Healing Miracles

I had been working full time for only a few months when I received a phone message from my two-year old son's daycare provider, Lori. There had been an accident and she was taking Seth to the doctor. Her message was a bit hysterical, but I remember feeling calm as I made arrangements for my colleague to cover my classes. I immediately drove to the doctor, arriving at the same time as Lori.  I grabbed Seth from the back seat of her car and ran in. His hand was wrapped in what had once been a clean white dish towel, now saturated with blood. I remember positioning him and his hand so that he wouldn't bleed all over me; I also remember thinking that was a strange impulse and wondered what it said about me.

While the doctor unwrapped his hand, I could hardly look. My stomach was turning and I was fighting back tears. Unwrapped, the doctor revealed that one third of Seth's pinky had been severed and was hanging only by a very small scrap of skin. Lori, in tears, told us that Seth and her son Jacob had been playing in the playhouse and that Jacob had shut the door on Seth's finger.  Seth, completely composed, corrected her: he announced, to Lori's obvious relief, that Jacob had been nowhere near the door. The wind, he said, had blown it shut.

As the doctor cleaned and stitched, I focused my attention elsewhere. I had always thought I would love being a doctor, but I knew at that moment I could never do it--at least not if the patient was my own child. Seth, on the other hand, was fully engaged, asking the doctor questions, giving him orders, and calming his mother.

Eleven stitches later, we left with instructions to prevent the loss of the finger. I drove him to father's work so Mitch could commiserate and comfort (mostly me), and then I took him home. We were at the time living with my grandmother who was in need of near constant care and so as soon as I got him comfortable, I raced upstairs to check on grandma.

When I got there, it was quiet...too quiet. The silence communicated concern and I knew immediately that something was wrong.  My first thought was laced with the fear she had wandered off, but I checked her dark bedroom anyway; it was empty. As I turned to leave, I heard a tiny whimper. I found her pinned face down on the floor between the wall and the side of her bed crying silently. I went to lift her, but she cried out in pain. It was then that I noticed her left leg was stuck between the mattress and the wooden frame. Speaking in a quiet, calming voice, I lifted the mattress in order to free her leg. I carefully helped her to the bed and saw with horror that her leg was badly misshapen. I don't know how long she had been there, but long enough to disfigure her leg.

Over the next few days, as I nursed two invalids back to health I was struck by the miraculousness of the physical body. Over the next few days, I watched in awe as two very different bodies--one very old and worn and the other very young and fresh--simultaneously healed themselves. The finger reattached, the leg straightened and strengthened, both were made whole. Modern medicine assisted the process, but I believe the body is so perfectly designed it can and often does perform miracles simply doing what it is designed to do. 

Educated by my 4 year old!

I believe childhood innocence is a beautiful and all-too-temporary glimpse of the divine.

Children have no guile, no ulterior motives, no malice. That trust, that innocence, is sadly tarnished as they grow and develop and interact with adults--who intend only to prepare them for reality, for life. But before that innocence is tarnished, it is something to behold.

When Meg was four years old, I took her and her weeks-old baby brother shopping. I had Seth in my arms, I was pushing a stroller, and I was intent on finding a deal. Meg was born capable, and so I found myself paying little attention to this curious child as I immersed myself in my quest for a bargain. She obediently followed me through Kids Gap, one hand attached either to the stroller or her brother's dangling leg. However, at one point I looked down to find she was no longer attached. In fact, she was wandering off. I panicked, sternly called her name, and was ready to scold when I realized she was very interested in something, something she had not seen before. She was so interested that she had violated my rules and had begun to follow this small woman around the store unabashedly wide-eyed and intrigued.

I was immediately embarrassed. My sweet little child was staring at difference. My innocent girl was in the process, I perceived, of making someone feel uncomfortable. I smiled at her and quietly suggested that she say hello and move on. She couldn't. She was mesmerized and speechless. This woman moved, so did Meg. This woman sorted through a rounder, Meg watched. Her curiosity was unabashedly obvious. As I watched and tried to alleviate the situation without being noticed, I felt more and more uncomfortable--to the point that I used her brother as an excuse to leave and escorted Meg out of the store. I was at that moment ashamed of my daughter and her lack of social acuity.

I was ready to lecture; I was ready to teach. Fortunately, I held my tongue and allowed her to open the dialogue, to invite my developing dissertation on manners, politeness, and difference. And she did. She began, "mom, did you see that little girl?" I nodded, waiting for her to implicate herself in judgment. Instead, she finished with what was clearly a combination of admiration and perhaps a twinge of jealously: "she had her own credit card."

I was speechless. I knew immediately that my own perceptions were flawed, that my years of education and that my commitment to celebrate and accept difference were forced in comparison to her genuine acceptance. She hadn't noticed a small person, she hadn't registered fear or discomfort; instead, she saw independence that she longed for--a child shopping on her own, free from the restrictions of an intense, overbearing, quick-to-judge mother.

All too often, we impose our own insecurities and biases on others without even registering that those are our issues, not theirs. As a literature professor, I regularly have students resist certain texts.  So often in fact that I have resorted to a beginning-of-the-semester warning: you will read difficult subject matter in this class and you should consider dropping if you don't possess the maturity to handle it! Okay, in truth I say it much more professionally, unthreateningly, and pleasantly than that, but that is what I mean. That is the message I intend to convey. When a student later comes to me and behind closed doors tells me the text is too dark, or too ugly, or too violent to read, I resist the urge to lecture, to declare that an inability to find beauty and truth in darkness is a reflection of the reader's heart...not the text.

On that shopping day, though, I had to give myself the lecture. My discomfort was mine; my tendency to look away from difference, to pretend it wasn't there, was indicative of a hypersensitivity to difference not a guileless acceptance of it. On that day, I was truly educated by my 4-year old daughter and her first encounter with difference...a little girl with her own credit card.

Written 26 April, 2016 

Faith in Doubt; Doubt in Faith

I believe in doubt. 

There, I said it. In doing so, I may in fact have opened the doors of cosmic retaliation. So far (sigh of relief), I have seen no lightning strikes nor felt any jolts of electricity; make no mistake, though, I have knocked on wood, my fingers are crossed, and my lucky rabbit-foot is poised protectively by the side of my keyboard.

I make no claims of being a religious scholar, but the religions I know of are, without exception, premised on the concept of faith.  And, as a language person, I can't help but point out that, while we don't often talk about it, faith itself is predicated upon doubt. You cannot have one without the other.  If you do, you have certitude. Certitude by definition is not faith, and faith by definition is not knowledge.

This complexity of thinking is not new. Derrida, for example, explains that translating language is incredibly complex: when looking at Plato's use of the word "pharmakon," which of course is translated as "drug," the translator then must choose between two competing, in fact polarizing, concepts.  A drug, he argues, has both the ability to cure and to poison--two extreme meanings, two binaries or opposites, and yet both contained within one word.  Rejecting the limitations of translation, Derrida suggests that the single word, pharmakon, carries both hope and despair and in so doing the word embraces simultaneously polar extremes. (I know that is a an oversimplification for you Derridian scholars.)

Language is like that:  complex, challenging, paradoxical, thought-provoking.

For me, faith is one of those terms that demands attention, but only if you allow yourself to think about it. Many of us proclaim faith. But in the simple act of merely proclaiming faith, we are also admitting doubt.  Faith by its very definition is coupled with doubt. Faith is not the quest to remove doubt. Instead, faith is the ability to accept doubt. To admit it. To choose to believe in the midst of it. Faith is the ability to believe in contradiction, to accept uncertainty.

For me, faith is the human mind's, the human heart's, acceptance and resignation of not knowing. It is the ability to hold two competing ideas in your heart and still breathe, and in some cases faith pushes those with doubt toward a search for truth.  

Perhaps faith is more honorable, more courageous, more powerful than certitude. Perhaps faith is higher order thinking. Perhaps faith, confidence, belief, and trust allow us to survive an uncertain existence amidst the certainty of doubt.

Written 29 April 2015