I should have sung but didn’t have the nerve. An American friend and I had just walked down dirt paths in a village outside of Dabòn, through corn and sugarcane fields. The plots are relatively fertile, but small and farmed just by hoe and machete, muscles and sweat, so the yields are often not enough to sustain a family.

Where we turn toward the market, a family has built a small house with a tin roof. Good to see them again. The man, a carpenter, invites us into the family’s living room/workshop, where he’s shaving down a wood door. His shirt is off, smile is open, laugh is quick. Sweat glistens on his fifty-year-old body taut from hard daily labor.

We talk. I translate—from Creole to English and back—between him and my friend, Steve, a businessman on his first visit to Haiti. Then the carpenter says, slouching in regret, “I have nothing to offer you for hospitality. I want to give you something, but can’t afford anything.” There’s a good chance his family might not always have enough food. Maybe he can’t afford to send all his kids to school (only fifty percent of children in Haiti attend elementary school). He would feel the strains of poverty in many daily decisions.

Then he lights up: “But I can sing.”

And he sang. Beautifully. A hymn about God’s love and grace. Loudly with his head thrown back in that little workshop. And it was one of those moments when the ground—in this case, the packed dirt floor—suddenly turns holy, making you want to step out of your sandals like Moses, this time before the holiness that arrives when someone opens his spirit and somehow God’s Spirit sings forth.

He finished, then said, “Now it’s your turn!”

I cannot sing. But I should have warbled out “Amazing Grace” or something. Alas, my faith and generosity—and indeed it would have taken faith to sing with the hope that God would transform it into a gift—can falter even on holy, packed dirt.

Haiti’s beauty and misery are regularly humbling: A friend in Port-au-Prince who can’t afford to put windows and doors on the tiny house/shack he’s just built for his wife and three children. Thousands of kidnappings during recent years of political/social upheaval. A parent’s daily courage amidst this insecurity to find a way for the family to keep living. The cries of another woman being abused somewhere in the village at night. The unheard cries of the poorest of children who live in involuntary domestic servitude. The songs of faith and thanksgiving rising up on Sunday mornings. The prayers for miracles that go unanswered. Life expectancy that hovers at fifty years. The glimmers of hope, person by person, in churches and schools and communities where people are making changes to their lives and their country.

In the midst of all this, frankly, my Master of Divinity degree can feel quite superfluous. Not only do Job-like questions (seared into one’s spirit every day in Haiti) remain inscrutable, but I also don’t have the skills of a medical doctor or the resources of a billionaire. I’m not a potable water expert or a government trade representative who can open doors to create thousands of jobs.

But despite how greatly they’re needed, better infrastructure and more police wouldn’t be enough. That’s an easy thing for a full-bellied, middle-class American to say, but my confidence about this comes, from working with refugees coming out of Kosovo into Albania and with people I’ve come to know in Haiti: despite the need for it to be distributed more fairly around the world, it’s true that people don’t live on rice alone. And so I’ve felt called to work alongside Haitians in this largely Christian country who are seeking to change their communities—to see transformation in churches and in individual lives through Scripture and prayer, hoping that such transformations by grace may lead to other transformations in society.

In his book Temptation, I think PTS professor emeritus Diogenes Allen describes well the struggle to respond both to the horrible physical hunger of too many in the world and to the spiritual hunger in us all:

…Jesus retained that craving [for what the world cannot give], and never lost sight of it as he faced the hard fact of human hunger. He saw both sides: the terrible suffering of people who lacked bread, and the fact that we do not live by bread alone. He did not reject or ignore the second half because of the first. The strain of keeping aware of both is terrible, but it is a strain that is unavoidable, if we are to find God. We can fail even to see that there is a second half because we attend only to the more obvious need people have for bodily sustenance.

“For too long we did all the thinking for our people,” a Haitian Methodist pastor in his sixties recently told me in his small office in Port-au-Prince. “It was a mistake. We need to find ways to help them think for themselves.”

He was eager for his churches to integrate the Bible studies and Christian education materials that, since 2002, I’ve been part of creating with Beyond Borders, a Christian development organization that has worked on education and children’s rights in Haiti for fifteen years. Beyond Borders calls this program Living Words. (Our other programs focus on children’s rights, literacy, and leadership development and teacher training.)

Searching with Haitian colleagues for new education opportunities, we saw that lectio divina, an ancient form of Scripture meditation and prayer that I learned in Professor Allen’s spiritual theology class, could be a great spiritual tool in Haiti. With sixty percent adult illiteracy and a dearth of books (including Bibles) in the language of Creole, this could offer many a first chance to interact with Scripture. And not insignificant byproducts include opportunities for leaders to act as facilitators instead of as the sole proprietors of God’s Word, experiences in participatory education where most education consists of rote memorization, and chances to sit together and listen for God and follow where that leads.

So via experiences in many villages and cities, lots of trial and error, and the work of exceptional Haitian leaders, we’ve developed a twelve-page booklet and offer training seminars around the country in lectio divina for adults. We’ve also adapted the practice for children in Sunday schools and schools around the country. More than 10,000 adults and 5,000 children have asked for and received the materials and training. A new Creole theology discussion booklet is being printed on a large scale. We’re in the development process for a new Bible-study-discussion-booklet/mini-theological-tract on children’s rights that encourages the church to better care for society’s most vulnerable (about 300,000 children in Haiti live away from their homes in unpaid domestic servitude).

Like any spiritual work, it takes both careful thought and faith: these kind of seeds can take time to germinate and grow. Yet one is encouraged by experiences like sitting outside on rough-hewn benches with a group of farmers, market women, teachers, and a pastor, under the shade of a mango tree, reading Scripture prayerfully, listening to how we each hear God’s living Word in the words. And halfway through the session one sees a wizened farmer and a young mother each holding the booklet upside down—ashamed to reveal their illiteracy, but fully welcomed and participating wisely.

Elsewhere, a school for the first time has children sit in a circle to do Bible study—and then finds the pedagogical dynamic of the whole school constructively called into question. Young people sit together to meditate on Scripture in a gang-controlled slum. A teenage girl who was afraid to speak, after two months of group lectio divina has found her voice and confidence in the Bible study and beyond. Protestants and Catholics read the Bible together. A young pastor learns that he doesn’t just get to/have to tell everyone what to do; seeking to know God can be done even more fruitfully together. I sit in a church’s candlelight with people who struggle daily for life, and we listen to and talk about Mary’s Magnificat, and each word sounds different to me than it has before.

“He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.” And I’m looking around the circle thinking, “Well, that just plainly isn’t true.” And then a young illiterate mother refers to the passage: “Like for Mary, God still blesses us—and blesses me—who are poor, who don’t have any place in society.” And a teacher hears this more as a psalm with longings for justice, more of a prayer that touches God’s desire for all people rather than a prophecy that is coming true any time soon. Someone says the church needs to help make this happen. A farmer says, “But it is coming true soon. When our lives are over, God will put everything right.” And for me, there in the candlelight I’m finding the words dissonant—as a psalm of sorrow, but also a prophecy of justice and a call to action; as a promise for eternal life, and a statement about life right now. All at the same time, with a depth and intimacy I hadn’t known before.

So I can’t sing, and I’m regularly humbled by how little I have to offer in the face of it all, but what an incredible privilege to be able to offer all I can. Having enough resources to meet the opportunities is a continual challenge, but it’s a gift to partner with people and churches to make this ministry possible. Part of what’s appealing about these partnerships is that I don’t think this is just about us giving and them receiving (a paternalistic missiology that we know can be counter to the liberating gospel).

That’s not to say those who are poorest and have the least resources don’t deserve our every effort. They do. But alongside their need for our help is a great need of ours: to hear their sorrow in suffering, to hear their understanding of Scripture’s meaning for our lives, and to hear their singing in faith.

Kent Annan (M.Div., 1999) and his wife, Shelly Satran Annan (M.Div., 2000), began working in Haiti with Beyond Borders in 2003, after Kent worked for three years in the Seminary’s Office of Communications/Publications. They returned to the U.S. for the birth of their daughter, Simone, and for Shelly to take a call as associate pastor in Vero Beach, Florida. Kent continues working full time for Beyond Borders and travels regularly to Haiti. To learn more, visit www.living-words.org. To contact Kent, email kent@beyondborders.net.

Printable pdf