Then a Jesuit pal asked me, quite simply, What would you write if you weren’t afraid?
– Mark Karr, The Art of Memoir
When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” John 5:6
I think a lot about this unnamed man in the Bible, a man who had been disabled for nearly four decades. I often wonder how I would respond if I was him and a man walked up to me and asked if I wanted to get well. Do I want to get well? Are you kidding me?
This experience with Jesus brings questions into my mind, deep questions about myself and the things I long for. I hesitantly turn my eyes towards my many and varied illnesses.
Do I want to overcome my addictions? Or do I enjoy the numbness they deliver?
Do I want to finish writing that book? Or am I afraid of the potential apathy?
Do I want to live a simple life? Or is all this noise keeping me comfortably distracted?
Do I want…?
Of course I do.
But then a still, small voice asks again.
…but do you really?
* * * * *
At the core of what Jesus was asking this man was this: Do you dare to imagine being recreated? Do you dare to engage in a new adventure, a new way of being? Do you dare to stand when all you have done up until now is sit and wait by the water?
Which brings me back around to the Mary Karr quote: “Then a Jesuit pal asked me, quite simply, What would you write if you weren’t afraid?”
The two questions are strikingly similar:
“Do you want to be made well?”
“What would you write if you weren’t afraid?”
* * * * *
Who would you be, who would you really be, if you dared to hope again?
It’s certainly a question worth considering during these days when fear rules most of us, when companies and individuals around us stand to profit from our insecurity, our uncertainty.
Do you want to get well?
What would you do, how would you live, if you weren’t afraid?
Across the street, barbers
do pull-ups under the fire escape,
tattoo artists stand on
their stoop, smoking, staring
at their phones, and cars
drive down Prince Street, deeper
into the city.
A man stands on the corner with his standard-
issue cardboard sign
HOMELESS VET
FOOD OR CLOTHING
GOD BLESS AMERICA
Driving along the sidewalk
towards him are construction
vehicles worth more than my house. The men
in hardhats stand in a semi-circle, savages
discerning the will of demanding gods,
then peel back the crumbling macadam, lay
the pipes, and cover it with more debris.
Always more debris.
The barbers cheer and count their strength.
The artists breathe in and sigh out their smoke.
The construction beeps its backwards movement.
And in the middle of all this, in the middle
of this city, this construction, this noise, these
sad and weary people, these begrudging
celebrants, these conquering barbers,
these smoldering artists, I cannot get the image
of that refugee boy out of my mind, the boy
drowned on the beach.
Rag doll limp, waterlogged, his face planted in the sand
like a castle, or a seashell, the sound of the waves always
in his ears. I try to imagine him, or the essence
of him, rising up and walking into the water, leaving
his body behind, his hands
gliding over the waves, ripples rolling
outward from his movement.
I am tired of talking.
Cars are always driving down Prince Street, always
driving. There is no end to them.
There is no end to the number of us
who will sleep well tonight on soft pillows, who
will eat too much, watch too much television,
who will wake up tomorrow with that
same gnawing ache that says
nothing is quite
as it should be.
I know better than to enter
the mountain ranges of Silence alone and unarmed,
because I know they will be there, too, the
Voices.
Today I picked up a phrase, a walking stick to carry
with me, God, what is it
that I should do? It was light
in my hands, an easy burden.
Still, the Voices waited, sidled up next
to me, tried to lead me down familiar slivers.
Before I pulled my way through the first line
of brambles, the
Voices had me arguing in my mind
with other writers who do not appreciate
my genius, and literary people who have not embraced
my work, and friends who have never
read my books,
but then I remembered the hiking stick I brought
with me, God, what is it
that I should do? I sank
into those words and the silence between
them.
The Voices dispersed
when they saw what I carried with me. They are fragile
enemies, fickle
friends. It is always a relief to leave
them behind.
Silence is a beautiful range, once you get beyond
the brambles, up into the hills that fold
over one another, with peaks that glow
like honey in the light, and valleys dark as
warmth. There is hope there, and peace, if you
remember to take a walking stick, if you
can get in beyond the tangled undergrowth
of Voices.
Fifteen minutes later
– or a lifetime – I always emerge washed
by the thin air. I always descend
a changed being. Silence will follow you back out,
if you let it. Silence will
remind you there is A Voice
beyond the voices, one that will
rename you
if you let it.
My son sat in the passenger’s seat as I drove our truck into one of the poorer sections of our city. We pulled a small trailer behind the truck, and it was loaded down with three dressers, an end table, a dining room table, and a few other odds and ends. Two old African-American women sat on their porch and stared at us as we drove past. One young man used a leaf blower to clear the sidewalks. Other than that, the street was empty. Other than the leaf blower, the street was silent.
We pulled to the side and looked for my friend Melissa. She was meeting us there, introducing us to a Ugandan family, recent refugees to the United States. They had lived in a refugee camp in Africa for seven years before making the trip to the southern end of the city of Lancaster. Seven years. Three of the children had been born in the camp and knew nothing of the world beside temporary lodging, prepackaged food. There are ten of them now sharing the house.
We are new to them. This place is new to them. They don’t completely understand the way we live. When Melissa first joined a team of people from CWS to help this family with their transition, she soon learned they were taking their clean clothes from the dryer and sorting them into garbage bags. They didn’t get the concept of folding, of putting clothes away neatly until it was time to wear them.
When Cade and I got there, the father greeted us, though he could speak little English. The son, 24 years old, grinned and nodded and grinned and nodded and spoke occasionally. When he saw the largest chest of drawers, he insisted we take it up to his room. All the way on the third floor. Up two very narrow, very steep staircases.
We fought that piece of furniture, he and I, and eventually it submitted. We wrestled it to the top of the house, he and I against it and gravity, and when we finally had it in place, the look on his face made it all worth while.
“Thank you,” he said, his dark eyes shining. “Thank you.” He nodded his head up and down, up and down, and there was something of the miraculous in the whole situation. Strangers had arrived out of nowhere and given him this fabulous gift. He stared at that dresser the way a typical American 20-something would stare at a new car. It was another piece to the puzzle of his life in the United States.
Why do I feel I must justify our willingness to let them into the country?
I tell this story because now, so soon after terrorists have worked their wicked magic, it would be easy to let fear guide us. It would be easy to pull into our protective shell. It would be easy to shake our heads, sigh, and say, “No more.”
No more Muslims.
No more Syrians.
No more Strangers.
It is, after all, the logical thing to do. And our professional pundits, our aspiring politicians, they all agree. They are, after all, peddling fear. They always are. Unfortunately, we are usually buying.
“Giving asylum to Syrian refugees is ‘the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,'” said Sean Hannity.
“I’m putting people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they’re going back,” said Donald Trump.
Protecting ourselves, protecting our best interests, that’s the logical thing to do. Even if it means turning away people with legitimate needs.
But it’s not the Christian thing to do.
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.We love, because He first loved us…” 1 John 4:18-19
He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'” Luke 10:27
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” Matthew 5:43-45
It’s actually rather upside-down, rather silly. But that’s the Kingdom of God for you, because the Kingdom of God doesn’t make sense. In the Kingdom of God, we do good for those who hate us. In the Kingdom of God, the smallest of things can move mountains. In the Kingdom of God, we are told to return violence with non-violence. The first will be last, the last first. The meek will inherit the earth. It’s a Kingdom that belongs to the poor in spirit.
It’s a Kingdom that doesn’t make any sense.
What does make sense? Well, it would make perfect sense to stop welcoming refugees – after all, they might be ISIS! It would make perfect sense to stop taking in the needy, the orphans, the widows – after all, they might simply become freeloaders! It would make perfect sense to turn our back on those we consider enemy, those we consider other, those we don’t understand.
My life is fine as it is, thank you very much.
All I want is to be left alone.
Bootstraps.
They should sort out their own country instead of coming here.
It would make perfect sense to turn inward. But it doesn’t make Kingdom sense.
The Kingdom of God insists, “Love your enemies!”
The Kingdom of God implores, “Love others because God first loved you!”
This upside-down Kingdom shouts, “Get out of the boat and walk to me on the water!”
Can we do that? Can we leave our safe places of security? Our comfortable places? Can we stand on the moving waves of these terror-filled days and somehow maintain compassionate hearts?
Can the power of love somehow manage to overwhelm our fear?
For now though, when I look at the real choices before me, I pick up that red bottle and break the pills, like pieces of communion bread – grace I need, grace I cannot afford to do without.
* * * * *
And then she asks again how I’m doing with the Vitamin L – my daily dose of Lexapro. It has been six years. Six year since I was able to release the words, the pain, the confusion, and the power of fear by saying out loud what I couldn’t imagine saying even to myself.
We agree, to the best of our ability, that racism is still a problem in the world. We have raised awareness, taken stands, and we have composed Tweets and posts and essays about the evil of it all. There will always be a need for that. As long as racism exists, there will be a need for us to say it’s not okay for conferences and churches and schools and restaurants and neighborhoods and others to overlook or mistreat or prefer or exclude.
* * * * *
There’s no end to how social media has impacted our lives and the way we mourn is no exception. It’s something we’re all figuring out together but I haven’t seen it discussed very much and that’s why I thought it would be the perfect topic for my first online course, especially since the holidays- those great magnifiers of our grief- are just around the corner.
* * * * *
“As somebody who is listening, I just want to commend you on your bravery, and say that I’m so happy to know there are people like you who exist in the world.”
In 2009, my wife woke to a ball of anxiety about what was happening, about our business going under and all the debt weighing us down, about us having to leave a place we loved and move our family of six into my parents’ basement 150 miles away. She slid out of bed, down onto the floor, and put her face in the plush carpet.
How can this be happening? God, how can you let this happen?
She heard the closest thing she’s ever heard to an audible voice from heaven, and it echoed in her mind, one phrase reverberating and growing.
This is a gift.
When the phrase faded off into the darkness, disappearing beneath the whirring of the ceiling fan, my wife shook her head.
Well, she muttered, it’s a pretty shitty gift.
She stood up off the floor, crawled back into bed, and went to sleep.
