The Book of Strange New Things(111)

Your loving wife,

Bea

He felt feverish and dehydrated. He walked to the fridge and had a swig of water, then stood for a minute with his hot forehead pressed against the cool shell of the machine.

He sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet lay the loose pages of a Bible chapter he was adapting for his flock. Luke 3. John the Baptist announcing that there was someone coming soon ‘the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose’. Oh, that awkward word ‘latchet’. And its even more awkward alternatives, ‘strap’ and ‘shoelace’. He’d considered ‘leather band’, but there was the additional problem that Oasans’ footwear had no straps or laces and the entire concept might require explanation, which might be more trouble than it was worth, theologically speaking. If only he could think of an equivalent detail to replace the shoe stuff with . . . ‘whose (something) I am not worthy to (something)’ . . . Obviously, to mess around with the metaphors and similes of Jesus was unacceptable, but this was John, a mere mortal, no more divine than any other missionary, his utterances no more sacred than Peter’s own. Or were they? The Oasans had made it clear that they preferred their Scripture as literal as possible, and his misguided attempt to translate ‘manna’ as ‘whiteflower’ had caused murmurs of –

‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?’

He flinched. The voice – low-pitched, male and loud – had spoken right near his ear. He wheeled round. No one had entered the room. And God, surely, did not resort to four-letter words.

Dear Bea, he wrote,

I’m so sorry for my silence. I’ve been busy, true, but that’s not the reason I haven’t been writing. The real reason is hard to explain but it certainly isn’t that I’m angry with you and CERTAINLY not because I don’t love you.

This mission has turned out very different from what I anticipated. The things I expected to have a lot of trouble with have gone astonishingly smoothly but I feel out of my depth in other ways I never imagined. I assumed that I would be fighting an uphill battle to minister to the Oasans and that it would take me weeks, maybe even months, to construct even the flimsiest, most provisional bridge between these very foreign minds/hearts and the love of God awaiting them on the other side. But what has actually tested me beyond my abilities is the gulf that has opened up between you and me. I don’t mean an emotional gulf, in that my feelings for you have changed in any way. I mean a barrier that circumstances has pushed between us. Of course, physically, we are a huge distance apart. That doesn’t help. But the main thing I’m having to confront is that our relationship, until now, has totally depended on us being together. We’ve always seen and done things as a team and discussed everything as it’s come up, day by day, minute by minute – even second by second. Suddenly we’re on different paths. And your path has veered off in a frighteningly strange direction.

All these disasters that are befalling the world – the tsunamis and earthquakes and financial meltdowns or whatever – are just so alien to my life here. They don’t feel real. I’m ashamed to admit this because obviously to the people suffering through them they’re very real indeed but I have enormous trouble getting my head around them. And I very quickly reach a point where I think ‘If she tells me about one more disaster my brain will seize up.’ Of course I’m horrified by this failure of compassion, but the more I strain to overcome it the worse it becomes.

Another problem is that I find it almost impossible to talk about the Oasans to anyone who doesn’t know them. Not just to you, to the USIC guys as well. My communion with my new brothers and sisters in Christ seems to happen on a different plane, as though I’m speaking their language even though I’m not. Trying to describe it afterwards is like trying to explain what a smell looks like or what a sound tastes like.

But I must try.

The basics: The church is built. We worship in it regularly. I’ve taught the Oasans adapted versions of hymns that they can sing without too much difficulty. (The insides of their faces aren’t like ours; they have throats but I’m not convinced they have tongues.) I read to them from the Bible, which they insist on calling The Book of Strange New Things. They have a marked preference for the New Testament over the Old. Thrilling OT adventure stories like Daniel in the lions’ den, Samson & Delilah, David & Goliath, etc, don’t connect with them. They ask comprehension-type questions but you can tell that even on an ‘action’ level they don’t really get it. What floats their boat is Jesus and forgiveness. An evangelist’s dream.

They are gentle, kind, humble, hardworking people. It’s a privilege to live amongst them. They call themselves Jesus Lover One, Jesus Lover Two, etc. Jesus Lover One was the very first convert, dating back to the early days of Kurtzberg’s ministry. I wish I could show you pictures as I’m hopeless at describing them. Their behaviour is not that distinctive compared to ours, eg, I wouldn’t call some of them extrovert & others introvert, some good-humoured & others bad-tempered, some well-balanced & others crazy, etc. They’re all pretty low-key and the differences between them are quite subtle. It would take a novelist’s skill to capture those nuances in words and, as I’ve discovered to my embarrassment, I totally lack that skill. Also, they look physically very similar. Pure, unadulterated genetic stock. I never thought about this before coming here, but when we need to tell the difference between people, we get a lot of help from all the cross-breeding and migration that’s gone on in human history. It’s given us such a smorgasbord of different physical types – caricatures almost. By ‘we’ and ‘us’ I mean people in the cosmopolitan West, of course. If we were rural Chinese, and somebody asked us to describe someone else, we wouldn’t say, ‘She’s got straight black hair, dark brown eyes, she’s about five foot three’ and so on. We’d have to get more into the nuances. Whereas in the West there’s so much diversity we can say ‘He’s six foot two with blonde frizzy hair and pale blue eyes’, and that immediately sets him apart from the crowd. Bea, I’m rambling here but the point is that the Jesus Lovers would all look the same to you except for the colours of their robes. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’, I guess. In a future letter I’ll tell you about the contributions that some of the individual Jesus Lovers have made to the church.