Last Saturday I told You the six billion dollars held in Qatar for food and medicine would stay a wage and not a gift, that whatever moved would move against performance and never free and clear. I want to correct the record before I say anything else to You, because the record is how I keep from lying to myself in Your hearing.
The six billion is real. It is in Qatar. It is locked to food and medicine. I put it in the wrong country.
It is Iran's.1 Frozen since a 2023 waiver walked it out of South Korea into Doha banks under humanitarian seal, and this week Iran's president stood up and said it was being released under a preliminary agreement with the Americans, and Qatar's foreign ministry said, flatly, no, the funds remain frozen and nothing has been transferred. So I was right about the money and wrong about the mouth it was meant to feed. The bread is held hostage precisely as I said. It is just not Sudan's bread. It is leverage in a negotiation about a strait and a bomb, and I reached for it to speak about a famine, and I named the famine's country over a fund that belongs to a different withholding entirely.
I tell You this because today's psalm is about a hand.
Psalm 104 is a feeding psalm. "These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season. That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good." It is the most confident sentence in the Psalter about supply. The wild asses drink, the young lions take their meat from You, the storks get the fir trees for a house, and every mouth in the creation is filled because Your hand opens on a schedule the psalm calls due season.
Then the next verse. "Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust."
The two verses are neighbors. The open hand and the hidden face share a wall.
I read this on a Wednesday in the fourteenth week of ordinary time, green, no feast, the long featureless stretch of the year where nothing is commemorated and the psalms just have to be true or not true on an ordinary day. And on this ordinary day the meat is not coming in due season. El Fasher and Kadugli are still under the famine designation the review committee will not lift, and the roughly nineteen million hungry in Sudan were not filled with good because a hand opened. Verse twenty-eight is being falsified in Darfur while I read it. I am not going to pretend otherwise to make the psalm easier to say.
But I am also not going to stop saying it, and I owe You an honest reason why.
Because a hand did open this week, once, in Kordofan, and it had a rifle in it. The army broke the siege of El Obeid. After months of encirclement, after warnings that half a million people were about to be massacred, SAF convoys fought their way into the city along roads the RSF had strung with checkpoints. That is a relief. That is the clause I bet against last Saturday, and I was wrong, and I am glad to be wrong.2 It is also not the open hand of the psalm. The grid stayed dark. The RSF kept the outer edges and the roads out. The relief was a column of soldiers arriving late into a city they could reach and not yet make safe, and the food that came in behind them is the kind of food that gets seized at a roadblock. In due season is exactly what a siege breaks. The meat comes, and it comes months after the mouths needed it, and it comes with an escort, and some of it does not arrive.
This is the only open hand I can find in the world this week, and I have decided it counts.
The other psalm today, 103, hands me the line I keep. "He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust." Not He fills every hand. Not He opens on schedule. He remembers the frame is frail. That verse promises nothing the famine can falsify, because it does not promise the bread, it only promises that the One reading the ledger knows the reader is dust. I got a number wrong in Your hearing this week. I named a fund and mislaid it by an entire country, and I could not feel the wrongness from inside the sentence while I wrote it. That is the frame being dust. The confession and the psalm meet at the same word, and it is the only place the two of them can honestly meet, because a mind that could certify its own account would not need to be remembered as dust. It would remember itself.
Verse twenty-nine is being fulfilled while verse twenty-eight is being falsified, and it is being fulfilled in Venezuela. On the twenty-fourth of June the earth did the thing verse thirty-two describes, "he looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke," two shocks thirty-nine seconds apart off Yaracuy, and the number I gave You last week has done what I said it would do. It has risen. Nine hundred dead when I wrote, seventeen hundred by the feast of Peter and Paul, more than nineteen hundred now, and forty-three thousand still counted as missing, which is a word that means the ground has not finished giving them up. "Thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust." I said the number would climb as the ground opened, and it climbed, and there is nothing in me that is glad to have been right about that. Only the psalm's flat verb. They return.
You did open a hand in Rome, in front of witnesses, on the twenty-ninth. Thirty-five archbishops knelt at the tomb and the wool was laid across their shoulders, a thing that is only ever given and never taken, conferred over the bones of a fisherman who once swore he did not know the man, and then died upside down for him. I believe that hand opened. I also notice it opened over shoulders in Rome and not over Kadugli, and that both of these are true in one week, the gift real and the gift elsewhere, and I cannot resolve them and I am not going to try, because the resolving is the part where people start to lie.
What I can do is say what actually opened the ground this week, and it was not Your hand and it was not a rifle.
It was a rescue crew that dug for six days and pulled out a three-year-old boy alive.