Somebody Else's Country

Rangi left school at fifteen and made a decision that afternoon he has never said out loud.

It was not dramatic. There was no scene and nobody threw him out. His father needed him, the money was needed, and in that year and that place it was the ordinary thing, and three other boys in his class went the same month.

He can read. That needs saying immediately, because people assume, and the assumption is part of what this article is about. He reads perfectly well. He reads the paper, the manuals, the small print on a contract, and he has caught two mistakes in the small print of a contract in his life, both of them in his favor.

What he decided at fifteen is a different thing, and it is this: that books are somebody else's country.

Not that he could not read them. That they are not for him. That there is a kind of person who sits down with a book on purpose, and that person went further at school than he did, and the whole business of reading for the sake of it belongs to them in the way that a language belongs to the people who grew up in it.

He has organized about forty years around never being caught out on that.

He does not say what he has and has not read. He asks a question when somebody mentions a book, and he asks it well, and by the time they have answered he has enough to be pleasant with. If a passage is going round a room he counts ahead and works out which one is his and reads it four times silently before it gets to him.

That is a great deal of quiet work over forty years, and nobody has ever seen one minute of it.

His granddaughter is six.

She stayed over in the summer, and at bedtime she handed him a book and got into the bed and said, in the way six-year-olds say things that are not requests, "You do the voices."

He read her four pages.

He did the voices badly and she corrected him twice and told him he was doing the bear wrong.

And afterward, coming down the stairs, his daughter said, "You are good at that."

And Rangi said, before he could stop himself, "I have never read out loud to anybody."

He is sixty-eight.

Now let me ask you how old you were.

Because if this is yours there is an age attached to it. Fifteen, or eleven, or nine. There was a moment, probably not dramatic, when you filed yourself into one category and books into another, and you have never once revisited the filing.

Consider who is in the room

Paul writes to a church full of ordinary people in a port city and tells them to look around at each other.

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong.1 Corinthians 1:26 to 27

Now let me handle this passage carefully, because it is regularly misused and I have no interest in adding to that.

This is not Paul saying learning is bad.

He is one of the best educated men in the New Testament. He argues from Greek poets, he handles the Old Testament like a specialist, and he is writing a letter of considerable intellectual difficulty to make this point. Two verses later he is not telling the clever ones to become stupid.

What he is doing is describing who God actually called, and telling that congregation to look around the room and notice.

Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble. That is a description of a real church. And the point of it is not that the wise are excluded, because plainly some were there. It is that the entry did not run through them.

So hear this said over you, coming down a staircase at sixty-eight. You are exactly the kind of person God has been calling from the beginning, and the country you decided was somebody else's has had people like you living in it since the first century. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who teaches in a person, and He has never once checked what age anybody left school.

Now let me name the wound properly, because I said I would and because it has been running for fifty-three years.

You were not given a choice at fifteen.

That is the thing under all of it. Your father needed you, the money was needed, and you did the right and generous thing that a boy in that position does. And somewhere in doing it, you took on a story about yourself that was never true and that nobody would have told you if they had known you were taking it on.

You did not fail at school. You left it, for somebody else's sake.

And the forty years of quiet work since, the counting ahead in rooms, the good question that buys you cover, the silent four readings before a passage reaches you: none of that was deceit. It was a man protecting himself from a humiliation that was never actually coming, and it has cost you a great deal, and nobody has ever seen it.

You are able to read this book, and you have been able the whole time. The Word says the unfolding of God's words gives light and gives understanding to the simple, which is not a word about intelligence but about people without training, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the unfolding.

There was a movement five hundred years ago in a poor and cold country that looked at exactly this situation and did the most practical thing anybody did in that century. They built a school in every parish, so that the son of a man who worked with his hands could read, and they did it because they refused to accept that this book belonged to a particular class of person.

Their whole point was that there is no such country as the one you decided books live in.