Eyes of needles

A journey ends in uplifting disappointment

The poor have it. The rich need it. If you eat it, you’ll die. What is it?

A clever riddle is always a good riddle, but not if you’re the object of its sharper point. I’ll leave you to ponder the solution, which is to be found at the foot of the article, just above the “Share” button.

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The Gospel according to St Mark, chapter 14, verses 3 to 9:

And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head. And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, Why was this waste of the ointment made? For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor. And they murmured against her. And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me. For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always. She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.

There are three remarkable things to say about this episode, which is to be found in three of the four gospels. First, the location. It was at Bethany that Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist. It’s symbolically important that this scene, which marks the start of the process that saw Jesus denied, forsaken and betrayed, and involves the application of perfumed oil to Jesus’s skin, just like the oil gifted to Him at His birth, should take place at exactly the same spot.

Second, and third in fact, the line ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good. It is evident from the outset of His mission that Jesus’s entourage were not inhospitable to the poor. Jesus Himself approached social outsiders, hookers, tax barons, lepers, like Simon here in Bethany. He reached out to the underprivileged. And yet, here He speaks of them almost dismissively. Would it be uncharitable to translate Jesus’s words as: there will always be plenty of time to help the poor: they’re not going anywhere? Perhaps we need to consider the words that follow as conditioning this seemingly abrupt construction: me you have not always. Jesus knew, therefore, that His death was approaching.

Elsewhere in the gospels, we encounter the story in which Jesus tells a young man how he might enter the kingdom of Heaven (Mark Ch. 10 v. 21 et seq., edited):

Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven. How hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

The Bible is not an easy text. Are we under a moral obligation to liquidate our possessions, in order to give them to the poor, or are the poor plentiful enough that we will always have them to do good by? Are the poor rich men’s playthings, to assuage their sentiments of piety?

Nobody is anybody’s plaything, and any act of giving to the poor that constitutes an act of piety will bring the donor no closer to the kingdom of God. Because it is not the donation that is crucial; it is the frame of mind in which it’s given.

If you read through the Holy Bible and look for logical connections, you’re in for some rare treats, for God’s logic is not man’s logic. One might ask oneself whether much of what Jesus did was in the wisest vein: the confrontations with authority and large public gatherings. But one thing is clear from the gospels: you cannot be led by the nose into the kingdom of Heaven. You must find the way yourself, however you do it. There is no operating manual for Heaven, no step plan, no troubleshooting guide; plenty of FAQs, very few answers. If Jesus had come today, would He have given TED Talks? Spoken at Speakers’ Corner? Published a blog, like this blog? How do you know that I’m not Jesus, returned for the second coming? How did the people of Judaea know that 30 AD was the Son of Man’s first coming? How could they?

When Jesus was born, three wise men from the east remarked a new star in the heavens, and promptly set forth to discover its portent, egged on by some useful prophecies. Their names were supposedly Caspar, Balthazar and Melchior, though this is not information we have from the Bible itself. Open to question is: whether they were kings, where they came from, where they went to, and why they came. Only one gospel writer mentions them at all and he, Matthew, states what gifts they brought with them. We can imagine that the journey was not without its dangers, especially if the contents of their baggage should be discovered. Also in doubt are matters like whether they were alone; we think that they were probably astrologers (they saw a star ...). Only really one thing is certain about them: they were wise.

Why? Why did the Three Wise Men come to wherever it was they came to? (It wasn’t the stable, that much we know.) Much play is made of the symbolic importance of the gifts. Gold, for richness on this Earth (Wikipedia states: “gold is fairly obviously explained” and I beg to differ. It is in no way obvious that the Son of Man should be given gold); frankincense, a perfume, for deity; myrrh, an embalming oil, for death. Scholars have, in fairness, wildly speculated as to what happened to the baby shower subsequently.

The gold—as intimated—and the myrrh are both surprising, given later developments: of course, we don’t know how much gold was brought, but my guess is that it was spent by the time Jesus would have needed to enter through the eye of a needle. Myrrh, symbolic of death, is a macabre christening gift. It’d be comparable to gifting a coffin to a new-born nowadays. For the modern Christian, it is not death that is symbolised by the myrrh, for death itself is an inevitability of life. What this gift represents is the portent of the death of this particular child.

So, there you are, in Tehran or Yerevan (both potential localities for starting out). You’ve seen a star up there, and call a couple of friends, who confirm they saw it too. You all decide to pack a bag, gather together some symbolic gifts and hoist yourselves up onto camels to cross Eurasia and visit a newly born child whose name you don’t even know. One thousand miles. Camels, we are told, can walk a distance of around 30 miles a day. From Teheran to Bethlehem, or Nazareth, is therefore a journey that’ll take you two months, there and back. A modern equivalent would be driving at 35 miles an hour from London to Vladivostok TEN TIMES. Why do you do it?

The answer lies not in the concept of a gift as we know it today. In the law, a gift is a voluntary relinquishment of property in favour of another, third party. It is a property transfer. Right, title and possession, together with risk, pass from the donor to the donee. Upon transfer being consummated, the donor is relieved from all and any duties to insure, protect or maintain the gifted property, and these duties, in so far as of relevance, pass over to the donee. Some people think the Bible is long, but at least it wasn’t written by a lawyer.

The law of donation is permeated with words like “in favour”, “for the behoof of”, “for the benefit of”, “gifter”, “donor”, “recipient”, “donee”. Because the law regards donation as constituting a deprivation by the donor of something that was, and the enrichment of the donee with something that was hitherto not his property. But, in God’s world, property has no value. It simply exists, but no one could tell you that a fish is worth less than a tree if there weren’t markets there to tell you what fish cost and what wood costs. There are no markets in Heaven. So, what is the benefit in religious terms of a gift of gold to a baby, for a religion that places no value on gold as a means of enrichment? Well, there is a benefit, but not to the recipient. To the giver.

If you can grasp the first shall be last and the last shall be first or to man such things are not possible, but to God all things are possible or we must die in order to live then it will not pose an impenetrable barrier to understanding to conjure it is more blessed to give than to receive. The first ever recorded gifts were those brought at the culmination of a journey taking an entire month, over 1,000 miles. No wonder they knelt in adoration: their bums must have been red raw. But they didn’t do it to benefit Jesus. They did it to benefit themselves: not selfishly, an act of piety in the purest of senses. They didn’t know it would benefit them, but it did. That’s why there’s no record of what became of the gifts. That’s why there’s no record really of what became of the Magi. But that’s why they came. Any other interpretation according to our modern tenets of giving and receiving, for which this single act is the model, makes no sense whatsoever.

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Last June, I launched an appeal for the benefit of Abs, a friend of mine in The Gambia. I made a number of representations in good faith asking those who are able to consider the plight of an African man whom circumstance has decreed should bear great responsibility for his family and very little means with which to succour to it. The idea was to get him a car so he could set up in business as a taxi driver.

With 240 euros raised, the appeal stagnated and didn’t appear to be susceptible to getting moving. By publicising the appeal on LinkedIn, it came to the attention of professional appeal administrators in Nigeria, around six or seven of them, all told. When I pressed one of these congenial ladies and gentlemen for the particulars of what they could do for us and what was in it for them and how it worked financially, I grew wary. Essentially it boils down to me purchasing a list of e-mail addresses and spamming people. I never did find out how much the list would cost, but I declined.

Then, recently, came a spark of hope. A well-respected friend of mine, let’s call him Joe, took an interest in the matter. He asked “Can you lay your hand in the fire for Abs?” and I replied, “No. I can’t name any particular instance that convinced me he is false. But I cannot give you a guarantee that he isn’t.”

Go into your computer browser and type config, and you’ll probably first be asked whether you really want to do this, and then you’ll be admitted to a part of the programming that is likely unfamiliar to the average user. It is a list of parameters and settings and, for the vast majority of them, a decision needs to be taken as to whether the parameter in question is true or false. It’s a clever wording, I imagine because one could end up with common conceptions that make no sense: “You don’t want to do this?” “No,” and now the computer does it, because no after not gives a positive for a computer. Binary systems know only two states: true, or false.

Now that we hopefully understand what true and false mean, let us consider the following conundrum. Just quickly check: we are clear on what truth and falsity are? Because, you will appreciate that a computer doesn’t evaluate the absolute truth or falsity of a parameter, because it can’t. Only you can do that. It configures the parameter in accordance with the code that has been used to programme it: you can therefore encode a computer to recognise black as white, and vice versa. True and false mean that the selected parameter complies with the pre-set definition of what truth or falsity represents to the computer. Of course, you know that.

This is the conundrum: I trust Abs, but I can’t guarantee his reliability. (By the same token, I trust God, but I cannot guarantee His reliability, either, even though I place my entire faith in Him.)

If I ran a theatre, and a patron enquired of me, “When does the show end?”, even if the stage manager will have informed me of the time of curtain down, it would not be out of place for me to reply to the patron, “All things being equal, the curtain comes down at 11 o’clock.” I owe the patron no absolute obligation in that regard; at best, a best-efforts obligation, barring unforeseeable circumstances. In the Bible, the Book of Revelation describes in phantasmagorical detail the end of the world. It does not, however, put a time on that event. Because I cannot absolutely guarantee the time the show ends, I will issue a guarded estimate; but because the time the world ends is unknown, I can state it with certainty. These are subtleties that can get represented (or lost) in other languages (als/indien, wenn/als, lorsque/quand) but English tries to distinguish between when an event happens and if it happens, and this can have drastic consequences for truth. If an event happens at 11.05, that is predicted for 11 o’clock, the prediction is false—in the case where the when is predicted. In the case where the if is predicted, the prediction is true.

However, human beings are not binary machines. We know nuance, subtlety, implication and degree. We can tell light green from dark green. And we can tell half-truth from half-falsity, or we think we can. We are clever and sophisticated. That said, our ability to recognise degrees of truth poses a difficulty for us: how can we be sure that something is true? Is there a cat in the box or isn’t there, Mr Schrödinger? Well, in most cases, we can’t be sure, so we develop a standard that sets the bar a little lower. Things don’t need to be true or false; they need to be true or false enough. True enough is a standard used in courts of law. Enough means evidence that banishes reasonable doubt, but not all doubt.

How do I know that my true enough is the same as your true enough? Because enough can be like appetite and therefore determine whether lunch is a three-course meal or a sandwich, there can be no universal definition of true enough. Everyone decides for themselves. And, because the decision is made by the individual, who also sets the standard, there’s never any controversy. Not until they encounter contrary opinions. When that happens, those with input on the adequacy of the truth convene a final true enough. For instance, a jury cannot all decide guilt or innocence on their own standards. They must agree—under direction from the bench—what facts, if found proved, will determine the accused’s guilt. That works for a court verdict, because a court, like a computer, is a binary machine. What a court is not like is a board room negotiating table. There, fundamentally, high enough and low enough do battle until a deal is done and, if negotiation were honest, no one should be happy with the result.

In relation to Abs, Joe had made a handsome proposal: he would match all and any donations up to 1,500 euros, euro for euro. All that remained to be done was to persuade other people to put in 1,500 euros. What happened next was that a donation was made: 30 euros. And that was that.

Abs and Joe were acquainted because Joe had helped me out by sending some rice to Abs, a couple of weeks ago. Unbeknown to me, Abs contacted Joe and asked for some more rice. This was a bad idea. Joe has withdrawn his support, because he smells a scam. He doesn’t know, factually, that it’s a scam, but he smells it. He’s out. Like at a negotiating table, or a poker table.

Whether Joe is right to be out on the evidence is immaterial. It’s his decision and his true enough is what counts here. His offer was more than most gave.

This story has been a voyage for me. You’d have thought there is nothing simpler than a gift: no contract, no signatures, just money, from one party to another. Not even a 30-day trek on the back of a camel.

Of those I approached, there were some who used euphemisms to denote the reasons why they declined to give. Most, in fact, simply ignored the request. The articles I wrote were well read, and even shared, but they produced no donations. All those who donated, aside from one close contact on LinkedIn, were old friends of mine.

I am stopping the appeal. Not because I believe it’s a scam, or because Abs isn’t true, or even true enough, and really independent of Joe’s decision. There are a number of reasons, which boil down to a question of feasibility, on the one hand, and of human nature, on the other. Feasibly, the plan was never going to work, regardless of how well-meant the intentions were.

The target was 3,000 euros. Supposed I’d raised that, what next? Was I really going to send an almost perfect stranger 3,000 euros? The irony with organised charities is that they maintain local offices where the funds are deployed as well as central headquarters, which take care of fund-raising. Donors know that their donations will be spent wisely under the watchful eye of the charity’s own people. Then, some donors decline to give because the whole lot goes on administration. In the world of giving, one is not infrequently damned if one does, and damned if one doesn’t.

In terms of human nature, the appeal was as much of a starter as King Canute on a beach. The city of Las Vegas is built on speculation. Patrons speculate that they may win, and willingly throw their hard-earned cash into the circle. Because they may, in the end, win. Even knowing that a roulette wheel’s odds are manifestly stacked against the gambler (with its “0” compartments) does not dissuade people from their wager. Even knowledge of the fact that a gambling establishment is in fact run by gangsters doesn’t dissuade, just as pollution or crafty negotiating skills don’t dissuade people from investing in nefarious listed enterprises. They’ll happily leave two euros on the saucer for the waiters’ tip when they buy coffee. Because none of these is conceived as wheedling the cash out of them. But, if there is the slightest suggestion of a scam (a term that has a broad application, from outright theft to perfectly legal goings-on in the art world), then you can hear the indignation on their faces. And I just heard Joe’s.

Abs is a simple man. That’s, in a way, why he needs help and can’t help himself but there is an underlying precept to giving that we help those who help themselves. If they show gumption, enthusiasm, tenacity, then we will chip in. Lay-abouts get nothing. It’s the moral that runs through Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio: the puppet’s ardent desire to be a real little boy can only be realised through honesty and hard work, not by indolence. A donor may be inclined to assume need and even to assume deservingness. But the hard work needs to be demonstrated.

From the recipient’s angle, which is an African one, the prism sheds a different part of the light spectrum. Asking is hard work. Asking is initiative and can meet with success or failure, just like cold-calling a customer. Nothing ventured, nothing gained; fortune favours the bold. One must not forget that Pinocchio meets with a great number of stumbling blocks before he finally becomes the little boy he yearns to be. At each set-back, he is rescued not by Geppetto, his creator, but by circumstance: a lady with blue hair, falling into the sea, being eaten by a terrible great shark, being sent to prison for his credulity, a sneeze.

Anyone who’s read thus far will maybe nod in agreement, and the less kind, the mean of spirit, will offer words of reprimand, along the lines of grow up—punishment for my own credulity. Growing up is the process of shedding innocence; it can entail a loss of faith in one’s fellow man, if not in God; faith that is seldom restored in the same measure as it is scattered to the four winds. Growing up is becoming resilient to disappointment, and forging ahead regardless. Growing up is discovery, of oneself, inside and out, and of others, ditto. Growing up is done when life is done. For all their wisdom and sagacity, no one, I can assure you, forewarned me that I’d one day be writing these lines. Maybe because what is now truth for them wasn’t at the time true enough.

A great voyage is worth a great travel journal, and this is the journal for this voyage. It has not been a learning process, as such; rather, a series of blinding epiphanies. It may not have produced a taxi, but they’re never around when you really want one. It will, hopefully, have nonetheless forged some deeper friendships. I don’t in any way regret the energy I put into it. I have no recriminations against those who declined to assist. Those who did assist demonstrated their friendship to me, and they have my thanks for that. They did help.

The riddle:

The poor have nothing. The rich need nothing. Eat nothing, and you will die. Close your eyes, close your eyes and relax.