A New Year Calling

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

Remember Helen Keller, who suffered both deafness and blindness?   Remember Anne Sullivan, who determined to break through to the mind of this girl?  Without hearing or sight, Helen had no sense of what a word was, and a human being without any sense of a word is cut off.  She was locked into the silent, pitch-dark vault of her own mind.  In this isolation Helen was furious and frightened.  She was a flailing life.  Perhaps you’ve seen the play called The Miracle Worker, which tells the story of how Anne Sullivan came to live with Helen and how her method was flesh-to-flesh to sign out the names of things.  Hand pressed into hand, life pressed into life.  They nearly killed each other in the process, but with persistence and great stubborn love and with Ms. Sullivan signing with the flesh in her hand into the flesh of Helen’s hand, the breakthrough comes at last – water poured into the hand, and “W-A-T-E-R. Yes!”

How similar our journey with God.  When God spoke the Word, almost no one understood it.  God spoke through nature, shouted the Word from the splendor of sunsets, whispered it down from the night sky, murmured it in from the sea, thundered it like Beethoven in the clash of storms.  Most of us were awestruck by what we heard in nature, but we didn’t “get it” – or if we “got it,” we couldn’t keep it.  We signed and scratched our heads and went back to our business.

So God spoke the Word again, over and over.  Into scripture God spoke the Word.  In tablets of stone at Sinai, in a splurge of stories around the freeing of slaves and toppling of tyrants, God spoke.  In the ringing words of prophets like Amos, in the ringing of music of singers like David, God spoke and sang and shouted and whispered.

We didn’t get it.  Maybe we weren’t really paying attention.  Maybe our ears were deafened by all the blaring noise down here.  Maybe we’re too stupid to catch on.  Maybe we’re not stupid at all, but are frankly not so interested in what our Creator might wish to say.  Whatever the reason, here was the God who made us, losing us – calling and calling and not getting through, and the world slipping further and further away, and the echoes of the Word growing fainter and fainter.

So God did a new thing.  “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” so that we might better grasp God’s meaning, grasp with more than a momentary insight of the intellect and with more than the temporary tremors of emotion, but with that kind of apprehending that sends roots down deep and branches out all through life and into behaviors and relationships and social systems.

It’s as if we had all become deaf, so God stopped talking and took flesh to sign for us the Word.  Jesus of Nazareth was God signing the Word.  So Jesus is heaven’s hand placed into our hands, flesh-to-flesh, to spell into our minds the name of God:  L-O-V-E, L-O-V-E.  Yes!

You do know that we are right at the center of the Christian Gospel here – this is the throbbing heart of our good news, the Word becoming flesh.  And it does not end with Jesus. He made it relentlessly clear that we were to follow, that his life and his way would infuse our mortal lives, so that the Word would become our flesh too.  The miracle must keep repeating.  Christ has tapped you and me on the shoulder to dance the dance of what God has been trying to say to the world.

I mentioned the play called The Miracle Worker.  To my knowledge, two productions of that play were staged for television.  In the first production, the part of Helen Keller, cut off from the world and afraid, was played by Patty Duke.  Years later the other production was made, and the part of Anne Sullivan, the woman who gives Helen that patient gift, was played powerfully by guess who…Patty Duke – same actor, same story, new role.  So with you, so with me.  There is a Word that God always wanted to say to us, and the flesh of Christ was the signing of it into the flesh of our lives.  What else can we do but dedicate our embodied lives to be also the signing of the Word – for each other, for our world, and for the living love of God.

The Word is waiting to become your flesh and mine all during 2008.  Happy New Year!