Born Into Seeing

I have been wrangling a most difficult group for the past four weeks as they employ the fundamentals of writing. Save for a few that just warm my heart, I have been bullied and tested and spoken to with profanities. But, this frigid water that has been splashed in my face has cleansing qualities. Opening my eyes, with beads of water still dangling from eyelashes, the world is somehow new.

Born into... What an absolutely material phrase. Friends' babies come to mind, nearly 20 of them, now speaking first words or teetering on wobbly toes, teething and grunting and squealing sounds, being wrapped tightly and beheld with loving eyes; in these portraits I find grasping fingers of shoots embedding in material contexts.

Born into haunts me every day when I see my students' glares, blackened eye sockets, prematurely wrinkled and weary faces; I hear their sneers, the fighting voice -against failure, a system, oneself.

Poverty alters one's body forever: Starvation from love. Decay of praise. Emaciation of attention. Scant touch. Poor health. Rigid hands that never clapped. Abject words. Silenced songs. Barred pleasure. Jaundiced muscles not encouraged to move. Crippled hope.

Their stories of abandonment and shame grip my insides: my family was threatened with a water hose when we showed up at a yard sale because we were hispanic; I gave my son up for adoption 8 months ago and I am plagued by guilt every day; I have three children under 3 -one cannot walk and she needs multiple surgeries, but I don't have a job; I have worked at a liquor store all of my life and I don't know nothin' about writing or talking proper; I can't come to class because after a fight with my boyfriend, my appearance would be a disruption to the class.

I have heard these stories and worse before, but to live daily in their presence, to see the flinching, the absolute self-loathing, the fight-or-flight defenses, the signs of passivity and acceptance of abuse seep into every facet of their conduct and performance, language, and expectation of human interaction is like seeing straight through to a child who cooed and was yelled at: "shut up," who toddled her first step and fell to the hard ground without anyone to celebrate with her, who heard and felt punishment, criticism, and disdain, but never praise, never encouragement, never that she was loved or beautiful or valuable. 

When I stand at the front of the room and I face them, the glaring, persecuting stares, there are moments when my words abate because I see through their faces and my heart absolutely breaks.

Could they overcome, change, find hope, receive Jesus, fight harder, learn the rules? Perhaps. If they could cease to be born into; if it were possible to reach into their past and extend arms to them as they rocked on hands and knees eager to crawl, when their sallow eyes welled with tears, when a soothing, singing, praise giving voice was needed to calm their hearts.

I have always seen people. I have always known my own born into. I have pretended to care countless times. I have known facts and I have heard stories. I attended a church with a mission toward people. But what did it mean to see? to understand? to convert? to change? to reach... them?

They remained them, and I was me. Have I tried to make them me? Have I tried to become them? It's reciprocally impossible.

Born into: I cannot know the material reality that grounds beingness for another.

Perhaps this means that I will fail to help, fail to love, fail to see until compassion and empathy coat my ears. They tell me what they need. Who they are. How to love.

And seeing comes at times with the cost of being bullied, tested, spoken at profanely: tried. But this helps to see, baptizes [admits one], in a sense, to the reality of another.

Perhaps this explains Born again.

Jesus came because we were born into death. And suffered the cost, himself being born into death to bring opportunity for baptism into new life.

"What do you mean?" exclaimed Nicodemus. "How can an old man go back into his mother's womb and be born again?" 

"Don’t be surprised when I say, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.”

The way of becoming born again, to be re born-into is not a reasonable, rational occurrence that responds to material action. It is spirit. By the Spirit. When He chooses. When we submit.

My exposure to Christian idealisms has involved socializing the poor and "uncultured" masses with the individualist, materialized gospel of wealth, education, and white, twenty-something, middle-class values. They need us for food, money, direction, hope, community, and to meet their material need. We aim to make converts to our gospel rather than being open to converting to their gospel in which God is the sole provider, the sole hope that they have, and in their Catholic, revivalist, private expressions of faith, He hears them and meets their needs every single day until we tell them that He provides so much more: we offer our born-into contexts as proof that God gives shelter, love, praise, affirmation, good feelings, warmth, and happiness.

They know that these are not for everyone. In their own fighting, stubborn way they know something of the reality of the world that we do not, and something of the way of Jesus that we do not: a narrow path of pain and fear, loneliness, judgment, condemnation, and extra-material truth.

They may not need me, but I need them to show me the way.