by Esther Heymans
The floor of the church was a hideous purple fabric that didn’t give way under my bare feet, the treads already too worn down. I’d been there since 10 in the morning, a long time for my tiny body, but I wasn’t tired. My favorite part of a Sunday evening was about to begin. I made it to the front of the room just in time to pick which de-facto-auntie’s lap I would sit on tonight, since my mom sang in the church choir and my dad ran the lights. I chose my seat, one of my mom’s older friends with a wide lap and soft hands, and climbed in. The lights dimmed in the auditorium and if a curtain had existed, it would have raised. I bounced up and down on Mary’s lap. The show, at least in my six year old brain, was about to begin.
I remember the first time I prayed to God to heal me. I was thirteen years old and the saddest I had ever been. I knew that something in my body didn’t quite work anymore. I didn’t get any reply from almighty, no lightning bolt that made me healed. I faced school the next day, symptomatic and ashamed. “Your mother must have been a whore, why else would you be so sick.” I had no response but to wonder if I had done something wrong in my repentance last night. The next day I went to school, my knees were ringed with bruises from my nightly prayers.
From Mary’s lap, I watched as rows of people lined up at the front of the room. Some limped to the front, others walked with their heads bowed, and one brave man rolled in his powerchair. My mother sang hymns in a powerful alto as the pastor came to the front. One by one, he walked to each congregant, each devotee. He put his hand on their head, his shoulder, and prayed. “Have faith, and you will be healed.”
The next few years of my life, sick unrelenting, my time was between fiery outward defiance and inward whirlwind. I memorized scriptures proving that my mother wasn’t a whore for making a disabled kid, I could spit Psalms better than David himself, and I argued with anyone who dared to claim my existence was a sin. At night I still got on my knees, the conviction getting smaller as the bruises grew larger.
If we were all made from the same dust, I must have been made from God’s discarded cigarette ashes. My body must have been constructed from the rib Adam discarded for the newly named dog. If God really made me in his image he must have dropped the mirror that day. How can the creator of all things beautiful really have chosen to make me exactly like I am? A body that is getting worse by the second, held together by secondhand prayers stolen from my childhood and the hope that one day, God would finish taping back the mirror that was my eroding joints and I would be made in their image. Construction and creation took time after all. There was time for God to sweep up the ashes, clean off the bones, heal me and make me new. I’d seen it done before.
Healing didn’t work everytime, for everyone. But when it did, it was a spectacle. The music would swell and the pastor and healed would speak together in a language entirely different than everything I’d ever heard. Sometimes people would scream. This night, one lady, who walked in with a cane, took off in a sprint. She ran around and around the church, blurring the purple carpet and green seats into a twist of grape and lime soda. I wanted to run with her but Mary held my arm tight. I watched her run, faster and faster. She seemed like she would never stop.
I stopped being able to run when I was 16 years old. By then, sick unrelenting, I’d stopped praying for healing. I barely prayed in general. My whole life, I’d been taught that faith is what healed aching bones and cauterized wounds. I couldn’t reconcile a lack of health with a seemingly fullness of faith. I wasn’t well and faith didn’t fix me. I missed running.
I remember when my friend started getting sick. They stopped showing up to church and everyone stopped talking about her. I barely knew what happened outside of hushed whispers. “Incurable…” Sick unrelenting. They left the church a few months later. We left soon after that.
It took me years to realize there was a life outside of waiting to be healed, whether by Jesus or by medicine. I’d spent my entire life waiting to be whole when wholeness isn’t something provided by faith or a lack thereof. If we are all made from the same dust, mine contains iron and silt and bile and blood. Healing won’t make me whole because I was made from the bones of my forefathers before me, Adam’s rib included. There are no cracks in the mirrors to fix because God looks at me when he sees a mirror and is proud of his reflection. I was made. I may not be made to run but I am as free as a bird, trailing purple and green behind my wings. Entirely whole, sick, unrelenting.
