The Hidden Life

Living words

The Angelus, Jean-François Millet, 1857

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch

He is standing in his usual spot beside the left-turn only sign under the highway overpass. In his hand, a worn chunk of rough cardboard: “Anything helps. God bless.”

He stares straight ahead, not meeting the gaze of drivers who pull up beside him to wait for the left-turn signal. He engages only when addressed, and then hesitantly. She’s given him a few dollars once or twice before. He’s always subdued but friendly. Well-mannered even.

He’s youngish. About my own age, she guesses. Mid-length hair that looks like it was once nicely cut, maybe a year or so ago. However, it’s the glasses that stand out. Bold, strong frames—surprisingly stylish. An appropriate look for a performing musician or an actor. Whatever brought this guy to the streets can’t have happened that long ago.

She’s been passing him under this bridge on Sundays for at least six months, maybe more. Some days he’s here; sometimes he’s gone for several weeks in a row. Every time, she hopes he’s been able to get off the street.

Today is different, however. She’s glad he’s still here. Last night, she’d had a dream.

A young man, same bold glasses, same reluctant smile. She sees him scrambling to a fenced-off area along the highway, sees the ratty blankets and the makeshift tables, the scattered detritus of castoffs collected to make a residence. He crawls inside a gap in the fence, where a young woman awaits him. He hands her some food. She accepts it wearily, gratefully. In the dream, she sees the young woman is heavily pregnant. There’s a deep, infected cut on the woman’s leg, and she can see they need help.

When she wakes up, she knows. This is an assignment. Mary and Joseph. I have to do something.

She slows now beside him, rolling down her window. In the passenger seat beside her, her young son holds the closed container of warm, Brazilian bean stew in a box on his lap.

“Hey,” she says gently, approaching him with a quiet caution, as one might a deer in the wild. “I know this is probably going to sound really weird, but last night I had a dream about you.”

She rushes on, realizing how badly that came out.

“I mean, it was about you and someone else. I saw you going to this place outdoors to sleep, and I saw that there was a pregnant woman with you.”

The words are a statement, but they come out as a question. His full attention is on her now, and she sees his eyes suddenly glisten with tears. He doesn’t deny her question, but neither does he confirm it. He’s listening, wary. He’s used to the streets. Everyone has an angle.

“Look, I know it may seem weird, but I felt like the Lord was telling me to make this for you.”

She takes the warm container of food and holds it out to him. Cars start honking behind her, and she realizes the left-turn signal has gone yellow.

“Look, I’ll pull over up there so I can give it to you.” She points to the right side of the road past the intersection. “I brought you a few other things as well.” He nods, still wary, but allows a small smile. She pulls back into the main lane and heads to the side of the road. Fortunately, traffic is light.

Turning on the hazards, she reaches into the back seat and grabs the blankets. The guy in the bold glasses comes over. She offers the warm food and blankets, which he gladly accepts. Opening the food, he immediately digs in with one of the spoons she brought.

“Hey, it’s okay. You can keep the container,” she says, noticing him gulping the food. “It’s enough for a couple people. I was hoping it might last you a day or two,” she adds lamely, belatedly realizing he has no way to refrigerate it.

“Thanks,” he says, still chewing.

“Hey, do you need anything else? I could come back tomorrow.” She’s thinking about the wound she saw in the dream.

“Yeah, I could use some socks—and a toothbrush and razor. And shaving cream. Could you get some for my friend too?”

“A woman?” she asks.

“No, he’s a guy.”

“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow then. Probably mid-morning.”

The next morning, he’s at the underpass again, and this time his friend is with him. The dark-bearded friend looks at her suspiciously, but her school-age son in the seat beside her seems to put them both at ease.

Wonder why I dreamed there was a woman? Maybe there is. Doesn’t matter, really. It made me feel like I had to do something. She hands over the items he’s requested, learns his name, then drives away.

* * *

Later that evening while making dinner, she tells her husband about the meeting. He knew about her dream and agreed she should do something. She mentions how there was no woman with them—but maybe they just didn’t want to talk about her. They didn’t seem like addicts, but it’s hard to tell. Something has made them take to the streets. It doesn’t matter anyway.

“Hey, we should start a ministry for people like this,” her husband offers. “We could get donations and buy socks and toiletries and stuff and hand them out to people on the street.”

Her heart sinks. A heaviness comes with the words, and all her joy deflates. Maybe, but He only showed me this one. She shakes her head. “This isn’t about a ministry.”

---

This desire to start a ministry when you’ve only been shown to love the one in front of you seems to be at the heart of a lot of our society’s problems. Instead of loving our neighbor in a one-on-one way, we instinctively look to create programs and structures. We strategize for some system to take care of “the problem”: government, church program, NGO, technology—anything that replaces the messiness and cost of the personal relationships involved in loving our fellow humans. It’s so much easier to deal with systems designed to alleviate anonymized problems than it is to love individual human beings.

Perhaps we want the rules that become necessary when dealing with a large group of people, so that we won’t have to set boundaries with the one person that we’re connected to directly. Mostly, I think, we just don’t want to endure the personal cost.

Saving the world

If we look toward the Machine future we’re being offered, this tendency is only going to get stronger. Effective Altruism would tell us to pass by the “one” and to get on with the bigger, better work of “saving the world.” But is that what Jesus—the One who actually came to “save the world”—did?

As Jeffrey Bilbro of Front Porch Republic said recently at a Regent College lecture about living as creatures in a Machine age, Jesus’ ministry was marked by inefficiency and partiality. He didn’t try to fix all of humanity’s problems.

“Jesus never tells us to love the world,” Bilbro points out. “God loves the world, but Jesus tells us to love our neighbor.” While it can be tempting to automate acts of love to avoid the small, inefficient work of love and care, it’s not what Jesus modeled for us, Bilbro says.

“Jesus does good things slowly,” he adds, quoting Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama: “God walks slowly because He is love.”

Bilbro’s words capture what made my friend’s heart sink at the mention of systematizing into a ministry her care for the one individual she had been shown in a dream:

“The relationship is the point…. These things are slow, they’re inefficient, they’re difficult, but they’re all practices that constitute relationships of attention and care between myself and those I’m called to love. Love indeed “has its speed,” and when we try to violate the speed, when we try to automate it, we forego the opportunity to have the God who is Himself love abide among us.”

“As tempting as it might be to employ more efficient means, we have to refuse technologies that promise to automate our relationship with the world and each other.”

Living the words

As a writer, I have been called to use written words, which are, in fact, among our earliest technologies. However, I do not put much faith in words. They’re necessary, but words alone do not cause change.

More than a dozen years ago, at the end of my Master of Journalism degree, I went through a time of severe disillusionment. All of my life I have felt called to use my writing to communicate. I had hoped, as many of us do, that by telling others’ stories, I could inspire change in the world.

I came out of the degree much less convinced about the efficacy of words. So many of my colleagues seemed to believe that if they simply wrote about injustices, exposing them, that somebody, somewhere would eventually do something to alleviate the injustices.

I was less convinced. To expect somebody—some “adults” somewhere—to do something seemed now like a childish way to approach the world. We are all called to affect change, and change comes by actions, not by words. I still believed journalism was important to expose deeds of darkness, but in our post-truth world, I could see that it’s no longer enough. Of course, it was never enough. Journalism has a built-in problem, and that is its problem-focus. On one level, it has to be done. On another, it becomes part of the problem by constantly pointing at what is wrong with the world. It’s a conundrum I haven’t solved and probably won’t.

So leaving J-school, I started making plans for what I called “the alternate life.” I sold my house and set off on a course to start a small regenerative farm with a community attached. I felt like I had to lead by example because words alone would never be enough. I’m still on that journey. And I’m still utterly convinced that actions are what matter most.

Show, don’t tell

There is a truism in writing: “Show, don’t tell.” It means writers should paint impactful pictures that create the emotion they’re trying to express, rather than tell us how to feel or respond. I believe this is true of life as well. Show us what you believe by your actions, and then you won’t have to tell us. Or at least, your actions will be louder than your words.

What I like about the lives of the saints (then and now) is that this is what they do. They themselves are that impactful painting, the Image. Their lives speak in a way that cannot be easily refuted, disputed or indeed affirmed with words. They are the message. Feeble words cannot adequately respond to their lives. Only living words—embodied truth—have the power to do so.

In The Hidden Life—the new section of Missives From the Edge I’m introducing—I’ll be writing about people who quietly and habitually do small things with great love. Not big, systematic, programmatic things. Slow, messy, inefficient things that don’t always make immediate sense. Some of these people will be doing these things through for-profit businesses, in a section I call Candle, and others through their everyday, otherwise unremarkable lives. In some way, they are doing small things with great love. In short, those I profile in The Hidden Life and Candle sections will be everyday people doing stuff that gives me hope. Maybe they will give you hope, too.

I believe the entire world is looking for examples of God with skin on—for modern-day incarnations of Christ. This is what it means to be a Christian (little Christs). In the truest definition of the word, I believe that this is what it means to be a saint—however, I’m not holding these people up as saints, nor would they want me to. They’re just people trying to embody the love of God in their ordinary, quiet, unassuming lives.

It is my conviction that small deeds—done in hiddenness and with great love—are what actually change the world. It’s what Jesus showed us.

PS—These profiles will be randomly interspersed with the type of content you’ve seen here thus far. If you know someone who you think would be a fit for one of these sections, please let me know. Two caveats: I won’t likely profile individuals associated with non-profits, and individuals chosen will fit with my personal definition of what gives me hope.

“What’s wrong with the stories of modernity, progress and technology that they have brought us to this point? What are the alternatives? Whatever they are, I’m convinced they can only be shown to people through practice. Writers and intellectuals like me are all very well, but things will only really change when enough people get together and start to live differently. This is how change often happens in times of widespread collapse: not by waging war against the crumbling centre, but by creating parallel ways of being.”

—Paul Kingsnorth in an interview with Johnathon Van Maren, in the European Conservative, April 2022

Your voice is needed, and we’d love to hear it in the comments below. However, if you choose to abandon the voice of love in your comments, remember that you are abandoning all of your beneficial power.