What a peculiar sight!

Pedaling her vintage rusty red bicycle she eyes looked ahead down the street, the street she bikes to and fro every day.  She biked ahead of me, sometimes beside me, but never behind me.  I didn’t know where I was going, what I was doing or how I was going to get there.  This was once again, like every day here, an invitation to open my clenched fist—clenching control. This was another invitation to release—to relinquish.

I always wonder what a peculiar sight this must be for others.  I, a white North American Christian biking along a busy commuter route 5 kilometers to a village.  Beside me, Ibu Supri, who works making cigarettes at one of the many prolific cigarette factories here.  It is the type of job that makes a couple dollars a day.  Her husband passed away a few years ago in a vehicle accident.  She has a daughter, Eva, who is 10 years old.  Unlike most Indonesian’s, she doesn’t have a motorbike, so she bikes everywhere including back and forth to school, work and the mosque with here daughter.  

We enter the village and stop by for something to eat at a “restaurant”.  She orders cooked vegetables with rice.  I order chicken with rice.  Often for me, eating the food in villages and those whom are materially poor is not easy.   This “restaurant” was no different.  While eating my chicken, a cat jumped off the dirt floor, hopped up onto the counter and starting snacking on the food in the frying pan, which was in the kitchen.  Many things do not faze me any more. An ant in my orange juice is normal and sand in my rice is to be expected.  But this—yes—it fazed me all right!  However, I calmly mentioned to the cook, “hey, there is a cat eating there.”  To which the cook, glanced over and waved her hand at the cat. The cat left and the women did nothing to the frying pan.  The chicken became a little harder to get down after that!

We paid for the food.  Well, Ibu Supri paid for both of us.  But wait, why didn’t I pay?  I could have at least paid for myself, and surely for her as well.  Isn’t that what we always do when we are among the poor?  Whether it is in the inner city ministry or in our support for relief and development around the world, we give and they, the poor, receive.  They are the recipients of our love. But how often are you the recipient of the love of the poor? 

By her choosing where we would eat and allowing her to pay for me, she was able to enact her dignity.  A relationship between the “white rich guy” and the “poor”, so often described as “superior” was overturned to allow the blossoming of her dignity.  Although the poor paying for my food has happened so many times already, there is still something uncomfortable about it.  A discomfort because losing my control and superiority in the lives of the poor means that my fear of what may happen not just physically, but spiritually to myself is unknown.  As Henri Nouwen writes, “when you dare to let go and surrender one of those many fears, your hand relaxes and your palms spread out in a gesture of receiving.”  Only then, am I able to receive love.

To open my arms in a gesture of receiving it requires that I confess that I am limited, dependent and sinful—that my attempts to love the poor sometimes snuff out their humanity. And those actions themselves also hurt me.  As Nouwen put it “a person only becomes a person when he is capable of standing open to all the gifts which are prepared for him.”  When I play god in the lives of the poor—that becomes my poverty—a far more stubborn poverty than those who are materially poor. I remember Luke 21 when Jesus said “this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.”  My poverty was exposed, and her riches shone, when I accepted the gift of Ibu Supri—her presence, food, her decision making.  For “when someone accepts a gift, he admits another one into his world and is ready to give him a place in his own being.” It gets uncomfortable.

Ibu Supri and I continued to her home.  It was one of the most basic homes I have seen—the floor was dirt.  We sat with some neighbors, talk for a while.  And then like most conversations I have here, conversation topics run out and there is silence.  In this case, I was silent while others spoke.  The discomfort that I often feel vanished among the palm trees swaying in the wind and ducks waddling around.  Somewhere in some village in Central Java, I was still. 

“The promise of silence is that new life can be born. It is this silence, which is the silence of peace and prayer, because you are brought back to the other who is leading you.  In this silence you lose the feeling of being compulsive and you find yourself a person who can be himself along with other things and other people. Then you realize that you can do many things, but it isn’t necessary.  It is the silence of the “poor in spirit”, when you learn to see your life in its proper perspectives.”  (Nouwen)

For me, that perspective that is formed is staggering and beautiful.  It is that,  

“the corporate nature of the salvation that God purposes is necessary part of the divine purpose of salvation according to the biblical view that no one could receive it as a direct revelation from above, but only through the neighbor opening, only as part of an action in which one open’s door and invites one’s neighbor to come on in.” Therefore, “I am never permitted to think of my own salvation apart from that of God’s whole family and God’s whole world.” (Newbigin)

This has changed the way I live.  I don’t quite fully understand it.  I never will.  But moments where I am sitting with Ibu Supri, I begin to understand it a little bit more.

That to release my clenched fist means to relinquish power and pride.

That to receive with my palms open means that I am the bruised and naked man, not the Good Samaritan.   

That to accept with my arms wide open means that I realize that I need the ‘other’—for without them I am not whole.

When my hands release, palms open and arms accept Ibu Supri, I am reminded of the cross.  Where Jesus had his palms open and arms out knowing that I could not love like that.  What a peculiar sight.   

That enables me to be able to release my fist, open my palms and spread my arms wide open so that peculiar sights like Ibu Supri biking along side happen more often.  It seems that it is a way of life.  And when I live life releasing, receiving and accepting, then it seems a lot like praying.  And then I suspect that to pray is to live.