The way we were - Tall Story
18.08.2010
By Fr P. J. Kelly
It was a little village about twenty-five miles from my parish centre, in the heart of one of the largest timber zones in Fiji. I was on a week-end tour of some of my mission stations, and it was my first visit to this lumber settlement in the forest.
I got in around five on Saturday evening and was conducted to the house where Mass is usually said. The entrance was low so I crouched as I went in, and straightaway I sat on the floor to remove my boots and give my feet that extra “room” so necessary for comfort in the Tropics. After a short chat with the women of the house - the men were still at work in the fields - I decided to finish my office on the village green while the light still held.
Pulling on my boots, I moved outside. As I finished my office the men were returning, and soon a young girl called me to the evening meal. I again crouched through the low doorway and immediately inside I found my place set at the head of the “table” - a board resting directly on the floor - so that I had nothing to do but sit down, cross my legs in Fijian fashion, and do justice to the food.
As I was saying grace after the meal, the village bell rang for night prayers and confessions. It was an extraordinary sound, wholly unlike the tone of the usual wooden bell of a Fijian village, and I asked what kind of bell it was. A few knowing smiles were exchanged but nobody spoke.
Later I found that the bell was the discarded iron wheel of a lorry, slung from a tree. But anyhow here it was ringing for night prayers, so I reached for my haversack, pulled out my soutane, and sprang to my feet to put it on.
And then came the catastrophe I had been avoiding so carefully all the evening: I bounced my head with terrific force against the low-pitched galvanised-iron roof. I had forgotten for the moment that I was six feet two and that my host’s house was not the customary Fijian hut with high ceiling and thatched roof.
A few youngsters laughed, but the man of the house seemed a little embarrassed and passed a remark on my unusual height. He assured me, still embarrassed, that everything would be all right for me by Mass time next morning.
The villagers gathered, we recited our night prayers together, they sang a hymn, and I preached. But for the first time in my life I preached on my knees, with my hearers seated on the floor around me. Occasionally I noticed an eye straying towards the roof and then back towards me, and I suspected that its owner was wondering just how much of me lay below the knees. Others possibly wondered was this a new approach to the art of preaching - but they hadn’t been present for my abortive effort to stand after supper.
When prayers and the chat that followed them were over and the villagers had dispersed to their homes I noticed the man of the house having a consultation with a few other men outside. The extraordinary height of the new priest and the problems it posed were being discussed. I left them to it and retired. In the morning I awoke to the sound of the birds and washed and shaved at a nearby stream.
When I returned, preparations for Mass were well under way. A neat little altar of boards had been erected and immediately above it one sheet of the iron roofing had been removed to allow me to stand upright during Mass. As I dressed the altar I found that this would not be enough to permit me to move from epistle to Gospel side during Mass, and at my suggestion the men smilingly removed two more sheets. Some villagers on their way to Mass also smiled: they too had learned the secret of the night before.
As I was taking leave of my host later in the day I nodded towards the open roof and said: “John, you may close it now - until next time.”
He laughed, and assured me that by next time he hoped there would by no need: they would build a little timber church sufficiently high to permit even the most impossibly tall priest to stand erect in it when he comes.
- Taken from The Far East, November 1, 1955.
Read more articles from The Far East, August 2010
