Canter Bridge

You haven’t seen rain until you’ve raced through one of these tropical downpours, water in the street rushing at your leg above the sock level. Everywhere else in the world, rain falls. Here it is thrown down from some preternatural height at unnatural speed. It’s a wonder the whole country doesn’t wash away. Occasionally a chunk of it does, leaving a reddish slit where simple houses once stood, and a row of coffins amid grieving relatives in the morning paper three days later.

Apart from such intermittent tragedy, rainy season in this land of extremes obeys a splendid rhythm. Living this close to the equator requires no alarm clock. Instead, natural light streams through the window at precisely the same hour every morning. One awakes to a visual bath of green earth, blue sky, and life-giving sun. As morning passes late in the dry season, the humidity of the approaching rains crescendoes, promises, threatens, and then retreats by evening. Each day moves a bit closer to the climax that is the first hard rain. Birds noisily ‘beg for water’, as the local folklore would explain their frantic singing in the month before the rains come. The neighbors look slightly aggrieved as they chase the dry season’s final dust from their carports and sidewalks, swinging their brooms as the sun sets and the evening cools.
Finally, one day each year, teasing showers give way to the first downpour. Just after lunch, thunder announces that this time it’s for real. And then, it rains.

A wall of water’s approach appeals to many senses. Huele a agua, my neighbor Elizabet nods knowingly. ‘It smells like rain’. Elizabet is no meteorologist and her words have less to do with nature than with us. Unless we both intend to get very wet, this conversation is coming to an end, she means, with the wry resignation that seasons the words of people who live under weather that is bigger than they are.
Across the city’s aluminum roofs, the water pounds out its approach. Not having grown up hearing the rain arrive, I still grin every time I do. And then you watch it coming at you down the street, a straight line of bouncing drops rising up off the asphalt with a predictable fraction of the force that hurtled them to earth. I’ve never seen rain like this rain.

Like so many ticos, Rosidalia appears to have sprung from the land that surrounds her. The translucent brown of her complexion framed by auburn hair perfectly matches the red-brown landscape that makes a Sunday afternoon drive through volcanic countryside with the family a feast for the eyes. For my tastes, there may be no more handsome population than the reddish browns and coffee eyes of Colombians and Costa Ricans.

Rosi looks at me now, across the working surface of our tabletop. She is angry and in full swing, not at me, but at the injustice which she articulates in warming prose and punctuates with a chop of her arm. Her occasional grin as her rhetoric rises tells me she knows I comprehend her sermonizing and forgive its excesses.

When I first met Rosidalia fourteen years ago, she scared me to death. Newly arrived to Latin America, I was only too aware of my naiveté, too conscious of the drunken lurches of my Spanish, too far from home and in over my head. Rosi was never one of those warm, welcoming types who only wants every one to feel happy. She crisply organized the classroom’s too-thin air with her critique of the profe’s point of view. Never unfair but always clear that there was more than one ‘expert’ in this room, she left me gasping for relevance and wishing she were the prof, and I strolling alone in some far-away park.

One later morning those years ago, she burst into my office with livid indignation to protest about a foreign prof and his paternalistic ravings. ‘That Costa Rica that he talks about’, as my eyes struggled to remind her that I was not her foe, ‘is not the Costa Rica I know!’. She turned to me with thumb and four fingers pressed together and held aloft, the ritual pose of someone with something really important to say. David, she addressed me by my mere name, without title or honorific, for the first time ever, ‘There is not just one Costa Rica. There are two!’

I grabbed the arms of my chair in preparation for the next onslaught. ‘That lacadaisical, anything-goes, good-for-nothing, mediocrity of a country that he thinks is Costa Rica is not my country! That place exists’, she allowed with barely contained rage, ‘but I don’t live in it and I am not its citizen! My Costa Rica is capable and dignified and responsible. That’s my Costa Rica, and he knows nothing about it!’

I suppose I was honored to be let in on this cathartic drama, though I have no memory of how that conversation ended. I assume it included my mumbled apologies for the sins of others, and perhaps Rosidalia went away wondering what she had expected from the terrified profe behind the desk. I never asked her why she came to me with all that, though she grinned with faint bemusement a decade later when I told her she had changed my life that day, had given me a lens through which my Anglo-Saxon eyes could see and understand her América, had left me forever after assigning boorishness and violence to a Latin America that was not Rosidalia’s way, was not that of millions of her compeers, and need not be mine.

‘There is not just one Costa Rica’, I sometimes whisper to myself without even thinking of Rosi or her delivery to my little life of a truth more profound than even she may have known.

When it rains like this, normal conversation comes to a halt. The liquid artillery which beats down upon our tin roofs means talking will have to wait. The phone rings, but the rain is too loud to hear who’s calling. ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to call back when it’s not raining so hard’, you yell foolishly into the receiver, not knowing if you’re speaking to a telemarketer, the hospital emergency room, or your best friend. The goldfish in our backyard pond swim with their fins sticking out of the water, as though even for them this downpour blurs the primeval boundaries between the heavens, the sea, and the dry ground.

I had a brief, animated conversation with a Costa Rican woman this afternoon about what the birds do when it rains this hard. Oddly, it seemed a worthy discussion, traced out with all the earnestness with which New Englanders predict the first snow and the seasonal closure of the ice cream shops.

Now, a decade-and-a-half later, Rosidalia and I are allies in a common task. She is the president of the board of the institution I lead. She is my boss now, I like to remind her, though she shakes her head dismissively at such a vertical notion. She has become my comrade in a thousand small battles which by now must amount to a campaign. She is a woman who knows her mind, a friend who has let me understand her suffering, a colleague whose mind I can now read from across a heated board room or from the other side of the table around which the two of us now work out an institutional knot of no few twists. And right now she is really on a roll.

‘It’s just like with the water’, she tells me with a flourish more seasoned and inclusive than her ‘two nations’ discourse of many years ago. Where Rosi once would have instructed me, now she is content merely to place our mutual conundrum in its proper setting. ‘If there’s one thing we have much more of than we could ever need in this country, it’s water! And yet what happens? They end up having to ration our water for more days every year, even though we’re awash in the stuff for more than half the year. They just don’t plan. They just don’t think ahead. It’s too much to be endured!’

Rosi is not worried about the water, of course. She is facing off against an endemic vice of the culture she was born into, and an intermittent adversary in the institution we both serve. Rosidalia is not here to talk. She is going to change a couple inches of her world today.

Biblical faith bequeaths to its sons and daughters one vital conviction regarding our brief moment of human history: This is going somewhere. Biblical faith invites us to see our disparate stories as short chapters in a tale that will prove infinitely worthwhile when the telling of it is done.The person made wise by repeated hearing of the biblical story knows that her moment is for building blessing into the future. You and I will be forgotten, she anticipates, but some future generation will breathe grateful satisfaction in a heavenward slant because of foundations I laid down today.

In the delicate dance of living with providence, one cooperates with history’s Teller to make this brief moment productive rather than terminal, life-giving rather than death-dealing, a blessing and not a curse. ‘Random acts of kindness’, which the bumper sticker exhorts one to practice, become not so much the caprice of an afternoon commute, but rather the delightful stewardship of one’s small treasury of minutes. Insofar as possibilities wander into my small sphere, such a person tells himself, they will emerge poised to bless the stranger.

This is why a soul shaped like Rosidalia’s rebels against passive resignation to how things are. The future is malleable in our hands, she believes. The circumstances of this moment are rich coins in our palms, to be invested with ebullient cunning. The future, she insists, will to some important degree end up as what we shape it to be today. With some thought, with some effort, with some costly intelligence applied to the task, six months of rain offers more than twelve of liquid abundance. Rosidalia wants those who fall under her influence to face forward, not to mumble and stare at their shoes. t is a contagious fixing of the eyes on the steady horizon, resisted chiefly by those who find gray mediocrity the most manageable kind of safety.

Sometimes the Bible motivates its readers to face forward by sketching out a vision of the future. Too often converted into the papier maché landscapes of manic futurologists—the technical term for sketches of time’s end is eschatology—such glimpses of humanity’s destination are powerfully formative of the lives who walk in their light. If, as the prophet Isaiah’s opening ‘vision’ has it, the nations will one day flow against gravity right up to God’s own house, there to learn how to walk, then the exhortation goes out to the prophet’s own generation to start shuffling by that wisdom’s light right now. If nations will one day beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, if their military academies will one day be repossessed by agricultural colleges, then hearts attuned to a pacific future will grow gentle and forgiving in the roughness of today.

People nourished on this story face forward. The values and the virtues of God’s good future take up residence in the ordinariness of today’s trembling moments. And then they plan, because they know today will have mattered when we arrive at tomorrow.

Jesus loved to tell a story about a man who went away on a very long trip, leaving behind three deputies of uneven intelligence. To each, he gave a gold coin of a certain worth. One version of this story explains that Jesus told it ‘because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately.’ Apparently, he intended it as counsel for the long haul.

One of the three recipients of this bounty was possessed of a toadstool’s imagination and a bureaucrat’s taste for control. He buried his coin right where he knew he could always find it. Trapped in the small circle of measureable virtues, this poor man had no idea that safety lay in facing forward, not in cautiously controlling his very short allotment of time. The present, for him, was a possession to hoard, not wealth to invest. He kept it, all right. And lost everything that mattered.

The other two fellows were more imaginative, though each had received a bequest whose amount was known only to him. Each of them doubled his money, and presented it proudly to his master when, ‘after a long time’, he came back. After he’d had a hot shower and called them to account, two of them presented their earnings with a satisfied exuberance and were rewarded with both words and further opportunity. ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’, their travelling master congratulated them. No doubt Jesus enjoyed the smiles on his listeners’ faces as they learned this outcome. ‘You have been faithful over a little. Now I will set you over much. Enter into your master’s joy!’

Hearts shaped on such stories understand that the cycles of life, so celebrated by paganisms ancient, modern, and postmodern, are not the fundamental shape either of my life or of the humanity of which I am one tiny part. That honor belongs to the journey and its destination.In his splendid The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill calls upon one of the twentieth century’s most influential theologians to make the point:

‘Nothing that is worth doing’, wrote Reinhold Neihbuhr, ‘can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.’ That accomplishment is intergenerational may be the deepest of all Hebrew insights.

The array of control freakeries which torment our hearts feed on our confusion about the future. We struggle to understand that it it not ours. It belongs to someone else.

The habit of facing forward requires the simultaneous execution of two feats. On the one hand, we shape our present so that there might be blessing for future persons whom we cannot name. It is a task so sobering, costly, and satisfying that mediocrity and carelessness have no place. On the other, we let go of our hunger to control that future. It is not ours. It belongs to someone else.

One of Judaism’s lesser lights stated with eloquent brevity the consolation of pilgrims who live like this, giving themselves to a task they find too worthwhile to evade. It almost sounds like something someone said accidentally, until you face forward, set your eye on the horizon, and tune your ear. ‘It is not yours’, Rabbi Tarfon advised in the Mishah, ‘to finish the task.’