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.