February 2008
Gemma Sisia, the young Australian woman who founded the School of St. Luke in Tanzania, smiles at some of the donations people sometimes send from overseas, often at great expense: textbooks in German, thermal underwear, and some things that have no discernible purpose at all. Father Albert Salvans, a Spanish missionary in northwest Kenya, also comments that much of the well intentioned international aid is not what his people actually need. “International aid agencies are very bureaucratic, they have ‘programs’, they only want what is politically correct, what is fashionable, while the real needs of the people escape their notice.” This is one of the reasons that most people involved in missionary activity insist on building relationships: instead of deciding for other people what they need, we extend to them the courtesy of our asking, and the dignity of their speaking for themselves.
But the purpose isn’t simply to find out what type of aid is most appropriate and useful to those we seek to help: it’s more that as Christians, we simply believe in the significance and power of relationship. It’s why our own bishop spent much of his sabbatical visiting and engaging with people in Sudan and El Salvador, and in large part why a group from our parish is leaving for Honduras in a few weeks. Sure, there is always important work to be done, but even more important is our taking the time and the trouble to visit and observe and listen, to ‘witness.’ It is difficult for us to imagine the importance for people living in any extreme – poverty, isolation, danger, illness – to know that they are not alone and forgotten, but that they are connected and remembered. Of course, we want to arrive bearing gifts of supplies and clothing and money, but perhaps the most treasured gift is simply our presence. And always we leave bearing far greater gifts than anything we brought, gifts that have no dollar equivalent because they are wrought in hearts and lives and imaginations.
Sooner or later, human relationships need skin. For centuries God tried sending letters and gifts to the people he loved, to convey how much he cared for them – manna and water, tablets of law, priests and prophets, a land of their own – but nothing seemed to last. And so finally God took our flesh and showed us his face, learned our language, discovered exactly what it felt to be one of us. Wise men presented him with expensive gifts, but in nakedness and poverty he brought gifts beyond price. In time he sat with us, and walked with us, listening and speaking, watching and teaching, and modeling all the while what it means to live in relationship. It’s how we were saved, and how we continue to be saved.
TPG+
