Darkly, But I See

What has Steubenville done for me? Well, I met my husband here, and we had Rose, and for those I’ll be grateful forever. And this was the city where I took refuge when I tried to get away from the verbal and spiritual abuse in my immediate family, for which I’m also grateful. But it has not been a kindly or a safe refuge. It has been a refuge where I’ve had to fight for my life; it’s been a refuge that did its best to kill me.

I never got that masters’ degree I’ll be paying for for the rest of my life. Honestly, the memories are so painful I panic when I go onto campus, so I’m not going to try again to finish. But I’ve learned some powerful lessons just the same. I learned that sometimes priests act nothing at all like Christ.  Sometimes, in fact, they serve the devil, all the while praying that their victims have perfect charity. Sometimes the cruelty of pro-life people is what drives you the hardest to consider abortion.  Sometimes the most pious and prayerful-looking church ladies are the ones who know the least about prayer.  Sometimes you get raped, even if you take all necessary precautions and dress like a modest lady. Sometimes you get sick, even if you exercise and eat healthy foods. Sometimes the sickness doesn’t go away even when you get prayed over and believe very hard, and it’s Christians who will resent you the most for this.

Anything can happen, and someday it will happen to you.

And when it happens, Christ will come to you.

In my new church, in the Byzantine Rite, we read the gospel about the Man Born Blind this Sunday. The apostles make a spectacle of the man; they ask whether it was his sin or his parents that left him a pariah. Jesus corrects them, and heals the man born blind, and what happens? The man born blind is still a spectacle and a pariah. They drag him before the elders and try to make him declare that the miracle didn’t happen, but he won’t say what they want him to, so the elders expel him from the synagogue. The man who receives the miracle is the man the Faithful humiliate, scorn, use and throw away.

And after he has been thrown away, Christ comes to him.

Christ has come to me here, in ways I struggle to describe. Ways the respectable wouldn’t understand. I trust He comes to them as well, a different way. I’m told that every soul is purified in a hidden manner. The manner for their souls isn’t mine to know. I only know the way I’ve been led to the pool of Siloam, to wash my eyes and gain my sight. It’s led through moldy and bug-infested apartments, up and down the bus route, to the grocery store to spend my food stamps and pray they last all month,  onto the operating table with a ruptured appendix, on again with a cecal volvulous, on again with a destroyed gall bladder, screaming in pain in the back of the con artist midwife’s van, onto the operating table again. And He has been here through it all.

It seems that He’s finally leading me away.

While we were gardening, Rosie led me down the path she’d made through the tall grass, down the side passages she’d carved by trampling down the weeds. I couldn’t see the detours and sharp corners until she pointed them out; I couldn’t see the way from one end to the other.

It seems that Christ the eternal Child may finally be showing me the way out of this particular desert.

I can scarcely believe it. It could all fall through. I’ve had more disappointments here than I can ever count. It could be that next year I’ll be here, digging another garden in the Valley of Shadow, more hopeless than ever of getting away.

Or, it could be that He’s leading me to West Virginia.

I don’t know who sinned that I was born blind, but I was. I don’t know whose sin it was, or if it was sin at all, that I stumbled into the Valley of shadow, but I have been here eleven years. I don’t know through whose merit I’m going away– surely not my own, for I have none.

I know that I was blind. But I washed my eyes in the dark valley, and I began to see.

Darkly, but I see.

And these are the things I see.

(image via Pixabay)