Never Walked In High Heels

When I was in Prague a few years ago I saw a blind violinist on the street. He played his instrument so lovingly well that, without thinking I pulled out a bill (as to not make noise with cumbersome coins) and placed it into the tin cup in front of him. When I returned to my traveling companions  one of them was enraged.

“I thought you didn’t believe in charity,” she snapped. This was news to me. We had sat up many a night debating politics and the role of government. She, of course, had different views from my own (most people do). I wracked my brian trying to figure out when I had said that I didn’t believe in charity. I couldn’t find anything.

I’m a little bit older now and can recognize something which I couldn’t see before.  One of which is, of course my companion’s insecurity about her own views. Another is, I see what often passes for “charity” and I do not like it.

Charity does not equate paying your tax dollars. Period. End of Story. The next time someone tries to tell you that paying taxes is ‘charitable,’ remember that charity is by definition a voluntary action. Paying taxes is not voluntary. Here is where my companion’s assumption went wrong. I want to help people. A lot of folks want to help people who also want to keep taxes and the government in check. I just don’t want to fool myself into thinking that paying taxes is my moral deed done for the day.

I also don’t want to give charity because “it’s the right thing to do,” like earning some Girlscout badge or ticking something off my list. The word charity comes from the Latin ‘carus’ which means ‘dear.’ Charity is as much of a trade as anything commercial. One cannot be charitable until he values what he is giving to. I received something from you/ your cause, you gave me an idea, you made me think or, I am just glad to know you are in the world. Charity or aid should be about recognizing inherent value of the recipient, not the action.

I do believe in charity and gifts. What I don’t believe in is that you should give because you ought  or, worse still, because you are ‘privileged.’ We have come into a time (no thanks to the redefinition of taxes) where charity has become defined as giving a check rather than service. The more “the government takes care of it” the less we have to see the hunger, the less with have to heal the illnesses, and the less we have to fight the injustices ourselves. Thus, the less we have to feel the painful pull that makes us grit our teeth and do everything we can to make it better.

When people say its ‘society’s duty to be charitable,’ I can’t help but squirm. What is this “society” you speak of? And how can duty ever be on the same plane as charity? Society never cured anything. People, individuals, took action to overcome. And they did. And they will again. Society has never changed en masse. It took individuals prodding them for things to get better. Call it Newton’s Social law if you’d like.

I still remember that violinist and can hear him play. I just wish I knew what he was to have given me over the years. I would have paid him more.

Money is a very strange thing. Money when you are a follower of Christ is an even stranger thing. It is too easy to fall into the trap which absolutely states that money is the root of all evil. For too many, every mouthful of food on your spoon is one that is taken out of the stomachs of starving children in some impoverished country. And thus, not having money becomes an opportunity for reverse snobbishness as much as having money does.

If we are to believe that a person’s value in not determined by his bank account, then it should also follow that his morality should not be determined by his poverty. At this point most of my friends say, “Well that’s easy for you to say because you’re considered extremely privileged by the rest of the world’s standards.”

If you can read this, you are extremely privileged too. There, what do we do now?

One of my dearest friends now lives in Russia. Her family has adopted 9 children and there are always rumors of more. My friend lives her life on a shoestring with so much class and honor she’d make Emily Post squirm. Devoting her life to serving others, she uses every bit of her advanced liberal arts education to make ends meet. When we pack for trips together I’m almost embarrassed by the lotions, the extra tires, the tools, the creams I need to pack to have a ‘normal life.’ And I can’t help but wonder when I crossed over into the realm of high maintenance?

And when she came to visit me in the UK for the first time, she came into my flat and said “wow, being here is so restful.” There wasn’t an ounce of judgment in it.

She doesn’t expect me to live like her. And in this lack of expectation she is the richest person I know. She knows first hand how hard living cheaply truly is. And because of this, she knows that I can’t walk everywhere or sew buttons back on my clothes. And while we both have the responsibility to use our resources as wisely as possible, that’s not going to look anything the same for both of us.

No two people are uniform, so why should their budgets be identical? If a family has a kid whose wheelchair can only fit into an Escalade, should they be ashamed to buy one? On what grounds should they apologize for it? For that matter, which one of their peers has to deem it a ‘need’ before it is the moral vehicle to buy? Or is it the government’s role to determine that?

For the moralist out there, it never says ‘money is the root of all evil.’ Maybe to you we seem the incongruous pair. God has given us very different resources to use wisely. There were many times that the Hebrews and the Gentiles both were aided by very wealthy people. These are the types of people who support my friend, who buy her groceries so she can serve without needing an income producing job at Starbucks. Without giving people like that, nobody could afford to take a vow of poverty.

            There’s a picture on my desktop of one of my best friends in college. She is wearing a straw cowboy hat and holds a handmade sign. She is just as I remember her, smiling, with a combination of hope and opportunity in her eyes that just epitomizes the age of 21 for those of us who are blessed. She is full of the vibrancy of life, wanting to change the world for the better and knowing it is hers to change. When the picture was taken, she was getting ready to go to Nicaragua for a service trip. The sign she holds reads “do not fear.”

            A few months after her return, her world started spinning, literally, out of control. It’s something  she still fights close to 4 years later. Some days  she wakes up and her world is toppling over and over. She cannot find the ground and getting out of  bed is a dangerous task. She finds even watching television nauseating and reading a book is out of the question. The few times I’ve seen her post graduation I have been shocked at how skeletal thin she is. I know she gets tired of explaining why she has lost so much weight to those of us who are busy with internships, new jobs, and new lives. Several doctors have tried to diagnose her but so far they’ve all just been baffled by it.

            On her bad days, getting to the toilet can prove to be a combination of agony and terror. On her good days, she can’t plan much further than what the moment gives her. Long term planning is out of the question.

            Sometimes I look at her picture on my computer screen and get frustrated. How could this happen to her of all people? Why would a person wishing to devote her life to service, ready to be a force of good, be struck down by something we can’t even put a name to? I look at her holding that sign “do not fear,” and I think what a crock. This is when the force of irony becomes too much to bear. I change my desktop.

            I always change it back.

            It’s because I need to be reminded by her in particular that to fear is worthless. The constant worry of what terrible pains lurk  in upcoming years does nothing to enhance ourselves today. In fact, it stands to rob us of the times of hope and expectation which makes our struggle worthwhile when we need hope to come out the other side. In college she was fearless not because she didn’t know what horrible things there were to fear. Ignorance is not always bliss. But she was fearless simply because  life was hers  to shape into whatever form she wanted.

            We keep in contact the days she feels up to it. On the days she doesn’t I think of her often in my quiet moments. There are many times that I feel my life overwhelming me and I look at her picture, to try and breathe. Sometimes I find a frustrated email in my inbox from her, asking all the same questions I struggle to understand. She worries that she is preaching to the choir. I remind her its ok, there are moments where only the choir understands it. More often than not, life is overwhelming. During those times, all we can do is look around, see the situation the clearest we can, and do our best not to fear.

            During my twentieth year, I had gotten the remarkable ability to lose time.  I could sit in my dorm room and watch the wall hoping that nothing would happen. And then my roommate would come in and ask me down to dinner, forcing me to look at my wall clock and see that over four hours of my life had gone missing. Sometimes I would find myself in a bathtub full of water staring at my razor blade  at 3:30 in the morning, having no idea how  I got there. It was like little green men had come and taken me, the essence of who I was, and left a shell which was too stupid to know to stop. And because I kept going through the motions, everyone thought I was fine.

            By the time four months slipped away from me (according to the calendar) I was gone. Everything that was characteristic about me had vanished. I couldn’t even recognize my own body in a mirror. I had a diagnosis, which frankly may as well been in Japanese. I knew what it was called, I had read about it during AP Psychology in high school.  I knew the literary context of it from English classes. I knew back then it only developed in extreme circumstances, back when I was eighteen I knew that I would never get it. Now I knew that logic was wrong. I knew all these facts, I just didn’t know what to do about it.

            I ‘snapped out of it’ next to find myself lying down on the back pew at our campus church. I heard singing. I heard bongos.  I pieced together that I was at our Thursday  night worship service. It was Thursday. Huh, who knew? I stayed there staring up at the ceiling, too heavy to move. People walked out by me. Suddenly my friend Ashley came into my vision.

            “I need you to pose nude for me this weekend.”

            “What?”

            “I need you to pose nude for me this weekend. I’ve asked nearly every other one of my friends and nobody has the balls to do it. I have a painting due next week. So now I’m telling you. I need you to pose nude for me this weekend.” I don’t know what I was expecting Ashley to say, maybe ‘you look tired’ or ‘I’m worried about you.’ All I know is this wasn’t how most people climbed out of the depths of despair. But I agreed.

            For most women, the idea off stripping of all clothes and letting someone sit there with an easel and study you is horrifying. Not for me.  Body image is, unbelievably, one of the few struggles I have never had to deal with. Maybe it comes from the fact that my body is utterly uncooperative anyway. As a movement teacher in drama school once told me: “You can just tell, your brain says ‘do it’ and your body says ‘fuck you.’”

            All of which was probably just as well at this point. I have no recollection of that Friday and when I ‘snapped out of it’ again I was lying on my side, Ashley readjusting my hair over my bare shoulder, my arm straining to reach the edge of sunlight. She looked at me with the eyes of an artist, selecting what to paint and highlight as a metaphysical recreation.  Her eyes shifted back and forth from the canvas to my skin with the level of observation like a scientist. Her brown hair fell into her eyes every few minutes when she forgot herself.

            To let someone paint you, see you without obstacles and barriers and then interpret it for an audience, means they know everything. Not simply every scar or mole, but she knows you from observation and study, much like a scientist would know his subject. And yet she deems you a worthy subject to reproduce. As I stared up at the ceiling, feeling the ruffles of the cloth underneath me, I felt at rest. For the first time in months I didn’t have to explain or excuse anything. She just spoke quietly about her own thoughts and reactions so I could gather my own.

            It takes being naked and having nothing sometimes to regain something. That day I got the smallest part of myself and my pride back. This is me. I need nothing else. I am lovely. It’s okay to be naked and have no excuses. Within this feeble state you will be made perfect.

            And I sat there, naked, aware of every moment. I still haven’t forgotten a second of those three hours in November.