Where is the Kingdom of Heaven?
Indoor Plumbing is not the objective sign of God's favor and goodness towards us.
The children pray before their lunch. Photo by Matt Kennedy
What day is it? Is it Saturday? I’m pretty sure it’s Saturday. Today we’re going back to Kuinde* to walk around the neighborhood—a one-mile square slum packed full of thousands of people in tiny tin houses. This piece, about an up and coming ballet dancer, includes a fair description of what life is like:
In Karen, an affluent quarter of Nairobi, is Kuwinda. Viewed from the air, this ramshackle island of corrugated iron is surrounded by leafy green and azure blue dots: back yards and swimming pools belonging to the slum’s wealthy neighbors. When a fire swept through Kuwinda in late March, razing hundreds of homes, the charred earth and buckled metal only heightened the contrast. It’s a tale of two cities, but it’s under the corrugated roofs and not the dappled shade of trees that Joel Kioko grew up. “It’s dirty, obviously, but it’s a good place,” he says. “It’s home.” Sixteen-year-old Kioko is not like the other teenagers from Kuwinda. Kioko is the boy from the slum made good. He’s found fame and his calling as Kenya’s current ballet prodigy – an internationally trained performer who was recently offered a full scholarship to the English National Ballet School.
For most Americans who visit places like Kuinde, it is the lack of plumbing, that most essential kind of infrastructure, that most shocks them. A working loo is such an unquestioned part of life that it is hard to notice anything else when it is missing. For me, though, as I’ve visited Karen over the years—the first time I came was in 2009, I think this is my fourth visit—it’s been fascinating to see the growing contrast between American culture, especially around the rearing of children, and that of Kenya. I don’t think it should be too controversial to say that American culture is disintegrating and that children, especially, are the focal point of its decadence and demise. What people think and believe about children and childhood has radically shifted in my own lifetime. This is not the case for the residents of this tiny slum. The brief generations of children coming through our preschool enjoy a continuity of assumptions about what it means to be human and what is the task before them. Assumptions, I would argue, more in keeping with reality.
To narrow down all the impossibly various and not distillable swirling ideas into only one, my thoughts and feelings about the word “blessed” have been overturned by being allowed to serve the children of Kuinde. Like most people the world over, even though, as a Christian, I didn’t admit it to myself, I assumed the sign of God’s blessing was material wealth. What else could it be? If you have indoor plumbing, it is God’s blessing upon you. You may not “deserve” it, but certainly, the working loo undergirds your sense of reality being what it is. You aren’t cursed if you have indoor plumbing. You may not be that good of a person, but you can’t be that bad either.
It’s almost impossible not to believe this, even if you say you don’t, because it must be true. As human beings, we have to be remade in the image of Christ to even begin to countenance the idea that the riches of God’s grace do not necessarily translate into a bigger bank account. This is such a basic human assumption it’s as hard to analyze as what it feels like to breathe air.
Recently I wasted a lot of time watching a dust-up online between two people arguing about the American heritage of slavery. One person was saying that the African people who were brought to America, even though it was a very wicked and bad thing to have happened to them (this person wasn’t saying it was good), nevertheless were ultimately “better off,” at least in subsequent generations. Witness the fact that almost all African American people would by no means choose to live in Africa in the year of our Lord twenty-twenty-three.
I don’t know how such a thing could possibly be calculated. What are the parameters of the term “better off?” Certainly, no parent wakes up in the morning and thinks, ‘I love living in this slum. This is great for my child.’ But every time I come back to Africa and then go back to America, two things strike me, almost like a blow. The first is that children, in Africa, are still desired and considered to be a blessing. And the second thing is how differently behaved the children are (not the children I know personally in America who are all very lovely, but the children I see online and elsewhere). Indoor plumbing notwithstanding, nor the enormous differences between the rich and the poor, and the corruption and political upheaval endemic in so much of Africa, greeting rows of little Kenyan children raised in a slum but who have been given an immeasurable and now squandered, indeed, spat upon gift—self-control—makes these lines jangle across my spiritual consciousness in groans too deep for words:
He said:
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.11 “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
You can’t use the ordinary human calculation of what is good and what is evil to measure the works of God. Americans don’t have good infrastructure because they are good people. There are more curious and interesting explanations for why the West is, at least right now, so wealthy. Likewise, Africa, in its desire to have the “good things” of life, would do well to look sideways at the West and keep their own council. I pray they don’t, for example, adopt the American view of the family. I hope they will never be tempted to think that children are not a gift from God. I wish they would never mistake the acquisition of material wealth as any kind of “happiness” worth having.
The fact is that all people everywhere are wicked and evil, but God often has mercy in the midst of our dark troubles. He often rescues his creatures out of the various pits they dig for themselves and each other. But if you don’t even know that you are in a pit, you really are in the worst kind of way.
Have a nice day!
*I have gone back and forth with the spelling of this town inside a town over the last ten years or so. Just when I was confidently writing “Kuwinda” somehow I had to unlearn it for “Kuinde.” I think there is at least one other way to spell it.