Never Walked In High Heels

Communion Sunday brings out the OCD in me. Ever since I was little I would dread the first Sunday of the month in church. It was literally disaster waiting to happen. First there were plates stacked on top of each other filled with the worlds tiniest glasses filled to the brim with grape juice or wine, both of which stain horribly. My mother wouldn’t let me bring a container of salt with me to church as a precautionary measure, despite all of Christ’s allusions to us being ‘the salt of the earth.’ Then our church raised enough money to buy new carpeting for the sanctuary, thus also raising the stakes for the severe consequences of dropping that which was to be symbolic of the blood of Christ. As if that wasn’t enough tension, our elders never could get the knack of passing the plates along the pews. Inevitably the men would have to do something which resembled the Electric Slide down the aisle as they never knew which pew would end up with which plate next. Often two plates of bread would be coming at you from opposite sides and created a cosmological traffic jam.

I once visited my friend’s church and discovered that Catholics all drank out of the same cup. This, of course only added to my obsessive compulsive disorder. Communion Sunday was an enormous risk. Who was stupid enough to think this was a good idea?

The more I am involved in a church, the more I find myself looking to God and saying “How on earth did you ever think this was a good plan?” Just about every philosophical outlook on the world has some serious problem with the topic of free will. For those who believe in an all knowing, all loving and all powerful deity the issue is particularly sticky. We all want a deus ex machina to swoop down in a blaze of glory and fix it all when we are in a crisis. We want a god who is a very visible superhero, complete with tights and Jimmy Olsen taking photographic evidence. Even those of us who are absolute atheists would very much like to see a world which is a vast improvement on this one.

For the followers of Christ, free will in a fallen world is counterintuitive. The fact that one can freely come to the table and drink the wine which Christ gives us even when we are bumbling fools compared to our Host is shocking. What’s even more ironic to our ears is that God uses us, though we are responsible for spilling wine and forgetting which way the bread needs to be passed to take care of each other. As any guest at a dinner party will attest, there is little worse than embarrassing your host, even if it is by inadvertently dropping the wine on a beautiful new rug.

God would rather work through us and run the risk of us spilling his blood and passing his body around the wrong way than swooping in and doing everything through force. Our fumbling ways of messing up how things ought to be, misjudging what is needed to make the world truly better, even refusing to acknowledge who invited us into the banqueting hall in the first place, are exactly the actions of the type of misfits He’s always had in mind to create a perfect kingdom. To Him, it was better to risk it all and have our choice to partake in the dinner be made in freedom, than to sit down and force feed us a meal which was supposed to be celebratory.

As soon as I walk into a church and see the wine and the bread on the communion table, it takes all of my energy to not run the other direction. I worry about the plate falling, or myself choking on a piece of bread, knocking over a glass of wine or drinking at the wrong time. For a meal with the greatest cost, I confess that I am too concerned about the manners and customs to enjoy that which has been prepared especially for me. Thus making me more ungracious than the guest who, in a moment of joyful abandon, commits the worst faux pas.

It is perhaps one of the oldest and in many ways overly used cliché stories that has ever been written, despite the fact that it is the foundation of so many peoples’ faith. But let’s take it out of context for a moment. A man; a leader whom many individuals had their heart set on becoming king and bringing in vast amounts of freedom for their oppressed people was killed on a Friday afternoon. Of course, that Sunday morning that was soon to follow, his tomb was empty and he had risen from the dead. We pass over the events of Friday and immediately go into Sunday without wondering at all what Saturday could have possibly been like. Nobody was happy come Saturday. Could you imagine the man who you thought would be your freeing king suddenly arrested and executed in the most horrific way possible. You are known to be one of his followers and so if they go looking for more trouble makers, you are the first in line. On that particular Saturday, everyone was in hiding. They met in attics, behind locked doors, secret areas where shadows lurked in hopes that they would never be found out. It was a mixture of terror, disappointment, and rejection which filled the hearts of people who lost their beloved leader on that Saturday; and they had no idea what Sunday would bring.

To say we live in a Saturday world to a modern audience sounds great. It sounds as if there is a world full of cartoons and waffles for breakfast, waking up late and mom asking what we will do to entertain ourselves for the rest of the day. A Saturday world sounds nothing short of heaven, but this is because we know that Sunday follows Saturday, as obvious as that statement may sound, and after Sunday comes the work week where everything is back to normal. But really, even in our own lives, do we have that guarantee? Do we have a promise that Sundays and Mondays will necessarily follow Saturdays and that life will continue as it ought to if we are in a particularly good place in our lives? Do we have a guarantee when we are suffering that this will be the end of our trials and if we pass the test once we will never be expected to pass it again? Just because someone was cured from cancer several years ago, should he expect not to be tested in the future by some other disease which may also risk his life? For a world that demands biological explanation and dismisses faith and assumption as grave mistakes, we are dependant on both of these characteristics to keep our world going.

If we look around and examine the world in front of us, we quickly see that nothing is as it should be. There is an ongoing outrage brought on by pain and death and destruction that reminds us, even if we aren’t religious, this world is nowhere near perfect; we are nowhere near where we yearn to be. Saturdays when I was in college, were not particularly the enjoyable morning which I had earlier in my childhood with cartoons and loved ones to play with. Saturdays were actually the loneliest days of the week. My friends had been out partying the night before only to spend their days off in bed with hangovers trying to fight their nausea and keep down food. Relief from the classes of that week finally came with the isolation in one’s room.

To live in a Saturday world means that we are forced by one form or another to be patient. There is so much about our own futures that is undiscovered and will go unknown until we are facing the edge of them. We are, as Thornton Wilder put it in his play Our Town, “Straining away to make something itself. This strain is so bad that every sixteen hours or so, all of us lay down for a rest.” As much as we may want to look to hitch a ride and look at the end of the movie to know if the hero’s struggle was completely worthwhile, we are unable to do so. So we wait on Saturdays; a day when nothing really improves and no work gets done, paralyzed in the world that promises so much and has so much about it that is yet to be desired. We wait for the Sunday morning to find out whether or not the promises we hoped for were worth the wait we have invested; we watch the sky in hopeful expectation.

We had been driving in the car for about 45 minutes when I proudly began to explain to my mother what I had learned in school that day. My legs were not anywhere near long enough to touch the floor of the car as I explained that certain letters made certain sounds. For example, the “B” made a “buh” sound. At that moment we pulled up to a stop light and I pointed to a sign and slowly read out: “B-A-N-K. That sign says bank.”  It was the first word my mother had seen me read out loud, and with that, I was on my way.

Now, my parents make it sound like they always knew I was smart. Maybe they did, but I doubt it. Having a child with special needs, it seems to me, has always been an area of great apprehension. What can she learn? What will she learn? How will she learn it?  Will it be enough, or will she need something more in her life that is beyond her mental grasp. The first words that I ever spoke, “shoes” and then “juice”.  My vocabulary doubled in a single day, something that I would later wish could happen again as I was studying for the SATs. But then afterwards, those were the only two words I could say until my mother took me to a speech therapist who ran a number of tests as she did for a great many children entering the early childhood development program. “Whatever you do, don’t speak in baby-talk to her, this one is very intelligent.”

“Intelligent? She says two words, shoes and juice. That’s it.”

“She understands a lot more than you realize.”

From that moment on my parents were never want to use a short word when a long word would expand my vocabulary. They would see other parents cradling their babies in supine and refuse to do so. They read everything they could get their hands on, experimented, and made absolutely certain under no circumstances I would be treated as a sub-normal child. In this way, I was brought up in an educated house. One night my father spent the last two dollars in his bank account to buy a set of used encyclopedias that were published twelve years before.  It was turning the pages of these books, which were older than I was, in a household that refused to stoop to sub normal standards simply because there was a little one in the house, that I acquired my language skills, and, as a result, my self confidence.

Language skills often seem to me as a summation of all you are. Children, of course learning spelling, don’t know this, and adults rarely see. But parents who want the best for their sons and their daughters realize it in full. To use proper language, interesting terms, and changes in words require a certain amount of devotion to reaching beyond your present state. A child with a brain injury, in a special education class, if he dares to read the right books rather than the ones the teacher deems “appropriate” for him can reach exponentially above the low standards the adults around him have set as his goal.  A waiter who refuses to use slang, and refuses to succumb to the standards of “simply a member of staff” may not only receive a higher number of tips, but also be sought after for additional opportunities which would not otherwise come his way if he was just trying to live from paycheck to paycheck without improving himself. The language we use are the building blocks to state who we are, where we come from, how we think of ourselves, and who we intend to be someday. Being someone who simply wants shoes and juice, or bigger goals like someone who probably intends on recognizing the importance of a bank, even at the age of five.

In London, I have a neighbor who routinely plays in our backyard with a best friend.  The two of them share tea parties in a bright pink tent. Yesterday, she ran out to ask my help on a school project about Pluto.

“What exactly do you know about Pluto”, she said, playing with her hair and trying to balance on the outside of her feet. At her age, she still cannot stand still for any length of time.

I thought back to her age, the time when my father would lay down next to me with an encyclopedia and read about any article I liked. I can still picture the ink drawing of Pluto as a ball of ice on the yellow onion-skin pages of our ancient Encyclopedia Britannica. I told her what I knew about orbits and eclipses, Pluto changing places with other planets and how long a year is on a planet that is so far away from the sun, it is only a ball of ice.  I told her everything about it my father had taught me. She smiled, thanked me, and ran back inside.

As soon as I walked through the door I called home to see what my parents were reading these days.

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?