By Matthew Beringer “There were many who were appalled at him—his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness.” – Isaiah 52:14 In America, people do not notice my scar like they do in Jamaica. “What’s that?” asks Asia, touching the purple discoloration on my elbow. Asia is a rail-thin orphan with kinked hair. She carries around a Bible she cannot read, swatting away the prying hands of other children and scowling, “Don’t trouble my Bible.” She knows all the words to 'Bless the Lord (Oh My Soul)' and can sing in perfect pitch, which surprises me. I am quick to doubt the talents God has given the children at the orphanage. “I got it from a bike accident,” I say, looking down at the scar. Last year, I was biking on a trail in Atlanta when I dropped my water bottle and ran off the path and crashed. I was fine except for the bloody gash on my elbow, a minor wound that likely would not have scarred had I gotten stitches at the time. Asia studies my scar. Then she says, “I think it will heal.” I almost laugh at her prophecy. It’s not that I doubt God’s power to heal. He’s the same God who told the paralytic to take up his mat and walk, cast out demons, called Lazarus from the tomb, mounted the cross and rose again three days later. But my scar is hardly his concern. I do not need to be healed. Yet apparently Asia thinks differently. She notices an aberration of nature, a defect, and assumes that a perfect God would want to heal any and all my imperfections. God employs the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, Paul writes, and he uses Asia to remind me of my own need for healing. My scar is an outward sign of something deeper, just as the paralytic’s disability points to the more profound illness in every human heart. That you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home… Jesus heals our bodies so that we might believe he has the power to heal our souls. Yet how easily I delude myself into thinking I have no need for God to heal me. If I do not become more like Asia, I will never enter the kingdom of God; if I do not recognize the reality of my neediness, I will never experience the troves of grace God desires to give me. * * * Asia is not the only one in Jamaica to notice my scar. So does Sheronette, an older girl at the home run by the Missionaries of the Poor sisters, who stares fixedly at the discoloration on my elbow. When she points at it, I explain the details of my bike accident, though I doubt she follows the story. There is an irony in her calling attention to my scar when she has a more obvious deformity of her own—a colony of black moles spread across her brown, wide-flared nostrils that reminds me of a rough piece of tree bark. I feel vaguely ashamed to notice her in this way, and yet my discomfort speaks to the question undergirding this essay: is it demeaning to notice the deformities in our fellow humans, their scars, the physical traits that society regards as ugly? I mean really notice, not just a passing glance, such that you could shut your eyes and trace the way the tumor in their cheek presses against their nose bridge and pushes out a bulging eye, or picture the colony of moles that oddly resembles the bark of a tree? Noticing physical characteristics, on its own, is not a virtue. The Klansman certainly paid attention to the color of a black man’s skin and the Nazi recognized the physical characteristics common among Jews, but the kind of noticing I speak of is just the opposite. It seeks to identify the irreplicable nature of each human; to capture the mosaic of characteristics that make an individual an individual; to testify to the Glory of God reflected in them. So yes, I pay attention to Sheronette’s deformed nose, but I also notice other things, like her slow smile that builds and then breaks like a languid wave, or that she draws portraits (one of which now hangs in my bedroom in Atlanta) and spells her name in large block-ish letters. Prejudice paints with a broad brush the same humanity that Love created with infinite nuance; it flattens people with a quick glance to the shallow depths of skin color or the size of their nose or the dirt on their clothes; it tries to reduce one into many by glossing over the particular in favor of the general. Hate trades in the currency of generalities, but love can only succeed in loving the particular. * * * Why did Christ rise with his wounds? Why did he still bear his marred form that had so appalled humanity while He hung on the cross when he could have greeted his apostles with a pure, unadulterated body? And why do so many cathedrals, beautiful in their own secular right, uphold such ugliness as the cornerstone of their beauty by placing a crucifix above the altar? Eternal beauty is found on the ugly rock of Calvary. So we must notice each other’s deformities, and in them, the markings of the same Christ who rose from the dead with holes in his hands and feet. We must strain to see a greater reality hidden in our scars and deformities. Where the modern ethos of the world tries to reduce humans to stock characteristics that can be used for demographic studies, we must take our cue from the One who was not afraid to look squarely at the lame and crippled and recognize their individual needs. * * * Sheronette stares at my scar for a long time before I break the silence. “Would you like to touch it?” I ask, something I would never dream of suggesting if I were in America. She smiles and nods, then reaches out and runs her thick fingers against the raised purple skin. She does not flinch or seem embarrassed, but if anything, mildly amused, and I hang onto this memory long after I return from Jamaica, feeling as if I have glimpsed an imperfect picture of Christ setting His hands on my scarred soul. Matthew Beringer is an essayist and fiction writer from Atlanta, Georgia. He writes a bi-weekly Substack on faith matters called 'Orthodox Fiction: Either/Or'. His fiction is forthcoming in Image magazine.
From the author: Last August, I traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, and spent ten days with the Missionaries of the Poor (MOP), a Catholic order that runs apostolates in the slums of Kingston and elsewhere in the world. This work is from a collection of essays based on my experience.
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