A Wonderful Disguise
On the divine hiding in plain sight.
The rubber gloves. The bog brush. The tangle of matted hair and gunk when you lift up the drain lid in the shower. Emptying the bins. Dragging a recalcitrant hoover around yet another room.
I spent last summer volunteering in a small community and Fridays meant pulling on my cleaning overalls, reaching for the disinfectant and bending low over another toilet bowl. Yeuch.
It all came back to me this week when Sue Gray published her ‘partygate’ report on lockdown events in Downing Street. Red wine spills on the walls, people throwing up and what she called “multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff”.
The cleaners. The invisible people. We often don’t notice those who keep clean our offices or trains or shops, this crowd of early rising, poorly paid people who make life practical and hygienic.
We overlook them. Worse than that, we may develop what a trades union this week called a ‘culture of disrespect’ towards low-paid workers.
The flip side of that is a ‘culture of entitlement’, the poisonous assumption that if we are prosperous or powerful in some way, then we are, to use an old-fashioned phrase, ‘god’s gift to humanity’.
The idea that our income or accent or birthplace somehow signifies our status in society was once promoted by religion — freighted in no-longer-sung verses of hymns like All Things Bright And Beautiful.
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
But a contrary and more powerful insight carried by the great faith traditions is the idea that the divine is hiding in plain sight everyday. And hiding in every person we meet.
That everyone, as the novelist Marilynne Robinson puts it, is created equal in the divine image, ‘endowed with unalienable rights… and claims on our respect.’
This was a truth that dawned on Mike Scott, of the rock band The Waterboys, while he was living in the Findhorn community in Scotland. He began to see everyone, regardless of their social status, as carrying a sacred imprint. When he asked a friend about this, she said to him, ‘you’re seeing God in all his wonderful disguises.’
In one of the most vivid stories told by Jesus of Nazareth, he pictures everyone who ever lived, lined up at the end of time and split into two groups... those welcomed through the pearly gates and those who’ve mislaid their ticket.
Those on the guest list are surprised, many assuming they hadn’t made the cut. It’s explained to them that whenever they’d treated someone with respect and dignity, with kindness and patience… they’d been welcoming God. That wonderful disguise.
To paraphrase Jesus’s words, ‘When you stopped to talk with the office cleaner and asked about their family, you stopped to talk with me.’
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From BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day on Saturday May 28th. Other recent radio thoughts :‘The Renewable Energy of Silence’, ‘How To Be Good Ancestors’, ‘This Bright Sadness’ and ‘I Can’t Speak For The Tree.’
