Unexpected Blessings
December 7, 2007: Lethbridge Mennonite Church
A few years ago I was in Montreal for some meetings. We were staying and meeting at Brebeuf College, an old residential high school. In one of the hallways was a display consisting of an antique seismograph and a map showing the location and the magnitude of earthquakes along the St. Lawrence River. While the earthquakes were all rather small, I was surprised and impressed by how many were recorded on the map.
During a break in the meetings, a small group of us went to one of the major art galleries in the city. I soon noticed that in almost every room in the gallery there was a small machine on the wall tracing two wiggling lines across a roll of paper. I wondered what they were. Then it hit me. Since this building has many fragile and valuable works of art, and because of the large number of earthquakes recorded on the map at Brebeuf College, these must be little seismographs that the art gallery is using to monitor how the movements of the earth affect each room!
I was excited about my new knowledge and quickly told my companions about all the little seismographs on the wall. There was no doubt in my mind that I was communicating a major discovery. A while later I asked a museum guide what the machines on the wall were recording. I was expecting more information about earthquakes that I could relay back to my friends. Instead, he looked at me as if I was from the moon and said, “it records the temperature and humidity in this room.”
That was a moment I will never forget. I had been so absolutely certain that these were miniature seismographs, and I was so absolutely wrong. I wondered how many other things I thought were true were actually wrong. I was confronted with the fragility and incompleteness of my knowledge, and with the realization that the intensity of my belief in the truth of something has very little to do with whether or not its actually true. I went back to my friends and told them what those little machines really were. If any of them already knew they weren’t seismographs, they were kind enough not to tell me so.
John the Baptist was not so kind to the Pharisees and the Sadducees who came to hear him preach. They were absolutely certain that they knew how to follow God. After all, they could trace their family lineage all the way back to Abraham. But John the Baptist tells them in no uncertain terms that they are not following God correctly, and that they are a brood of snakes upon whom the wrath of God is ready to descend. They think they are like the wheat that will be gathered into the barn, but John tells them they are actually like the chaff that will be burned. Just like the museum seismographs and me, what the Pharisees and Sadducees believed to be true simply wasn’t.
I am not implying that we cannot say anything with certainty. But, no matter how sure we are that something is true, there must always be room for a little more truth - and sometimes a lot more truth - to find its way in. This is especially true of our knowledge of how God works in our lives and in our world. Sometimes we can tell the difference between the wheat destined for God’s barns and the chaff destined for the never-ending fire. More often, however, we either can’t tell the difference or we get it as wrong as my discovery of miniature seismographs on art gallery walls.
In this season of Advent we remember in a particular way that we are waiting for God to come and dwell among us. How, when, and where God will come is a mystery. We know the story of how it happened 2000 years ago when Jesus was born. Next year we might know the story of how it happened in our lives this year. But right now we don’t know how God will be revealed in our lives in the weeks and months to come. Perhaps God will be revealed in those things we call wheat, but it’s just as likely that God will be revealed in those things we call chaff.
A friend with a developmental disability and I were once invited to participate in a weeklong retreat at a L’Arche community. One of the retreatants arrived late. We saw her for the first time when we arrived for the morning session on the second day of the retreat. She was hard to miss. She was absolutely gorgeous and was by far the best looking person in the room. Everything about her was perfect: her hair, her makeup, her perfume, her clothing, her mannerisms, the way she spoke and smiled were flawless. My friend, who I’ll call George, noticed her and the one empty seat beside her immediately. He made a beeline for that chair and sat down. I found a seat on the other side of the room where I could keep an eye on him.
Now George was as physically unattractive as this woman was beautiful. His face and teeth were battered from countless seizures, he talked with a pronounced stutter, he walked with a hunched over shuffle, and his hair produced as much oil as the Alberta tar sands. But what he lacked in appearance he made up for in self-confidence. He believed that he was stunningly handsome and utterly charming. If the number of girlfriends George had was any indication, his self-perception was far more accurate than my description of him.
George was totally thrilled to be sitting beside this fabulously beautiful woman. He couldn’t sit still on his chair, had a great big grin on his face, and kept on sneaking sideways glances at her. I was totally mortified that he was trying to make a move on this woman during a retreat session, and that any attempt I might make to stop it would be more distracting than what he was already doing. The woman, thankfully, wasn’t aware of what was George was doing.
She was deep in a spiritual and emotional crisis. The night before she had eaten supper at one of the L’Arche homes. Two of the persons with profound disabilities in that home treated mealtime as a full contact sport between themselves and their food. The hoots and hollers, the food covered faces, the food flying off fast moving spoons and out of joyfully sneezing mouths was pretty spectacular. It was something one got used to pretty quickly, and even enjoyed, if you lived there. But this woman was appalled and felt an actual physical repulsion towards these people because of how they ate. But more than that, she couldn’t accept the fact that she had such negative feelings towards two people who, because of their disability, were eating in the only way they knew how.
Not only did she take great pains to be perfect on the outside, she also made great efforts to be perfect on the inside. At supper, she was confronted in an unavoidable way with her own prejudice, and even hate, for imperfect and messy people. She was shattered. She wept uncontrollably and the mascara ran down her cheeks as she shared her experience and her feelings during the retreat’s morning prayer.
George thought this was all just great. He kept on shifting in his seat with his big grin and sideways glances. He knew that tears are usually followed by an opportunity to comfort and he was perfectly positioned to do just that. He also knew that the prayer time was almost over, and that it always ended with the Lord’s Prayer where we always held hands with the people sitting beside us. George just couldn’t wait to hold her hand. I was going crazy. Here is this woman having a spiritual crisis, George is sitting beside her ready to make his move, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. For weeks later I knew I would hear George say to me, “did you see how I held that ladies hand?”
The moment came. We got ready to say the Lord’s Prayer and George reached out his shaking hand to take her hand. He was so excited he almost had a seizure. She burst into tears again and I was ready to disappear through the floor. This was totally inappropriate; this was ruining the retreat; this was chaff that needed to be permanently disposed of.
But I was as wrong about that as I was about the seismographs on the art gallery walls. After the prayer she shared that her tears during the Lord’s Prayer were tears of relief and joy. She shared that when George had reached out to take her hand it was as if God had taken her by the hand. Her reaction towards the disabled people the night before had left her feeling unlovable and untouchable. Then a person very similar to the ones she had rejected the night before actually reached out to her and held her hand. At that moment God had spoken a word deep into her heart and had begun to heal a deeply hidden and painful wound.
I could hardly believe it. George hadn’t been praying: he was making a move on a beautiful woman. There was nothing holy in his actions or his intentions. But it didn’t matter to God. God used the inappropriately flirtatious advances of an ugly (by the world’s standards) developmentally disabled man to touch and heal a broken heart.
We don’t know what God will use to bring hope and healing into our lives. We don’t how God will use us to bring hope and healing to others. We may not even know when God uses us in this way. What we can say with certainty is that if God can use George, then God can use pretty much anything else to bring hope and healing into the world. It doesn’t matter what we think about it: what matters is how God uses it.
This doesn’t give us license to do anything and everything we want because God can use whatever we do. I didn’t start flirting with beautiful women during prayer times because God used George’s flirting to bring hope and healing. George was busy being George, and I am busy being me. Each of us needs to be faithful to the beliefs, decisions, and the actions that God is calling us to. We may not understand or agree with the beliefs, decisions and actions of others and God may very well call us to work to change those things. But we must not assume that the healing presence of God can never be experienced in those things we think need to change or stop.
I’m sure that many of you have similar stories to tell of the presence of God popping out of unlikely and surprising circumstances or events. Our God is a God of blessing and is pretty good at creative packaging. Not many would have thought that God would be found in a stable or in the amorous advances of a developmentally disabled man. The blessings of God continue to manifest themselves in the most unexpected places. So let’s keep our eyes open for the presence of God regardless of whether we consider the situations we find ourselves in to be mundane, holy, or depraved. God is there and will be found by all who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.