July 10, 2011
I'm going to tell the story of my faith journey and my call to Family Place through reading excerpts from my memoir, Border Crossings: A Spiritual Journey in Medicine. The Family Place is a mission of the 8th Day Faith community. It is a community center located at 16th Street and Park Road NW where low-income families with preschool children can find services such as prenatal and parenting classes, family literacy and ESOL programs, nutrition and medical services. It’s now 31 years old and it has been supported by a Church of the Saviour Mission Group throughout its life.
My husband, Dick, and I, and our children had found the Church of the Saviour some years after we moved to Washington in the 1960s. We were intrigued to find a church where the announcement period told of opportunities to participate in a Civil Rights demonstration, find out how to become a foster parent, and attend classes on prayer and silence. Dick and I signed up for a class.
I had become estranged from the faith of my childhood, because of my unanswered questions about the unfairness of suffering. God, if He existed, was distant, powerless, or uninterested in human affairs. My parents were Christian missionaries, fundamentalists, Both of them had become Christians as teenagers, converted from Judaism to Christianity. They were, or so It appeared to me, secure in their faith. I couldn't find a place where I could struggle with my questions. I couldn't be honest about my doubts at home, because it distressed my parents too much. Nevertheless, their faith instilled in my spirit a consciousness of God that I could not escape, and a yearning for a world beyond the one we see.
In the 1930s, my parents, two brothers, and my sister and I lived in Elmhurst, Illinois. Every day our father took the train to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicagowhere he taught Jewish Life and Customs to people studying to become missionaries. We lived in a shabby comfortable wood-framed house that had screened porches upstairs and down where we played and slept in the heat of summer. But during the late thirties we were no longer allowed on the porches because they were given over to strangers, refugees from Hitler's Europe. No one told us kids why they were there, or if they did, it didn't sink in. I resented the wild-eyed men and women taking over my space and my mother's attention. I stopped bringing my friends home. I think my mother had a vague idea that our non-paying boarders might help her with household chores and child care, and my father thought they might teach us Hebrew or Yiddish. These plans did not work well. Our visitors were preoccupied. Most had sensitive stomachs for which mother cooked matzos ball soup and custards.
We children attended Sunday School in a Lutheran Church down at the end of our street. The Sunday School held an annual Children's Day with a picnic and games, and a barrel of beer my teetotaling parents knew nothing about. We pushed potatoes along with a teaspoon, hopped with our feet in a gunny sac, tossed horseshoes, dunked for apples, and played Bible Bingo. The adults played games too and ate potato salad and sausage. The prizes for winning the games dazzled in those Depression years when for Christmas we were likely to get an orange and some socks.
The year I was seven, the grand prize I coveted desperately was a red two-wheeler bike. I was good at games and my cumulative score was getting higher and higher as the afternoon wore on. I overheard a man say, "Dammed if the little Jew-girl isn't going to win." "Jews are winners," replied the other man. How did the man know I was Jewish? Why did the good Lutherans care that I was a Jew? This was 1937. The majority of Midwesterners were carelessly, thoughtlessly, anti-Semitic, and a few were bloodthirsty They followed, mostly without thinking about it much, the Third Reich's labeling rule: anyone with Jewish blood is a Jew, not exempting even Lutheran Sunday School attendees.
I triumphantly hauled home my prize. When I told my mother that the man said "Jews are winners," she tensed. "Oh?" Then she voiced her worst cussword:"Ignorant," and we switched to a Baptist Sunday School. To my sorrow, the new Sunday School didn't give out expensive prizes. The lesson I learned was to keep my mouth shut.
I also, I think, began to develop a fear of winning big. Did I want people to call me a "damn little Jew-girl"? That summer in Christian camp at the Winona Lake Bible Conference, I was way ahead in the finals for junior ping pong champion. I purposely let the other finalist score a few points. If our scores were a bit closer we could stay friends. But my game got away from me and the other girl won. "Let that be a lesson to you," my mother was always saying to me. This time I said it to myself, over and over, although what the lesson was I did not know. Maybe it had to do with my double-mindedness: the desire to be the best and the fear of being noticed. Maybe I dimly felt the contradiction between my religion and my compulsion to be to be the big winner. I was competitive, but my religion commanded me to be nice and share. Besides I wanted people to like me and some of them didn't like winners. I also wanted to be best at everything so I would not need to struggle with envy, a deadly sin. And I was still puzzled by the Lutheran Sunday school man: "Jews are winners," he had said. Those Jews on our porches seemed like big losers to me. Did I know any Jews who were winners? I did not think so.
When I was 12 years old I solemnly responded to the Altar Call during the annual summer revival meeting at Greenwood Baptist Church. To the background of a hymn sung by the choir over and over and evermore softly, the preacher quietly but insistently asked the congregation to accept Jesus as Personal Savior and Lord:
"Just as I am,
Without one plea,
Except thy blood was shed for me....
O Lamb of God, I come, I come."
As I walked down the aisle, my copycat little sister ran after me. So both Eva and I were Saved that night. Later I severely cross-examined her about whether her conversion was real, or just another instance of her being a hugely annoying littlesister. We both took baptismal classes. Although we’d had Presbyterian baptismal water sprinkled upon us as infants, that didn't count for Baptists. Salvation came through faith in Jesus, and this depended on receiving the Word of God, which a baby was not old enough to do. As a sign of salvation, it was necessary to "go down in the waters," in the same way that Jesus had been immersed in the Jordan River. My profession of faith was genuine. I loved Jesus. I believed He died to save me. I wanted to be good. Pleasing God was my deepest desire. I threw myself into various church activities in order to prove to Him I was saved.
But when I was 14 years old, I found out about the concentration camps and the murder of the Jews. I rejected God. Who could trust a God who couldn't keep even his Chosen People safe? How could God be good? I tried, but unsuccessfully, to put God out of my mind.
Then when Dick and I and our children moved to Washington two decades later, we found the Church of the Saviour and took the class in the School of Christian Living, a class called "Doctrine" taught by Gordon Cosby. I was converted all over again.
A few years after discovering the Church our family spent a year in Mexico I did neurological research at a pediatric hospital caring for severely malnourished children. I wanted to find out how malnutrition affected infants' brain development and to document the effects of nutritional rehabilitation. I did electroencephalographic studies of 30 infants when they were admitted to the hospital and then followed them with periodic tests over the next one or two years. On admission, they were severely malnourished—limbs like sticks, hollow bellies, listless, apathetic.
The babies did get better with good medical care and nutritional rehabilitation. Their brain waves did become more like those of normal children. But sadly, the children remained stunted in both physical growth and cognitive development. Early deprivation leaves permanent scars.
Our hope was that my research on the twenty six babies inmy study would someday be of benefit to otter childrenby helping to guide their treatment. I sat with the babies in my study hour after hour, following our research protocoland watching the babies,
Most of them were so sick when they were admitted to the hospital that they couldn't even cry. Maybe a little whimper, not more. At the time, in Mexico and Central America, the winds of Liberation Theology were blowing through the Catholic Church. Carried on the current were the words, "The voice of the poor is the voice of God." Dimly— I had no blinding insight like the Apostle Paul's on the Road to Damascus—I wondered if God could be talking in the still, small voices of the infants. Perhaps in their mute suffering God spoke.
"Feed my sheep," Jesus had said to Peter, his disciple. As a well nourished North American, I had taken the admonition to mean that Peter was to provide spiritual sustenance to his flock. Similarly the petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread." Now Ireflected that, however rich the possible spiritual interpretations, first the words should be takenliterally. Perhaps the small cries of these starved babies were as authentic a Call of God as I was likely to get in this life.
As is true of much medical research, my study raised more questions than it answered. Some of these questions could be answered with more analysis and research. But many of the big questions that loomed for me were not so easily addressed by the traditional research techniques I'd been trained in at Harvard Medical School. Some of the answers to my questions were glaringly obvious but, given the way life is structured for the poor, made me feel helpless and even complicit.
I asked myself:
What could have, should have, been done to prevent these children's malnutrition?
Did their treatment program include adequate social stimulation and enrichment?
Why weren’t their parents more involved?
What good did it do to feed these starved infants and send them back to the sameconditions that resulted in their nearly dying? What kind of future was open to them?
What good did it do to partially rehabilitate starved children when not enough was being
done to prevent malnutrition?
Why weren’t these babies breastfed?
Where was the government?
Where was the church?
Where was the outrage?
Who is my neighbor?
These were not original questions, although most were new to me. What did the lives of these babies have to do with the admonition of all religions to love my neighbor?
Whether or not it was reasonable to do so, I felt complicit in their suffering. After my "conversion"—my experience of a suffering Jesus incarnate in a baby—I found I could not maintain my customary perspective as a scientist. Although, of course, I was not directly responsible for the suffering of starving children, I experienced myself as part of the web of indifference that allowed, condoned or accepted their regrettable fate as unavoidable. In the immensely rich world we live in and of which I took full advantage, they took nothing except pain. No one precisely meant that they should be sacrificed for my comfort, but nobody cared enough to prevent it. The babies were "collateral damage" in the struggle of those who already have enough to get more. The children were victims in the war against the poor.
I was nagged by my unexpected (and to tell the truth unwanted) vision of God in
those babies and in the 35,000 others who were dying all over the world every day. How
could I know Immanuel—God with us—unless I recognized him embodied in those
babies? They called out to me with great power: Do to us as you would be done to. "In
as much as you do this for the least of these, you do it unto me," Jesus said.
Most of my baby patients came from one of the wretched shanty towns ringing Mexico City that were populated by millions of migrants from the countryside. The bloated city had totally inadequate services for its ever growing bulk. The city piled its trash into huge mountains on the city outskirts. On the edges of the trash, many thousands lived in what the Mexicans with their flair for the dramatic called ciudades perdidas, lost cities. Children, probably the older brothers and sisters of my baby patients, scavenged the trash heaps for soda cans, plastic bottles, rags, discarded furniture, cardboard boxes—anything they could sell for a few pesos. In fact whole families lived in the cities of trash, sometimes for several generations, making their living by recycling what others discarded.
In order to document the progress of our patients after they were discharged from the hospital, I sought them out up and down dusty smelly no-name streets and alleys. When we found the right house, the family was invariably friendly and gracious. We were served sweets and soda while we sat, usually on their only chairs, and, as do women all over the world, spoke admiringly of our children. The children usually stared solemnly at us until they got bored and ran off to play in the alleys. Everyone spent most of the day outside. "It's very safe and friendly," a mother said. I tried to picture how they all fit into their home on cold days or when it rained. "That's how Bibi got sick," one mother said of the pneumonia that resulted in the hospitalization of our little patient. "The roof leaked on her for hours before anyone noticed. I was still at work, and her big sister" (an eleven year old) "was busy with supper. She didn't see." Bibi's clearly devoted mother couldn't prevent her from being born in a leaky shack next to a garbage dump.
I wondered silently, my admiration mixed with guilt, how she could live this way and cope so well. She had two, even three babies too young to be toilet trained. Toilet? Where was it? How in the world did she keep their bottoms clean? She had been pregnant ten times. Did she have morning sickness, post partum blues? In the latter months of her pregnancies, did she have to get up in the night to pee? Who emptied the chamber pot? Not that she had a chamber. They all slept together.
The contrast between the way my own family and my patients' families lived could not have been more stark.
Our family returned from the year in Latin America to reenter our usual lives. Although I was busy at my laboratory at Children's Hospital and I continued to consult for the U.N. on child nutrition projects, I contemplated the work-years ahead without much joy. I joined a support group at the church led by Elizabeth O’Connor. Gradually I grasped the notion that any commitment I made to changing the neighborhood or the world depended on taking my own steps toward a deeper more centered inner life. I was trying to acknowledge and accept my sense of being fragmented, of possessing many selves; how could I act with integrity?
I began to feel that there might be a landing for me in the safe harbor of a transformed church. I would not be able to practice medicine or religion in the same wayas before. I had crossed a border. Mine was not a hero's lonely quest. I wanted to rock along with a community of like-minded voyagers. I wanted to stay within the Christian tradition. I needed and gladly acknowledged my relationship to Jesus, even though I was dubious about the language of fundamentalism. Could I be a politically and socially radical Christian, committed to democracy and equality, to science, to my family, to children, and to openness to many world views? What did it matter if my beliefs were not entirely consistent? Life is full of unanswerable questions. I reflected on Elizabeth O'Connor's words borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke, "Have patience with everything unresolved hi your heart and try to love the questions themselves. The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday, far into the future you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
I could anchor myself in the community at the Church of the Saviour. I began to take the disciplines of the church community more seriously: daily time spent alone in prayer, meditation and study, keeping a journal, worshipping with my community.
My conversion, this knowing Jesus, was "personal." It was also the work of a community. Humans are blessed with a long tradition we can look to that holds up love, justice, compassion, and humility and calls us as people of God to this work. True we are also mightily constrained by the urge to survive with the fittest. Who doesn't want to be fit? Who doesn't believe secretly or openly that in a world of not-enough there are winners and losers? Clearly we want to win.
We operate uneasily in a between space. We desire to win the whole world, but in our better moments realize that the price, losing our souls, is not worth it.
Gordon Cosby once said: "Leaders are trained best when they are set in the midst of the suffering and feel the hurt and pain of which they are to be the healers. Unless we ourselves are there, we will not be able to know and to introduce others to the poorest of the poor. We cannot begin to bring in the Shalom prophesied by Isaiah and embodied in Jesus…What we do with intensity and focus in the neighborhood in which God has set our community will enable us to reach out in affection to the whole human family, to the whole created order. We are related in affection to everything that is."
The Family Place is a specific small something that was born out of my need and the need of a few others to "do something with intensity and focus.” Others have grander dreams, mobilize more resources, and accomplish greater things. Or they achieve something even more minor.
The faith that sustains us is that the almost invisible little streams and rivulets will flow together to become the mighty river that makes glad the City of God. It is Martin Luther King’s “Justice flowing down like a mighty river.”
If the river at floodtide is to be given, it is God's gift, not ours. The gift is given through that mysterious wellspring that flows from our journeys inward, outward, and in community. Contemplation and action seem to be different paths, but they are not. Together they give courage and inspiration for the journey that draws us across the borders that separate us.