Words lead to Deeds

I return to Nampula, in the north of Mozambique, which I reached once, long ago, by boat and lorry, but most recently en route to Nairobi (and Kigali) by air.

It seems an act of supererogatory grace that I am enjoying the relative comfort of Business class: by a quirk of Kenya Airways the fare is cheaper, just this once, than Economy. Nampula’s is a koppie landscape of table mountains and needles, the sort that makes one think of Tolkien.

My reading, as it has been for my first (and last) two Kenya flights in this post-Covid age, is St. Teresa of Avila’s Life (by herself), in a copy that bears the library mark of Kamuzu Academy. There is method in this: I am looking for a passage, and as the flight resumes, just touching ten thousand feet, I find it (cap. 25 in the Penguin edition by J. M. Cohen):

Another sign, which is the surest of all, is that these false locutions leave no results, whereas when the Lord speaks, words lead to deeds; and although the words may be of reproof and not of devotion, they prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness. They give it light, and make it quiet and happy.

I encountered a version of these words fourteen years ago this December: I had ridden a bicycle from Oxford to the Quaker burial ground at Jordans. I wished to visit my tutor, Tom. Braun, who had died earlier that year. The grave was still fresh: no stone, of course, but someone had tucked a slip of paper into the mound:

Words lead to deeds. They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.

These remained with me. I sought to discover the source from time to time. It occurred to me that the copyist might be a Friend, who knew Tom. from the Meeting House on St. Giles. But I was reminded more of our tutorials, from 1996 to 1998, at Merton. I was an indifferent historian. I recall Tom.’s learning and cleverness, his melancholy and wit, yet I owe to him far more: an education in humanity, for the import of his words, as I intimated even then, would not be limited to their literal effect.

In deeds, it was Tom. most of all, who, when the time came, offered encouragement to look beyond Oxford, to Malawi.

On this ulendo I am returning to Cape Town, for Cape St. Francis: to attempt recovery from Kamuzu Academy and its works, also a summary of the Gule Project, as record and as publication. The skies above Nampula have contributed a most welcome introduction. I note also – from an armchair in the Pride lounge at Nairobi airport – that today is for St. Teresa.