Like the earth we are here.

“Like the earth we are here”.   It was well after dark but the air was still warm and the palm fronds moved in the breeze which flowed down from the surrounding hills across the lake and through our garden.   The background sounds of tropical night life and vehicles changing gears on the winding lakeside road had been punctuated by the ringing of our doorbell.   Saman (name and photo changed)stood in the yellow light of our verandah lamp, insects orbiting, oblivious to the human drama.  His thin shoulders, stubbled , pinched face and vulnerable eyes spoke of a life lived on the edge of desperation, day to day and this was one day when he had come up short.   Four children at home, a calm and gracious wife who most people thought was far too good for him.  For Saman was a chancer, a smooth talker who could ingratiate himself into people’s lives and play the sympathy card well.  .  He had the shiftiness of a man who had broken his word too many times, whom others have little respect for and disdain.

I was exasperated that he had come for help again, that he just could not somehow manage when others with less education and skills did.  He wasn’t the ‘deserving  poor’ in my estimation and my Scottish morality resented being wheedled out of a few rupees .   Something of his brokenness that night came through however, he seemed to know he had come one time too many, yet had nowhere else to go and it was already late.  “Saman”, I asked,” …how do you keep going?  How do you cope with this day after day?”  His eyes lost their shiftiness and he looked me in the face and said, ‘like the earth we are here’.  I gave him what I could and he left, but his words stayed with me as I returned to my family comforts and the many assumptions of my life.

For who was I to judge who was deserving and who wasn’t, to resent an intrusion on a domestic evening at the end of a long day, to giving the equivalent of small change for me but which meant another family could eat that night?   It was messy this encounter of an unreliable man in need and a young well fed foreigner and yet somehow I think I was the one who received the greater gift that night.  Saman will have long forgotten that encounter yet here I am writing about it many years later.  For many people in the two thirds world just hope to make it through this day, to somehow still be standing at the end of it , to keep going through its’ many uncertainties and chance cruelties, to simply survive.   Just as the earth is still there when we wake up in the morning, so are the poor, and just as the earth has a humility about it , a taken for granted quality so have they.  They too are walked on, ignored, exploited, abused, providing the back drop of the lives of others, invisible (when did you last consciously think of the ground you walk on?).

And yet they survive, endure, maintain their dignity, and look us in the eye and see into our souls seering  us with a fierce grace even as they accept a gift from us.  For their lives remind us that we haven’t really a clue what life can be like.  We can take airplane flights and have holidays in their world and think we know it, we can even stay there for years and still not get it at all.   A father has to lie and cheat sometimes to keep food on the table for his family, whom am I to judge?  The moral and financial power may seem to have been all on one side in that late night encounter, but I wonder , I wonder.   I was so out of my depths I didn’t even realise it.   My naivety encountered an ancient wisdom hard won, ‘like the earth we are here’.

Those words remain in my soul as I live in a society of consumerism and the endless selfie, of aspiration for comfort and convenience.   Like everyone else here I continue to play in the shallows while off in the distance the deep ocean roars, where deep calls to deep and the day to day survivors adept in these depths are humanity’s truest and greatest souls.  Like the earth we are here.

Like the earth we are here