Power

When my Grammy Phoebe had dementia, she lived with my family. Sometimes I would accompany her on outings, like to get her hair cut or to buy something at the mall. I was a young teenager and if the inherent self-consciousness of being 14 weren't enough, I had the added benefit of moving at the pace of an elderly, confused women. I was always sure we were causing a scene, and I would be simultaneously apologetic to the people we were inevitably inconveniencing and agitated at my grandmother for her sloth-like ways.

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My eight-year old neighbour came to sit next to me in church the other Sunday. He is fidgety at the best of times, and it church this seems magnified. When we sang hymns, he stood up on the pew and belted them out at the top of his little lungs: "JOY TO THE WORLD," as if in a competition for singing volume. I didn't want to tell him to be quiet, because, hey, he was a boy singing in church. I was afraid he'd never sing again if I told him "Shh." But I began to notice the annoyed glances of other parishioners, as his singing drowned out the slightly more reserved congregation, and I couldn't wait until it was time for him to go to his Bible class downstairs, and be disassociated with me. 

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My friends and I had planned to go to a concert together, and the day of the concert, one friend learned that her university classmate, a close friend, had passed away. I asked if my friend still wanted to go to the concert. She did, and we drove the two hours to Moncton with not much talk about the heaviness we all felt. We tried to enjoy the concert the best we could, stopping at McDonald's, greeting friends from away with smiles, and taking in the music of a favourite artist. But during a slow song, a song about the joy we can have through Christ, the tears came, and we stood in the centre of a throng of people at a concert, surrounding our grieving friend. I have never been good at knowing what to do at times like these, and I just hugged her, trying to ignore the quizzical expressions of others around us. I am not good at comforting people. It makes me uncomfortable. 

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When my mother had her stem cell transplant, she stayed in a place a block away from the hospital. It is a kind of a hotel for people who need to be close to medical care. I joined her for some time as her primary care partner. Every morning, we walked at a snail's pace to the hospital for the morning's appointment. At this time I had strained my knee and my mother was thin and pale and hairless and so we walked together slowly, the cancer patient and the girl limping with a cane. People had to pass us on the street. Once someone offered to carry my bags for me, which, as an able-bodied person, had never happened to me before. I was taken off-guard and insisted on carrying them for the few more steps into the building. 

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These are just a few stories, and I have many more. They are stories of times I wished away the ugliness and the mess and all that is different and uncomfortable in the world. They are times I wish I could be seen with someone powerful instead of someone powerless, times I wanted to say to people, "This isn't me. I'm normal. I'm successful. I fit into society just fine." They are situations that make me really uncomfortable and that I would rather avoid. 

This Christmas, I am reminded, gracefully, of the kinds of situations Jesus chooses to be in. Jesus embraces the very situations I try to avoid. He, though human, forgoes that human habit of striving for upward mobility, and instead makes himself so vulnerable that he has to be delivered by a woman. This is the Christmas story: the Creator being fed at the breast of a new mother. Jesus your King is born. And it continues: he seeks out the messy, ugly corners of life that I like to forget about. He weeps with Mary and Martha for their brother Lazarus, even though he was just about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He chooses to suffer with his friends first. He eats dinner with Zacchaeus, a reviled tax-collector. He welcomes little children when people think he should be doing more important things. In one of my all-time favourite stories, he is on his way to heal a rich, powerful person's daughter when a bleeding woman, a social outcast, touches his garment. The Bible says she was healed just by touching his robe, but Jesus goes farther than physical healing. He stops. He asks for her story. He calls her daughter.

Jesus came and spent time with the powerless. He entered situations of pain and suffering and did not think about how that may affect his position in society. I need to be reminded of this, daily. I post articles on Facebook and hope they make me sound smart. I am a compulsive name-dropper, eager to advertise my connection to a Very Important Person, because that means I am important, too, right? Sometimes I read books just so I can say I've read them, or buy books just because they'd look good on my shelf. And I am even afraid to write these confessions, because I wonder: Does this make me seem insecure? What if people think I am insecure? 

So I confess: yes, I am insecure. I grasp tightly to power and status because somewhere inside, I still believe that is what brings success in this life. And daily I need to be reminded of what is truly important: to love God and to love others, even (especially) in the uncomfortable places. 

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I can't say this is entirely original. It was inspired, a lot, by the Bible, of course, and by some things I have read online lately:

How No Ache or Fear or Division Can Steal our Merry Christmas [with Spoken Word Poem: “An Advent Lament & a Brave Merry Christmas”] 

Excerpt: "God knows suffering. He chose to be born in the middle of a genocide. God knows suffering. He chose to be born as a refugee.

God knows suffering. He chose to come from a place where people said no good thing could come from. God knows suffering. He chose to be poor. He chose to absorb pain. He chose to be powerless."

Listening well as a person of privilege: Solidarity first, collaborative problem-solving later 

Excerpt: "When you’re used to living life on the clean, paved sidewalk of society, it can be uncomfortable to descend into the muddy ditch of oppression in order to stand in solidarity with the oppressed.  In their haste to escape their own discomfort, privileged folks can choose the easy route: to fix the oppressed person’s problem ASAP, thus ridding the privileged person of the discomfort of standing in the ditch or even the awareness that such a ditch exists."

Jean Vanier’s comfort and joy: ‘What we have to do is find the places of hope’

Excerpt: "So, the greatest thing to calm anguish is the knowledge that we are loved. Not for what we do or have done or for what we will do, but in ourselves. The more we lose, the more we come close to the reality of what it is to be human. Which is to accept our weaknesses, to discover that they’re beautiful. So many people are running around doing lots of things, but they’re controlled by anguish."