A Leg to Stand On

Dad’s leg popped off mid-air one day. He laughed so hard I thought we’d never get him up off the floor. He was playing the net in a friendly volleyball game, he jumped to tap the ball back over, and his leg popped off mid-air. He crumpled to the floor cussing and laughing contagiously. He strapped it back on and the game resumed.

As the result of a plane crash in the Pacific during World War II, his left leg had been amputated below the knee. By the time I knew him, he had had some 15 or so years to master the art of using a prosthetic leg – a “wooden leg” we called it, though by then it was mostly plastic.

I grew up being very confused about why other dads had two legs. My dad only had one leg, so that's what all dads should have. Even now when I’m older than the old man was when I was a kid, to see a man at the beach with two legs poking out the bottom of his bathing suit seems unnatural to me. What was normal was walking down the beach with dad, having him lean against the life guard stand to take off his wooden leg, and then stash it there against the stand while he hopped down to the water line and dove in. I now realize that when you have only one leg there is very little hesitation about the temperature of the water, there’s no dipping your toe in to test the frigidity factor. When it's balance versus water temperature, balance invariably loses, and you dive. 

Memories of dad's wooden leg are filled with every imaginable emotion. I remember dropping a little blue plastic Mary Poppins figurine into the ventilation hole in the side of his hollow leg and his anger and hidden laughter in taking it off and shaking it until it came back out that quarter-sized hole. I remember him convincing me during a trip to Florida with my high school marching band that he wanted to come down one of those tall water slides at Water World and that I would have to follow him up all those steps and carry his leg back down while he came down the slide – I remember feeling proud, not embarrassed as one might expect of a teenager, as I made my way down those steps with his leg under my arm. I remember the panicked fear in his voice as he called for me to run and get my mom to take him to the emergency room the night that he felt something in the knee of his good leg tear as he was crawling into the back of our pick-up truck – how incredibly anxious it must have been for him to have his good leg temporarily incapacitated because of surgery. I remember the surprise in his face when he wore an old wooden leg on a whitewater rafting trip and when he was tossed out of the raft he discovered for the first time that his leg floated and that it had a mind of its own when it came to floating in the same direction as the rest of his body.

I could fill pages – stories about ice skating and bike riding both of which he did without any problem, or his determination to try downhill skiing although he never got to, or the rainy, 17-mile Boy Scout hike that he led us along the Lincoln Trail through Washington, DC. My dad's wooden leg never slowed him down. No doubt it was sometimes frustrating and felt like a burden and I am certain that there were times when it caused him both physical and emotional pain, but he rarely let that show. His determination and courage and faithfulness – and his wooden leg – taught me well.

One of the most important lessons was that so long as you can maintain faith in God and believe in what you're doing you will succeed. Maybe that sounds too much like a Mike Brady, TV-dad cliché, but what he taught me was that in my faith I have a leg to stand on. It's not as if he took me aside a la “The Graduate” and gave me unsolicited advice: "Son, if you're gonna succeed in this life here's what you have to do ..." No, I learned it more subtly by watching the example he lived in front of me. 

Dad never complained about the things he couldn't do or couldn't have. He, like Job, refused to curse God or anyone else for the loss of his leg. He always seemed to have time for me and the endless band concerts and plays and Cub Scout projects that filled my schedule. He always had time for church – not just Sunday mornings but weeknights at a Trustees meeting or Saturday morning crawling inside the boiler to patch a crack so we had heat on Sunday or each year cutting down from a donor’s front lawn the biggest Christmas tree you could imagine and standing it up in our huge Sunday School auditorium.

And he always had time for what he thought God wanted him to do – leading us in Sunday morning worship at Boy Scout camping weekends, challenging those that refused to accept the appointment of a female pastor to our local church, fighting for my sister's youth group to be able to hold a Coffee House with rock music in the basement of our church in the 60's, willing to loan money to a Jamaican colleague at work who no one else would treat fairly, inventing ways to raise money for a new roof at church or to meet its struggling budget.

A leg to stand on. There was something so fundamental to my father's faith that it taught me that no matter what happened, I could always count on God to be with me and when that leg didn't seem like enough, I could always "lean on the everlasting arms" whenever I needed. It's taken me quite a few years and some real soul searching to understand what that fundamental piece of his faith was, but I think that I now know. That foundation of his faith was what gave dad a leg to stand on in a world that would just as soon knock him off his feet. 

Rabbi Hillel the Elder was a great Talmudic sage during the early years of Jesus’ life, born in Babylonia in the first century BCE. One famous account of Hillel (Shabbat 31a) tells of a Gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism but only if he could find a rabbi who could teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective convert, stood on one leg. Hillel accepted the challenge and while the man stood on one leg, he said: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this – go and study it!"

A scribe offered Jesus a similar challenge, "Which commandment is the first of all?" "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength" and "love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus answered. (Mark 12:28-34)

Those two commandments are equal in weight and importance, those two are more important than any burnt sacrifice, though they might require some other kind of sacrifice – the offering of one's selfishness and idolatrous attitudes – those two are beyond anything else that you might think God would have of you. Love of God and love of neighbor is so founda­tional to faith, so fundamental, that learning and living those commandments brings you "not far from the kin-dom of God," says Jesus, and that’s not such a bad place to be.

Love of God and love of neighbor was the foundation of my father's faith. That's the leg he had to stand on. And that's now the leg I have to stand on. 

Maybe Jesus and Hillel had a different message about how to best summarize God’s requirements of us, but they each knew it was fundamentally short and sweet, brief enough that it created for us a leg to stand on. “Love God, love neighbor, love self” or “Do as you would have done to you.” A leg to stand on.

In his novel “King Jesus,” Robert Graves tells of an old tradi­tion that claims that Jesus walked with a limp. Imagine the implications of that tradition. Picture in your mind the Jesus that you know and add to that picture a limp. Jesus makes his way around the country­side and cities of first century Israel walking with a limp. In a world where those with physical disability were cast aside, is it possible that this teacher had trouble walking? 

In a world where the powers that be look for ways to knock your legs out from under you, is it possible that the one who answered so that "no one dared to ask him another question" only had one good leg to stand on?

There is something so central to faith in those command­ments that maybe that's the only leg that Jesus needed. “Love God, love neighbor, love self.” Drop mic, walk away. In that simple commandment there is surely a leg to stand on.

That's what my dad was trying to tell me by living his life the way he did. If what I do stands on that leg, on that core princi­ple of faith, then surely my efforts will be close to the kin-dom of God and will be a faithful response to God's call. Not that I can justify every move I make by claiming it is for God and my neighbor, an argument which has been used to try to justify the Nazi death camps and racism, sexism, ableism and every other kind of –ism, but rather that if it is truly a faithful response standing alone on love of God, neighbor, and self, then no one will dare ask another question and no one will be able to knock that leg out from under me.

You only need one leg to stand on to take on the world.

"Man with a wooden leg escapes prison," writes James Tate, "He's caught. They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river to get to the field where he must work all day on one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn't want it. His escape is all planned. It requires only one leg." 

You only need one leg on which to stand to make your escape from the prison bars of the world and to get close to the kin-dom of God.

© Copyright 2015
James F. McIntire
All rights reserved.

Flirtgangelism

London pub, 2014

“So, you know, Bud Light isn’t really a beer, right?”

“Really?,” replied the server who had just shown me the beer list – bottles and drafts – and then told me $2 Bud Lights were the evening special.

“Nah, it’s basically just water.”

“Well, I guess that explains the ‘Light’ part. I don’t drink beer, so I wouldn’t know. Now hard liquor, I could tell you.”

It was the usual restaurant banter that my wife, Lydia, in one sentence claims is flirtation and in the next tells me it’s a wonderful gift that I have. Evangelism, basically – immediately engaging in a conversation with a stranger who I know nothing about simply because she is another of God’s children. 

Flirtangelism.

By the end of the night, I knew her name is Crystal, that she is 30, married for less than a year, and is now 7 weeks pregnant. The first child of an only child of an only child. Everyone is thrilled.

So she’s not drinking at all these days – not beer or hard liquor. I heard about her intolerable morning sickness and that she’s been told to keep saltines by the bedside so she can eat them before getting out of the bed as soon as she wakes up.

“During my pregnancies,” I slipped into the exchange, “Graham crackers helped.” She gave me that baffled look of confusion that often is the response to my random statements.

Pregnant, little, middle aged, white man – cognitive dissonance flashed across her face.

God is in these moments. Be they flirtations or evangelism or ramblings or profundity. God is in these moments because it is in each other’s faces and through our small interactions that we can today experience God. A beer in the bar, a baby in the belly; a smile, a word – God is there.

Will I ever see Crystal again? I told her I would stop by and check on how she’s getting along. The place is within walking distance of my house but I rarely go there. Will I check in on her?

Maybe. Maybe not. Yet, whatever, God is there.

In that small exchange this week, God was there. In each encounter we have with another person, we experience God who lives in our lives.

© Copyright 2015

James F. McIntire

All rights reserved.

In the Image of Rocky

In the Image of Rocky

(Exodus 3)

  

Shraga Weil, "The Burning Bush"1990  Serigraph 

Rocky was a young adult when I met him for the first time at a conference in the early 1990s, a young man with intellectual disabilities living in Kansas. As I ate lunch with Rocky one afternoon he insisted on telling me about his job in a rapid succession of spoken thoughts.  He told me that it was a great job, that he loved it and that he went to it every day, he said he made friends there, he worked hard, he earned good money, and he got up early to get there.  And if I hadn’t figured it out by that point, he let me know that it was the most important part of his life. Finally, in the split second that it took him to catch his breath, knowing that it might be my only opportunity to jump in, I did. 

“Rocky,” I asked, “what is it that you do?"

He paused for a moment, gathered his thoughts, looked me straight in the eye and with all sincerity he said, "I do … what I do."

That was the answer. There was no better way for Rocky to describe not only what he did for his job but also to say who he was, what he was about, and how he lived his life. "I do what I do," he said, and as soon as it hit my ears, I heard in my head the words of Moses when God spoke to him from the burning bush. "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"  God said to Moses, "I Am Who I Am.” (or "I will be who I will be"). (Exodus3:14)

"I do what I do," said Rocky. "I am Who I am," said YHWH.

The truth of those statements is reality for each of us, not just for Rocky, in that they describe who we are in this world. – I am Who I am, I do what I do.  There is no need to even try to define God, or us for that matter, any further than that basic phrase. God knows what it means to "do what I do" because God is one who knows what it is like to quite simply be, to exist, to be the one who is called, I Am.  And God created us in that very same image of God – b'tzelem Elohim in Hebrew, Imago Dei in Latin, in the image of God in English – we are created in the image of the one who is, simply stated, I Am. You and me and Rocky in the image of God.

Martin Buber, renowned philosopher and theologian, a person of influence in the revival of the Hassidic movement in the middle of the 20th century, was convinced that the only way for people to know each other and to know God is through intimate relationships.  In his seminal work, I and Thou, he writes:

The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing more.

When Moses stood at the burning presence of the Hebrew God, YHWH, on that mountain, he experienced ever so briefly that very same word of revelation. I Am was there in front of him –

and beside him and behind him and surrounding him. And if Moses got the message clearly he began to understand in a new way that this One in whose image he and everybody else has been created was explaining to him what Buber reminds us, "That which has being is there, nothing more."

Isn't this what Imago Dei and b'tzelem Elohim is all about? Isn't this what God means by I Am?   Isn't this what it means for us to be created in God's image?

Until we are ready to recognize in each other, whatever our ability, the reality of that description – I am who I am – then adding ramps and elevators and bathrooms to make our buildings more accessible for those we look at as other than I Am, is an absolutely useless process. Until we realize that each one of us has been created in the image of God and that we are who we are simply because God is one who knows what it is like to be – nothing more – until we realize that fact, we will never be truly accepting of each other.

Jean Vanier, founder of L'arche communities where people with and without physical and intellectual disabilities live side by side, wrote that “Interior growth is only possible when we commit ourselves with and to others.” We cannot grow spiritually until we are willing to allow others to grow as well and otherness is no longer defined by whether or not a person can walk or speak or hear or see or think or learn as quickly as I can. We cannot limit our circle to those who are just like us if we want to move beyond where we are spiritually and until we submit to the needs of others and allow them the opportunity to grow as well we will never grow.

For those with what society has labeled as disabilities, for their families and their friends, their doctors and advocates, their teachers and therapists, their pastors, priests, rabbis and imams, the reality is that those statements – I am who I am or I do what I do – describe each of us. No need to try to define it any further.

God knows what it means to "do what I do" because God is one who knows what it is like to simply be, to exist, to be the one who is called, I AM.

© Copyright 2015

James F. McIntire

All rights reserved.

Walking in Commotion

Walking in Commotion
 (Mark 5:21-43)

When they got to the house, there was a commotion and people were weeping and wailing loudly outside.  Inside, he asked "Why do you make a commotion and weep?  The child is not dead but sleeping."  And they laughed at him. (Mark 5:21-43)

Yeah, they laugh like that a lot.

But he took the little girl by the hand despite the laughter and said to her in his lyrical Aramaic, talitha cum – little girl get up – and Jairus’ 12 year old daughter did just that. She awoke and she walked. She walked around that house until finally Jesus had to tell them, “Well, she’s probably hungry. Give her something to eat.” 

It was the third year of my time on the pastoral staff of an active church in Philadelphia when a little girl named Lindsay, to whom I am related by birth and by God’s grace, had just turned 9 years old. Lindsay was born with a medical condition that allows her very limited intellectual and physical abilities and we had been told that she might not live very long, that if she did she would never know her parents, and even so she probably wouldn’t ever be able to roll over in her crib or sit upright on her own.

But Lindsay is Lindsay. And God is God.

By age 9, because Lindsay is Lindsay and God is God, Lindsay had moved far beyond those anticipated milestones of rolling over and sitting upright. Now she had finally been standing and taking tiny steps on and off for about a year – something which she, of course, would never be able to do. But remember, no one ever told the short and stubby bumblebee that it isn’t flight worthy. 

On a Sunday in June, Lindsay and God created a moment in time in the midst of a commotion of people, a group much the same as the group that had gathered outside the house of Jairus. Lindsay decided that that Sunday would be the day that she would let go.

Lindsay was in her classroom like any typical Sunday and when I got there I found her leaning against the doorjamb. She let go that day and walked. She walked from her Church School room into our fellowship hall where people had gathered for Coffee Hour. She didn't make a big deal out of it. Lindsay has no words but she kept shooing my hand away, making it clear that she could do it on her own. This journey of 100 feet down a tile-floored hallway is no small accomplishment for a little girl who was supposed to be “profoundly retarded,” who might not even live beyond 3 months, who would never roll over. 

She got to the doorway into the gathering and encountered three ridiculous little steps that some architect thought necessary to get into the room, so she sat down, crawled up the steps, through the door, and wouldn't let me stand her up inside the big room. Talitha cum. My little girl got up on her own and walked again.   

I stepped away and left her on her own as she made her entrance into the commotion which we lovingly named “the snake pit” since God-only-knows what worship visitors experienced among the indoctrinated mob that gathered for free coffee. But I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She stood and walked. This time around the room checking it out.

I have little idea what goes on inside Lindsay's brain. I have no clue how she operates on a cognitive level. I don't know what synapses are there let alone how they might fire. But I do know something about what happened that Sunday. Something deep within Lindsay experienced God and those words of Jesus, talitha cum – little girl, get up – and she took it to heart. I have no idea how the Spirit of God moves within the soul of my little girl, but I do know that something moved her to walk on her own that Sunday morning and she's been doing it ever since.

And the most remarkable thing about it was not necessarily that it was 8 years later than the typical child or that she did it at all, but rather the most remarkable thing was that she chose to let go and walk for the first time not at home, not at school, not at the playground, not at a friend's house but in that space where she senses that she is a part of something bigger than herself – a community, a community bound together in faith.

There is something fundamentally valuable about any community that joins together for worship and prayer and praise of God. That community – the people connected to it, the God who lives in the midst of it, the spirit that enlivens it – says to each of us talitha cum, "little girl, get up." And if we hear it, we do.

That's why we join. That's why we want to belong. That’s why we hang around even when the commotion might seem like a snake pit, when sometimes it seems like we’re not even welcome. It’s because, despite ourselves, God is present. 

When Lindsay finally stood in the room that Sunday morning and made her way around the crowd she would occasionally lose her balance and reach out and touch someone just for a second and then be on her way again and no one minded that touch. As she tapped the khaki back pockets of unsuspecting middle aged men, they didn’t flinch. They all knew Lindsay. I turned around once and found her standing at the table either reaching for the icing on the sheet cake or getting ready to do her pull-the-cloth-off-the-table magic trick.  People didn't mind. When she wobbled into the Church's fair trade bazaar to do her Father's Day shopping (naturally!) and I found her leaning with her elbows on the cashier's table, everyone one was okay with it. 

I do not know what goes on inside Lindsay's mind and I do not know how God moves her, but I do know that she chose to make that statement that day in that community of faith where she is safe and where she is loved with the love that God allows any of us. She stood and walked there because she is a part of that community and what it stands for. And that's reason enough for me to say I want to be a part of it.  

It was a miraculous moment which continues to remind me why it is that I am willing to stay a part of a community like the church which often seems like a, not-so-trendy, not-so-sexy, outdated institution. Because beyond every flaw, it is still a community of gathering and healing. The truth of it all is that we don’t want to – and we don’t have to – learn to walk alone.

It seems to me that what we do inside our faith communities at times is exactly the kind of commotion that Jesus found outside Jairus' house. Weeping and wailing, cynicism and rejection, pessimism and hypocrisy, gossip about and laughter at the unimaginable. But on the other hand, much of what do inside is certainly more than a commotion. Sure there's a bit of commotionness about it all. We sing and we pray and we preach and we clap. Some of us weep and others laugh. We're up and down, standing and sitting and kneeling. It is all a bit of a commotion.  

But the truth is, behind it all, beneath it all, through it all, it's really more than a commotion. It's what a group of people do when they want to share their faith. It's what a group of faithful people do to celebrate miracles and joys and tears and compassion and healing. It's more than a commotion. It's a community.

That's why people want to be a part of it. We all want to bring our joys and thanksgivings to the place and among the people who gather to each experience God in some way. And maybe we experience someone whispering in our ear – and God takes us by the hand and says talitha cum – and we stand in witness to what can happen in such a community.

We come together, we witness to the miracles that God creates when we connect with each other, we touch, and we are healed. 

© Copyright 2015

James F. McIntire

All rights reserved.