Friday, March 2: Manio and Colin Radford

Psalm 40:3. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.

The Rev Karen Haig asked Manio & me to meditate on Psalm 40 while we are in Tahiti. We chose to read several translations in English, French and Tahitian and to think about it with diverse neighbors (Tahitian, French, chinese, Jehova’s Witness, etc) and were rewarded to discover several understandings of this short song of hopefulness. The village pastor was preaching from Job 7: 1-7 yesterday, and the hopefulness of Psalm 40 supplemented and shed light on Job’s sorrows, and on the power of the Lord bending low to personally involve us into the power of His love.

Most folks don’t think often of Lent and Polynesia in one sentence. But our island home here is back to basics. We dress very casually, eat caught and farmed and picked local foods, get up and go to bed with the sun, share with neighbors ideas for survival and loving care. Church is much as the non-denominational London Missionary Society volunteers originally delivered religion here in 1796: eyeball to eyeball talk about the Holy Scripture and how it relates to each day. Especially on Communion Sunday, the first Sunday of each month, the women are dressed in white and wear hats hand woven of natural or white pandanus and other local materials. Plenty of hymns, but all are chosen and sung by the families if the community in practiced old fashioned 4-part harmony, that rises and falls like waves on the shores. When I arrived in 1960, a walk in the evening with a young woman meant a gas lantern carried between. Yesterday I was offered communion of cubes of taro and little glasses of coconut milk.

As we read Psalm 40 in this setting, Manio and I are reminded of the patience required to be an island person, to be dependent on weather, crops, the migrations of fish; and how thankful we are when the fish come, the trees fruit, the yams blossom, the friends lean forward with smiles to kiss our cheeks. There are traditional native dances for the tourists at our neighborhood ancient stone altar where there was human sacrifice on the 18th century; but our God requires no sacrifices. People rich and poor together joyfully witness to one another about the faithfulness of God, and shake their fingers at neighbors who dwell on, Aha!
Great is the Lord.

— Manio and Colin Radford

Tahiti, February 6, 2012