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Jesus' Distressing Disguise
7/20/09
This morning I walked into the same room at Sisters of Charity that I walk into every weekday.
It’s part of an orphanage – well, some of the babies are orphans, but most just have parents who can’t afford to take care of them. Many volunteers come to help the sisters care for the babies, but they tend to hold and feed the “normal” ones and ignore the ones with special needs.
There’s a kid there named Bola whose parents are Sudanese refugees. He lives there because his parents can’t afford to keep him at home. They both work full time. Bola has cerebral palsy and lies on the floor all day. When I walk in he recognizes me and squirms in a fit of joy. Sometimes I pick him up and hold him upright so he can walk. He loves when I do that.
There’s a girl named Martina. She’s nine years old, but you’d never guess that from seeing her. I can wrap my thumb and forefinger around her tiny atrophied legs. She also has cerebral palsy. She’s epileptic and she’s blind. Flies swarm around her face constantly.
Martina lies motionless with her empty eyes staring at the ceiling. Sometimes she flicks them back and forth when a fly lands on one of them. One day she was lying with her head tilted way back (she doesn’t have the strength to lift it) and the drool dripped from her mouth up her face and made a pool on her eye.
I feed her. It takes about an hour to feed her one bowl. She can’t really swallow.
There are others. Many others. They cry, they poop, they barf. I never know which one of them to hold or what to do.
In The Catcher in the Rye there is a part where Holden is scraping an inappropriate message off a wall and it occurs to him that no matter how long he does that, he will never erase all the profanities in the world. That’s the way I feel in the room full of kids, and it’s the way I feel as I try to tell you what it’s like.
I feel like blind babies are God’s way of saying “Screw you, Ben,” but on the wall at the orphanage there are many religious icons; as I was holding Bola, thinking how God has abandoned this poor refugee in Egypt, I looked at the image of the Virgin Mary holding the Divine Child.
I thought of how Jesus was born in a barn and had to flee the country to Egypt to avoid being murdered by government orders. God, the Creator of the universe, became like Bola. I see the icon of the Passion, and the saliva on Martina’s face starts to look like the blood of Jesus. Mother Teresa’s picture hangs on the wall too. She called this scene before me “Jesus’ distressing disguise.”
I look at the faces of the kids now and I don’t hear God swearing at me in anger. Instead I see his face.
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