Never Walked In High Heels

“We are a Christian nation. We were formed as a Christian nation, and a Christian nation is what we shall claim to be. People forget that.” She was getting more frustrated in her debate. The quilt on the wall and the dried flowers were the quintessential marks of a country home. She lived in typical Middle America. Good, God-fearing, hardworking stock, who believed that all the founding fathers were men of God.

I didn’t say anything at first, but I thought back to my 11^th grade US History class and seemed to remember an early lecture brought on by an older teacher—no they weren’t all Christians I thought to myself. At least not in the way we think of when we say they were. Weren’t they deists? The longer I thought about it the more I agreed with my assumption. I finally went home to look it up on Wikipedia when my mother asked me to check my facts after breaking into the argument and making such a claim. I was right, most of them were indeed deists. I’m always envious of deists simply because I’m not one. In fact I’m the dead opposite. Reason and rationale is tempting to me though, as are many of the deist doctrines, but there are so many things I cannot agree on. Deism is best described as this: God is like a clockmaker, he put all the parts in place and let it unwind itself. It’s a kind of hands-off deity where God created the world and then sat back to watch—like he created the world for his entertainment—a substitute TV show. With this in mind, God doesn’t rule over every aspect of our lives. The ultimate anti-predestination argument, man makes his own destiny and every choice he makes is one that he is directly responsible for. Born out of the Enlightenment, this view of God is highly allowing of individualism, reason, and rationality.

Now bring that philosophy to the men who wrote our Constitution. It gives you a whole new perspective on that document doesn’t it? If you read it, all of it, you can see that that single piece of paper was meticulously written, word-by-word to allow a great amount of flexibility in interpretation. It was almost like the Founding Fathers felt the government should mimic their view of God—hands-off, let the country and people unwind how they will. There goal was to protect people’s rights and afford everyone civility.

We were not founded in the modern Christian ideals. America was truly a great experiment and nobody knew how it would turn out. In writing the Constitution, maybe nobody wanted to be responsible for the mistakes of the future. Write the document and see where the country goes. Sounds like a pretty radical idea even if it was based on the Enlightenment and reason. To afford people the greatest freedom and to make them responsible for everything they do, doesn’t agree with much of the modern interpretations of Christianity. It’s radical really, almost humanistic, and forces us to be the drivers of our own fate. The truth is, I’m unsure if any of the Founding Fathers knew what to envision when they drafted that document. Who in recent history had ever successfully tried to make a country? Any man would be panicked in such a situation, and I can’t help but wonder, did they even think America would last this long?

Current events are making people say America is going down hill or America is finally coming into it’s own—depending on who you ask. Looking at the Constitution, I can say that considering what the Founding Fathers envisioned, America has great flexibility to create whatever type nation it wants.

I should have recognized it was a sign when the sermon that morning was on paradigm shifts. The idea of God throwing our world into chaos in order to bring us closer to his visions, echoed in our ears as we decided to go spend the rest of the Sunday in Lake Norman. It wasn’t my first Sunday with the Hillis Family including all ten of their children and incredibly energetic parents. Due to the loss of a biological son a few years ago, the Hillis’ opened up their home to adopt, two children from Russia, and then another one came, and then two more, and then three more, all having their own personalities and problems as well as past histories that could confuse even the most dedicated case workers. What makes them special is that every single member of the family is ready to gather what life throws at them and make the drama the best it can possibly be. They have become a family in the most mature sense of the word.

That Sunday one of us said, “I thought this morning how much I wanted to see a miracle,” and as it turned out one of us would be baptized by the mother, Susan. We spent the day on JetSkis and playing in the water, and enjoying each other as we said goodbye to summer.

Then that night we received the phone call. The parents had returned home with half of the children so that they could go back to school, and I was on my way back to Las Vegas when Christie got the call at 4am, she instantly thought something was wrong. The Hillis’ house in Georgia was being flooded by rain as her mother spoke into the phone. Flood water kept rising and it had hit the first floor of the Hillis’ house and was steadily seeping into the second. The boys of the family all lived downstairs and were the first to wake up when the pressure from the water had built up so that all the windows and doors burst open and water came rushing in. When I got off the phone with Christie telling me the news, all I could think was how could this happen to such good people.

I used to think the life of faith was supposed to be easy. You just held onto the belief that no matter what, all things work together for good. For many, this is the definition of faith. I buy into this, say my prayers at night, and somehow there will be a happy ending. But even if you adopt 8, or 10, or 20 Russian children, it doesn’t mean that you’re covered for any of the disasters that can sideswipe you. “It’s all just stuff,” Christie said. And of course, she was right. It is all. Just. stuff. The difference is when it’s your stuff and it’s what you’ve been dependent on. The Hillis’ have never had a lavish lifestyle, what they have they need is what they have, little more. All of a sudden that “stuff” can seem vital when it is taken away. Then the faithful seem to be permanently living in the Land of the Fucked, where nothing goes the way it should to and you have to be ready for what the rain water brings. However, living in the Land of the Fucked also allows us to call things exactly what they are , so that stuff can be let go of because we need all the power and the ability to cling to the truth rather when we live in a world that teaches us to clutch “stuff” under the guise of calling it security.

In one weekend we saw the many things that water can bring, from healing and recovery, to devastation. When I was little, I found myself clutching to safety at the edge of any pool I went into—even when I had a life jacket wrapped around me. I started to say when I went swimming, but the truth is when you’re clutching at the wall you’re not swimming at all. It’s more of a holding on and not noticing anything else. And in this way we miss what the water brings to us until one day, even after we’ve tried so hard to beat it, the water changes our lives, and we have to—if we haven’t already—learn to swim.

To learn more about the Hillis Family, please visit: http://www.rebuildthehillishouse.webs.com/

No man is ever made to live his life as he would wear a hand-me-down pair of shoes. It is not the role of anybody else to break in the seams and canvass of the pair of cross trainers, and then hand them back to you explaining what they are and are not capable of. That is your task, nobody else is permitted to unless you allow it.

What Sue realized and other therapists did not, is that even though I would never be a roller derby queen, there were things to be learned which roller-skating exemplified. Things like flexing one’s hips, finding core strength, regaining a center of gravity, and even the coordination it takes to bring one foot consistently in front of the other, all are skills which a pair of skates can challenge you to master more than being on your own two feet. Like football players taking ballet lessons to improve their game, Sue never expected me to become a great skater. And if I had become one, that point would be moot. What she was interested in is that I learned how to walk to the best of my ability. And if it took a pair of roller skates to learn that, then who was anyone to say that roller skating did not lend itself to a reasonable therapy goal?

Eventually I lost interest in the roller skates. I think I brought in a bike instead. And when I got my permit, Sue and a few other therapists took me out to learn to drive. Which is pretty impressive given that I came to the therapy centre with the expectation of never accomplishing the skills of speech and being able to sit up independently. It is the people who refuse to stop because hope may bring disappointment, refuse to believe that any dream is unreasonable, and strive for something which is deemed useless, who have the richest lives and greatest victories. The people who live life safely, refusing to reach beyond what is in easy grasp, have no claim on the lives of those that do.

After I was halfway through college, I went back to the therapy centre for a visit. Walking down the hall, I saw a small boy grasping desperately at the wall for balance. He was trying to move forward despite being attached to a set of roller skates. At a closer look, I saw they were the adjustable kind which attached to shoes. They bore the initials of the therapy clinic. Some therapist obviously thought they would be a good investment for teaching disabled children. The boy’s own therapist was encouraging him to move away from the wall. In answer to his protests and fears of falling she said “yeah, so what? Not like you haven’t fallen before.” I couldn’t help but smile.

Those who refuse to fall cannot learn to walk. They will look at a pair of brand new roller skates and never try them on. And eventually, they will do everything possible not to let a loved one fly.

The preceding is a narrative essay from Athena’s book The Perfect Sole due out this winter.

Hope is, by definition, something born out of adversity, slim chances, and unquenched desires. We do not hope that our loved ones will come home on time tonight when they’ve been on time every night for the past year. Unless there is a specific reason as to why tonight is different, we merely expect them to be on time. This is not hope. Hope does not come without the considerable risk of disappointment. Despite what any politician, inspirational speaker, or salesman may want you to believe, you cannot offer people hope without running the risk of them facing disappointment; the two will always go hand in hand.

Now there will be many who will respond  to this by claiming that there is a world of difference being giving hope for someone to obtain a reasonable goal and encouraging someone to reach for an unreasonable goal. In the upcoming weeks Sue was challenged with this statement plenty. In addition to roller skating being an unreasonable goal, it was deemed something even worse: not useful. After all. What possible use could I have for roller-skating? Wouldn’t my time be better spent learning to climb stairs or walking on gravel? Shouldn’t I be conquering something which would otherwise prove to be a hindrance in the real world?

This argument suddenly kept popping up more in my life when I decided to become an actor.  Was me being onstage really a reasonable goal? After all “you’re just so intelligent, performing seems like it would be such a waste. Have you thought about being a lawyer instead?”

But the argument of anything being a reasonable or even useful goal depends on the honest answer of a single question: according to who? Like anything else, is the judgment of a single person (or even a group) enough to make that declaration true? Someone may judge a dream unreasonable because they are unwilling to make the sacrifices it would take for it to come true. One man may deem it as a waste of resources simply because qualities such as intelligence, strength, and specific abilities are not his to offer or make use of.  But that doesn’t mean that a goal was ever unreachable. It simply means that that person was unwilling to do what it took to attain it. But one man’s limitations should never be placed on another, self imposed or otherwise.

At the age of four, just before I started working with Sue, my mother sat  in a meeting with my school’s administrators in which she was informed that I would never be encouraged to walk during school. Their justification was that encouraging me to walk was an unreasonable goal. Despite my mother’s protests and evidence to the contrary, none of the administrative experts or physical therapists would concede. Finally a student teacher raised her hand and said that she would give up her lunch hour to teach me skills I would need for walking. She never got to see me walk without the walker that she had to tape my hands to. She never saw me on roller-skates. But something told her those efforts were not wasted.

One wonders what the reaction would be if my mother had  brought in a pair of skates.

I took my first independent steps shortly after I was ten years old. Unlike our apartment, our new house was  mostly uncarpeted, which, for someone who is used to crawling as a major mode of transportation, this small detail constituted a major lifestyle change.  The difference between crawling on high pile carpet and tile for young knees meant that I learned to walk independently very fast to avoid the inevitable pain of pressing your knees into a completely unforgiving surface. And although I was well on my way to learning how to walk by this point, my mother has later admitted to me that she knew that a tile floor would provide me with the additional incentive needed to learn rapidly.

Of course, I’ve never been one to do things by halves, so looking back I’m always a little surprised that people had such a reaction when, nine months later I had saved enough from my allowance to buy a new pair of pink roller skates. The following week I took them to the therapy center and announced to my physical therapist, Sue, that I thought learning to roller skate should be my next therapy goal.

Perhaps this is where I should back up to explain, my version of “walking” at this point, can best be described by that scene where Bambi is attempting to get his feet under him. I wasn’t really walking at this point so much as I had learned to maintain a consistent direction during a controlled fall.

But Sue, the woman who taught me to walk, bought it the idea of roller skating as a therapy goal.

She reached for the roller skates that very afternoon and put them on my feet. Bambi was now trying to maintain a tentative balance while on wheels on ice with a film of motor oil underneath her to make life really interesting. In addition to being on wheels, I was two inches taller than I had ever been. And, having only walked independently for less than a year, I never realized how important having your feet directly underneath you really was.

As soon as we went from the treatment room to the clinic hallway, the questions from other therapists began. “What on earth are you doing? Sue, she’ll never be able to learn to roller skate. That’s not a reasonable therapy goal.”

What is the difference between allowing someone to hope, and setting them up for disappointment? I’ve been challenged with this question often by people who are trying to make me “see reality.” These people then hide behind the statement “I just want to protect you from disappointment.” What they don’t see however, is I’ve been hurt already. A lot. And as anyone who has suffered though agonies can tell you, reality fiercely slaps you in the face before you can see it.

              Missy unpacked her book bag in front of me. School hadn’t even been going on for two weeks and there were already crumpled bits of paper at the bottom of her bag, even a permission slip she had forgotten about. It was easy to see why her mom hired me as a temporary math tutor. She then pulled out her math text book, dropped it in front of me, flipped it open to the answer pages in the back, and started copying down the answers. I quickly asked her what she was doing.

              “If I don’t have the answers, how do I know if I’ve done it right?” I can’t help but smile at this honest and yet completely practical answer. Its a question I’ve wondered at often in my own life, now that I’m older. If I don’t know where I am supposed to end up, how am I ever going to get there?

              I want to look in the back of the book all the time. What flat should I move into? Will I be fortunate enough to get married? To whom? How can I make my dreams come true? Will I ever have to bare the pain of being abandoned? The list of questions keep me up at night as I see the worst possible epitaph engraved on my tombstone: Athena Stevens – reached her zenith at eighteen. Died at age ninety nine.

              I would have thought that by my age, all of my insecurities and questions would have disappeared or at least I would know how to answer them as I would an algebra problem. I thought that was the entire point of education, to learn how to solve for Z when all you have is X and Y. Problem is, once you have Z, who’s to say you wouldn’t be better of with Z+1 or Z+3? In truth, a person in real life rarely has all the variables needed to solve the equation by the time a decision is needed. You don’t know how many children you’ll end up with when you buy the three bedroom rather than the four bedroom house. You can’t know Cancer wasn’t included when she said “in sickness and in health.” And there’s never a guarantee that something better won’t come along after we’ve made a commitment… or that it will after we’ve rejected one. You can’t skip steps. All you can do is work with the variables in front of you.

              If I had all the answers from the back of some book, I would set out to complete life rather than live it. I guess I’m hoping that I would be able to save time by making all the right choices the first go round. I can’t figure out why else I’d want to do get to the last page without taking in the whole book. Maybe I see it as running into the supermarket just to buy milk. If I get in and go straight to the back, I will get home faster. Or maybe I see life like homework, if I get all the answers right the first time around, I can go outside and play sooner. Then again, being “done” with life rarely gets equated with a sunny afternoon on a swing set.

              At the end of Our Town Emily cries out, “oh World, you are too beautiful for anyone to ever notice you!” Leave it to Wilder to make us notice what we should’ve known all along. If life was about reaching some finish line as quickly and as flawlessly as possible, why do we dread death? Life is about living in the moment, and doing what that time calls upon you to do. Its about waiting to see the final product, while taking all the steps needed to get there. Because any good Algebra 1 student can tell you, you need to cover all the steps, even the counter intuitive ones, if you ever hope to understand how to do the problem correctly.

“Nobody laughs at God in a hospital  

Nobody laughs at God in a war.

Nobody laughs at God when they loose everything they’ve got

And don’t know what for.

But God can be funny at a cocktail party…”

The first time I heard Spektor’s new song I was struck. Now before we go any further, I’m no music critic. In fact I pride myself on being a musical idiot. But I am, however quite adept at thinking. This is how I was struck by Spektor’s new single the first time through.  

In the chorus she sings about when God can be funny, such as when we are at a cocktail party or ask Him for something specific as we would do to Santa.  But it’s the juxtaposition of this with some of man’s greatest hardships which made me think: now believing in God is quite a luxury.

See, I think most theists will listen to “Laughing With” will hear the idea that ‘God can be funny’ at places that the elites of society dwell. After all, there is the ongoing belief in our world that we, at our best and most developed, have no need for God or at least to believe in him. We’ve somehow evolved or grown up enough that we don’t need to ask anyone for what we want for Christmas.

Spektor’s family emigrated from the USSR in 1989. As she is often cited as being a Jewish-American musician, one can only imagine the internal conflict between the Jewish beliefs of her family while living within a Communist system. This is where the notion of Spektor’s theism comes into play.

For many of us, not believing in a god of some sort is quite the luxury. What it must mean is the complete confidence in one’s self and one’s position in society. I think it means being able to look in the mirror and say, “this is all I ever need.”

As a disabled women, that is a luxury I cannot afford.

Its not that God is funny, but if you can look at just yourself and say ‘I am enough,’ then yes, why shouldn’t it be amusing? Why should you ever have to wait on something that Santa God is going to give you when you can go out and buy it yourself? And if you don’t get it from Santa God, who is supposed to give you everything you need, why cry when you can laugh about it?

On my bad days I believe that there is a God out there simply because I have to. On these days I am with the ones who need justice and need for the world to change. Doors get slammed in my face, bus drivers insult me, I have no idea how I’m going to eat my next meal. I can’t look at myself and say “I am enough. I am free. This is all I need.” There must be something more. I’m not satisfied here.

But for those of us who do not laugh at God, who believe because we have to, we do it so that we can laugh somehow.

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.

Declaring a Miracle

By the time I was eight years old, I was a religious fanatic. I was convinced by the televangelists that if I played my cards right, God was going to heal me. And, of course, with each morning would come the disappointment of not being able to play kick ball, still having to depend on someone for meals, and still being gawked at rather than listened to. On Saturday I turned twenty-five, and now I have good days where I appreciate having shoes for five years which still have never been walked in, or how one can use a stranger’s stare to her advantage.   But there are still nights where I go to bed praying for a miracle. 

This somewhat large concession comes with a massive amount of irony. Nothing will get me to walk out of a church faster than a little old lady saying that she is praying for God to heal me. I think its the idea that our idea of perfection is somehow supreme to God’s which I find infuriating. The only way the world can be perfect is if it fits our own view of perfection, and anything that isn’t how we think it ought to be is a flaw. It’s like saying God isn’t big enough to have perfection in any other way than what is easy for us to swallow.

What constitutes a miracle, as opposed to a coincidence or perseverance?  Biblically speaking, when Jesus healed the paralytic, he first said, “Your sins are forgiven,” and then he healed the guy. Which was the bigger miracle there? The act of healing, the act we more readily concede as ‘a miracle,’ actually only took Jesus laying hands on a man. The first miracle would take God walking among us for thirty-three years and sacrificing himself in blood. After erasing one’s sins, healing the guy would be a piece of cake.

And yet, we actually need to be reminded of the first miracle via Easter or communion. A bit of bread and a bit of wine serve as a mental check to ensure that the act that ransomed us does not slip our minds. Which means, without these reminders, we most likely would forget. So, if I’m likely to forget how I became liberated, how much more likely would I forget that I was disabled in the first place? It would slip my mind entirely, and I would pass carelessly through life – because that’s what I want on some level, an easy, unexamined life. I want a life that lets me credit myself for every day a survive. We all desire that, deep down.

I used to pray for a miracle, and in the process I would miss the ten thousand miracles that were there in front of me. In waiting for a miracle that came in the specific shape that I thought it ought to take, people would open doors at just the right time or someone would come to fill a spot in my life which no one else could fill. And for some, those might be coincidences. They do certainly look that way as we go forward in life. But looking backward… Well, often it seems as if today’s happy accident will actually look much more like providence tomorrow. And really, which is more amazing?: The single miracle that is so life changing that you forget what life was before it happened, or the ten-thousand small miracles which make up one’s life in the first place?