribution for Torpa, and it was textbook stuff, very grand and showy. We gathered 10 vehicles, loaded them up with rice and other needful things, and, escorted by a company of Bangladeshi UN peacekeepers, we set out in a long and important-looking convoy. Some NGOs are dead against this kind of thing because they don’t like mixing military operations with humanitarian ones on principle – the principle that military causes all the problems and humanitarians have all the solutions. I think it’s pretty naïve to think that NGOs can exist without military might. Principled humanitarians can refuse to drink from the same cup as the military all they want but the fact remains that you can’t have relief work without something to protect it, and grand humanitarian ideals don’t protect you as well as the powder blue helmets do. I had a nice chat with the Bangladeshi Captain once we got to the village, and I liked him. Once things were peacefully underway he asked me if he could take his men home because they hadn’t eaten yet. He was very polite.

Once the distribution got underway there wasn’t much for me to do. I made a couple of suggestions for increasing efficiency, but mostly the staff had it all sewn up. They off-loaded everything into a round hut and brought people inside in fives to sign by their names and take their provisions. I went and wandered around the village, always trailed by a few grinning kids, curious about the white man with his shaggy blond hair. Most of the village had been burnt down but there were a few walls still up. It had only happened a week ago, but it looked months old already, maybe because people weren’t sitting around despondently, but running around and getting on with cooking and washing and the business of living, even in the middle of the charred skeletons of their houses. Western people always exclaim about the resilience of people and the persistence of life in places like this. I don’t know what to say. It’s true, but it’s also true that there’s a cycle of violence which makes such resilience necessary. People blame tribalism and the chaos left over from colonial exploitation. One of Tearfund’s elder statesmen, a 60 year-old farmer named Joseph Biaty, has a different view. He blames it on a choice of the human heart.

On Sunday, the day after the distribution, I walked with Mr. Biaty up the same road we’d paraded along in our relief convoy the day before, then turned off to walk up the hill to the Catholic mission for Sunday mass. Mr. Biaty is a tall man with bright, crinkly eyes that twinkle at everything from behind a pair of thick eyeglasses, which balance precariously on his face, always in danger of falling off. When he smiles, which is often, his cheeks plump up into cheerful little hills, further endangering his glasses, and making him look like a chocolate-coloured Santa Claus. At 60, he is fit and spry (on the way to church we passed an old man with a stick, not much his elder, and Mr. Biaty greeted him with a jolly, ‘Hey Ole Man!’). He also has the measured wisdom of one who has spent his years gathering to himself what is wise – and losing what is temporal. On the way to church he told me that he used to have a farm in Lofa County, but he’d lost it in the fighting. Now, far past his prime, he works as the food security project manager for Tearfund in Nimba, and slowly tries to gather funds to rebuild what he once had.

The gospel reading in church for that day was from St. Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount. The famous sermon of Jesus that everyone holds in such high esteem, many people have read, and nearly no one has actually understood. If they had, they might have responded the way the people in church did on Sunday.

‘You have heard it said, “Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, Do not resist and evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also…
‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you …’

The text was read in Gio, the local language, but you didn’t have to understand it to know which part people muttered at. Unlike most westerners, Liberians show their emotions in church, and the part about turning the other cheek got the equivalent of a loud grumble. For people here, the natural way, the right way, is vengence. I think it’s the way most of us feel in our hearts as well, which is why we gloss over these sayings of Jesus and dream up some way of telling ourselves he was saying something nice and peaceful and easy. He wasn’t. He was telling us to live in a reality all but forgotten by men, by rules that no one else seems to believe in. If we do this, we will be hurt on this earth. Make no mistake. That’s why he said – promised – that we would have troubles in this world.

The deacon who gave the homily did not mention what had happened last week in Torpa, only a few miles up the road. Maybe he thought it was a raw enough selection of scripture for people to add to it the insult of telling them that their neighbours and friends had failed spectacularly at obeying it a week ago. I don’t know. From their muttering, I suspected that had the same thing happened here, the results would have been the same. Worse, I suspect the same if it were to happen tomorrow.

It is not because these people are backwards, or ignorant, or primitive. Do not make the mistake of judging them in your mind because you are more enlightened than they. In our western, democratic nations it is not our hearts that are better, but our laws. It isn’t conscience that pulls us back from acting on the impulse to revenge, nor is it necessarily a high regard for the ways of heaven. It is mostly the fact that our forefathers decided – and we continue to agree - to put justice into the workings of law, so that it is reason rather than hot blood that decides crime and punishment. We give up our right to punish but not our desire to see people punished. We are not turning the other cheek in the courtroom, we are regulating our fury. Pull away the laws, and most of us will soon be charging the next village with machetes and torches.

I’m not disparaging our legal institutions, but they all they will ever be is a make-do solution, meant for this world. So give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. I’m talking about something else. Something akin to practicing chivalry in the apocalypse.

I said to Mr. Biaty as we were walking back that what we’d heard in the gospel was a hard teaching for people to accept, that it didn’t make sense in this world. After I’d gotten over my surprise at hearing people grumble at the words of Jesus, it was sinking in how very understandable their reaction had been. I suspect a lot of people had the same indignant reaction when Jesus first said it. It was far more understandable than our own blasé glass-eyed nodding when things like this are said. Really. It’s like saying to someone that when a thief comes in to your house and takes your TV, you should remind him of the good silver and hand it over. I can almost hear what is in these people’s minds: We already have little enough; if we start doing what this nutcase suggests, people will come and take everything. It is the etiquette of heaven, and more real than the air we breathe, but our world is so far from heaven that it seems like madness to our bent minds. We must unbend them to see. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, is how St. Paul put it.

‘You see da’ Bible theah?’ Mr. Biaty said to me, pointing at the Bible he’d lent me for mass for the readings. ‘Dey’s a Cat’lic Bible, and they’s a boo’ call’ Sirach in dey. In dey, he say da’ dey are four tings in de min’ of Man: Life and good, evil and deat’. An’ a man has a choice to make. Is he gwana pick life and good, or is he gwana wake up in de mawnin’ and pick evil and deat’. People tinkin’ ‘bout revenge like dose people in dey church? Dey tinkin’ ‘bout evil and deat’. Dat is still in dey min’, even tho’ dey sittin’ in church. If you start tinkin’ ‘bout life and good, den you start understan’in’ what Jesus say. Dat’s wha’ Ah tell people in my trainin’.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘If you keep giving to people, and turning your cheek, they will know you are weak and take everything from you. It’s not that people don’t want to choose life and good, it’s that this doesn’t really look like life, or good.’

Mr. Biaty tipped his head back so he could look at me through his glasses, which had slipped to the end his nose again. ‘If you choose life and good, God will bless you,’ he said, and then told me the story of his farm. He’d taught the people to clear the swampy lowland and reclaim it for planting. He’d taught them about how to protect their crops from pests, save some of the harvest for next year’s seed, and to maximize the richness of their soil. He taught them to work hard, plan ahead, and prosper. Then the fighters came and demanded he feed them. He had surplus and for a while he was able to do it, but later other groups came through, those who had let the monsters of war climb deeper inside of them, and they took everything he had. He told me the long story of circumstances that had led him from job to job and slowly let him build back his life, but it was not a Job’s Happy Ending: God has not come in a whirlwind and restored his former prosperity. He was an old man, trying to start again with his life, his farm, his whole nation. Still, he thought he’d been blessed. ‘Thos’ who steal fro’ you,’ he said to me, ‘Dey see how God will bless you if you wait, an’ somethin’ will change in dey min’. Dey tink – why dis ma’ been bless?’

I think of Rwanda, of people waiting for their Deliverer in churches, later to be found in hacked heaps by help that came too late. I think of a cool night in Islamabad, sitting with my friend Caroline on the porch talking until midnight. ‘You don’t feel God in Rwanda,’ she told me. I think of the chilling lines written by my friend Kelsey in Darfur after more news of death and horror: ‘And I wonder sometimes if good is slipping out of the world. Like a glass tipped over on a table with goodness dribbling out onto the floor.’ I barely understand Mr. Biaty’s story. It doesn’t sound as if God has blessed him, but he thinks so and who am I to argue? He is not a fool or crazy. He smiles when he talks and his thoughts are clear. I feel as if he knows something that I don’t, as if he sees some world around him that I don’t see.

The triumph of the turned cheek and the open hand is a mystery. It is a long road back from where we have removed ourselves, and it is not comfortable. It is like being born. Again. Mr. Biaty kneels beside me in the sweltering church. His rosary clicks. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’ He stands slowly to his feet and we walk out into the dusty world, amidst the murmuring people, and he is one of them, but like a shepherd amongst sheep. He smiles at a little girl, and his soul seems so light and clear that Evil itself diminishes, like an ugly little thing that was never meant to be, as if he has withered it simply by turning his back on it with his Santa Claus smile and his hearty, joyful laugh.

My friend says that once he had a vision about the gospel story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. He says that he could see what Jesus was writing in the dust while the woman’s accusers shouted and twisted their souls into dark knots. It is an odd thing to do, to squat down and finger the dust when everyone is shouting. It is the kind of thing a man does if he’s crazy, unless he knows something that everyone else is missing. My friend says that Jesus was writing to the devils who had gathered around, unseen. ‘You have lost,’ is what he wrote. I feel that like a sob gathering in my throat, as if I’ve suddenly caught a glimpse of home after a life of exile. We are meant to be like that. That’s what it means to turn your other cheek. It means you live in a world where the one striking you has already lost.