At River's Edge

What if Jesus had lost his left arm? Maybe in a war. Maybe blown off by an assassination gone wrong. What if it had been an accident? Yes, let’s make it that. As a young child, what if his arm were crushed in a masonry project he was doing with Joseph? A large boulder falling from great heights? His father shocked and running, trying to save his son?

How might that have affected the way we see and revere him? Would he have been seen as a healer, if he chose not to heal himself?

For sure, it might have shifted the way teenage catholic girls spend years trying find a young man with Jesus’ gentleness, his tan, young skin. His lithe body, his sinewy muscles. Maybe even Mary would not have anointed him with her perfumed oils.

What if our Jesus, the incarnate God, had not been perfect? Would it have opened up the way we see and live into our lives? Maybe we would have seen our bodies with greater kindness and forgiveness. Maybe tv would look different, maybe models would look different. Maybe payscales would not lean in the direction of handsome young, tall blond men.

What if Jesus lost his arm and chose not to fix it? What if God came down to us and lived with a flaw? Would we then be able to live with our flaws? Accept our imperfections? Maybe even not label them as such.

I am thinking today about the damage we do to ourselves. How we live under the false strain of trying to be more than we need to be.

A week ago, I held a curled and drying maple leaf – as did all of my classmates – and our teacher asked if each of our leaves was beautiful. I immediately decided yes, of course my leaf is beautiful.

My teacher’s premise was that we would develop a sense of appreciation about all of our “disformed” leaves when we looked at them closely, but I had leapt past that. I think that when a person decides something is joyous, helpful, silly, redundant, beautiful, ________________ (you can fill in the blank), that object, person, or experience becomes that intention. It’s a simple as that.

When I wake up feeling fat and ugly, I feel fat and ugly all day long. But when I awaken with an insistence to be a beautiful agent in a beautiful world, I am exactly that.

Or if I decide, as each of us can do, that we are one armed Jesuses wandering for a short time on the earth carrying flawed and ever healing spirits within flawed and ever healing bodies…well, the whole thing opens up, doesn’t it? The world cracks wide, in a sea of others who are so much the same.