Severed Limbs and Gauged out Eyes- There Jesus Goes Being Scary Again

I used to work at Trader Joe's when I lived in Minneapolis. One day at work, I saw a man, probably about sixty, who'd lost an eye: like, that morning. There was gauze over the empty space where the eye had been. The gauze was taped at the brow, temple and cheekbone, but it was loose and askew. There were faint blotches of blood on the gauze that really seemed to advertise the wound more than conceal it. I had the familiar sensation of something ghastly beckoning me to look at it, the way road-kill does when I have to drive right over it. There's some morbid draw that pulls at my eyes like a magnet toward tiny organs and bones and torn flesh, and I have to pass my eyes over it quickly to resist it. It didn't help that I'd just finished King Lear with the homeschool kids I taught, so that the image of a wandering, blinded, old man carried all kinds of tragic, Shakespearean overtones. I couldn’t stop the brooding curiosity that flooded my mind. Was the bandage askew because he couldn’t see that it was askew? The carelessness of the bandage gave the impression of it being there as a token courtesy to others because an eye that isn’t there cannot look with disgust on it’s own absence. He had another eye though, so of course, he could have seen it. Perhaps, I thought indignantly, it was the shoddy work of some heartless nurse, who hadn't even the respect to properly bandage a man's wounds and shield him from prying eyes...like...mine. All this intrusive wondering went on in the time it took for my spine to shiver with repulsion as we passed in the frozen aisle.

I was working cheese that morning, and to be honest, I was hoping he wouldn't come near me. I was already mentally exhausted from our first split-second encounter. Nonetheless, he ambled over to the deli meat section right next to me where he stood briefly, considering the rosemary ham while I knelt before the dairy case, arranging triangular stacks of Brie and aged Parmesan. Because of the looseness of the bandage and my vantage point, to the side of him and below, I was at the perfect angle to see the space where his eye had been. I tried to resist, failed, and stole a couple quick, horrified glances. It looked like that part of his face had been taken out with an ice cream scoop. I pictured his surgeon hitching up his sleeve to the elbow the way the guy at the ice cream shop always does before plunging his hand down in.

Later, I was on register, and of course, he came through my line. He set a loaf of multigrain bread, a can of turkey chili and a box of English breakfast tea on the absurdly small ledge Trader Joe’s supplies its customers for unloading their groceries. A bachelor basket, I thought. I imagined him at home in front of the stove, stirring his pot of turkey chili, the gauze over his eye, or worse, the gauze not over his eye, taking it to the living room, sinking into his reclining chair, and eating his chili alone and eyeless, glad for his loneliness for once since it meant no one staring at him and his one eye. 

He pulled me from the downward spiral of my pitiful thoughts by cheerfully asking me how I was today. He said he loved Trader Joe’s but lived too far away to come often. He said he was coming in to the cities more often lately because he’d had his eye out at the VA hospital, and he made sure to stop by Trader Joes every time he had an appointment. He said they’d caught something just in time, and that he was really very lucky. He said that he loved this fall weather, and pointed out the windows to the trees that were burnished gold and very beautiful. He thanked me and wished me a good rest of my shift. He was one of the more grateful people I’d met in a while. I have both my eyes, but hadn’t seen much to be happy about for a while.

That man got me to thinking about something Jesus said, probably one of his better known horrifying, distasteful statements that he seemed to so enjoy tossing out. He says, if your eye causes you to sin, you should pluck it out. He said it was better to enter Heaven with one eye than to be cast into Hell with both eyes in tact. He also said, if your arm causes you to sin cut it off because it’s better to enter Heaven with one arm than to have two pretty arms in Hell. I paraphrase.

There was that hiker a while back who got his arm pinned under a boulder while he was hiking alone in the middle of nowhere, and eventually sawed his arm off with his pocketknife. They made a movie about it with James Franco, (which, coincidentally, I'd watched just weeks before meeting the man with one eye). It wasn’t until the hiker was absolutely sure he would die if he didn’t cut his arm off that he made the decision to do it. The movie was called 127 hours; that was how long it took him to decide to cut his own arm off, almost six days. It would seem that only death is worse than hacking off your own arm. I wonder how long it would take someone to decide to gouge their own eye out. My guess is more than 127 hours.

Dismemberment is pretty grotesque stuff for the Son of God to be chatting to people about, or for a priest to be sermonizing about, and I remember hearing that passage in Catholic church when I was young, and being terrified. Most older people, I think, decide Jesus must be exaggerating, or "speaking figuratively," which is another way of saying exaggerating, another way of saying It’s alright folks! He’s not really saying what it sounds like he’s saying. Don’t be scared. Come on back in. There will be no amputations this service.

That hiker and the nice man in the grocery store are the only two people I’ve ever known, or known of, who voluntarily cut off their arm or plucked out their eye. They did it to save their lives, not to save their souls. Each loved the rest of his body enough to sacrifice one part to keep it. I think most people would give up one body part to stay alive, and if they don’t have to cut it off themselves the choice is even easier. I don’t know a single person who has sacrificed a member of their body to save their soul. Maybe that’s because the things that might cause one to stumble can usually be cast off less gruesomely than an arm or an eye. Maybe arms and eyes are generally behaving themselves these days, whereas the more common offender tends to be something like, say, a computer, a relationship, a job, etc. Still, I don’t think Jesus is exaggerating. Even if it’s only hypothetically, my soul has been dogged by the question I feel Christ asking: which do you value more, your body or your soul? Which do you value more, this fleeting life or the eternal one to come?

As the man with one eye left my line and walked out of the store, I swear I saw, as though a veil had been lifted, just how seriously we humans take our lives and how casually we regard our souls, and I saw how totally, insanely backwards that is. I think Jesus is trying to get us to see that it is our souls we ought to be in a frenzy about while our bodies, he basically says, can be tossed onto the chopping block. If his statement is shocking it is because of how inverted our values are, how much we love, love, love our precious hides. Sin is a boulder pinning us down, we’re losing blood fast, death is imminent, and if we were whole and unfallen and had the vision and wisdom of God we would feel the identical urgency of that hiker to cut off the offending limb rather than perish. The math would be clear. We don't see it though. We don't recognize the boulder as a boulder. We don't see that we're pinned, and we love our mangled, gangrenous and unsalvageable arm there under the boulder too much to cut ourselves loose for a life we don't see either, and not seeing don't value. We tend, mistakenly, to believe that our passing mortal life is a thing of enduring eternal value and our eternal soul, if it gets a thought at all, is a trifle. We are like a snake who’d rather die than part with its skin. A snake prettying up and working out and dressing up to the nine's a skin that's rotting while it suffocates the real, vigorous, and potentially immortal life surging beneath it. The whole thing would be silly if it weren’t so truly tragic.

Some Thoughts on the Economy in Light of the Upcoming Presidential Election or, Why the Middle Class is now the Spoiled Baby of the American Family

:The Economy! The Economy! This is the cry of a nation unified at last on one point, if on absolutely nothing else. At the moment, nobody cares two cents about social issues (except to get rid of those damned illegal immigrants who are taking all the jobs and money), about the environment or foreign policy, we want someone to pat our hands and soothe our fears about THE MONEY! Loudest among the cries and most discussed and pitied is the beloved baby of the family, “The Middle Class.”

First of all, before I launch my offensive thesis, let me establish some credentials. My husband, son and I live on about $40,000 a year, in Brooklyn, where the rent for our 400 square foot apartment is $1600 a month, and that’s a pretty good deal here. We have thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and are part of the lost generation of college grads, who will probably never have high paying jobs in our field of study. I am currently looking for work and having a hard time at it. The longer I go on unemployed the lower we see our savings account drain. My son is due to have costly surgery that will require some fuzzy math to work in to the family budget. Beyond my immediate family, my dad is in his fifties and has been searching for work desperately for almost a year now. He and my mom are behind on their mortgage payments. They, like so many others in their situation, have never been behind on a payment in their lives. My uncle likewise is out of work. My father-in-law was out of work for a while. My Aunt will be kicked out of her home any day. I’m there. I’m in it. I get it. We are truly in the throes of a nasty recession. That’s not up for debate, but I would like to make the contentious, distasteful claim that the real problem, at least for the middle class, is not a money problem. The real problem is that we want too much.

My mother-in-law told me recently about a family she met many years ago. Her family was new in town and didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, so this family invited them over. The family consisted of a mom, a dad, and six children. My mother in-law told me about discovering something curious at the family’s house on Thanksgiving. She had gone to pop her head in on the children, who were playing in a bedroom (which the four girls shared), and immediately noticed a marked absence of clutter. There were two sets of bunk beds with simple linens, and a couple dressers, but little else. She peeked in the closet and saw that each girl had one pair of shoes, one jacket, and a warm blanket folded on the shelf above. They didn’t have a black coat and a brown one, a light one and a heavy one, a snow one and a wind one and a rain one. They had one coat that would, admittedly, probably manage for any of those situations. They didn’t have every kind of shoe they might need for all shade of casual or dress attire, just one basic pair of shoes to keep their feet off the ground. Each kid seemed to have a toy each as they were playing in the center of the room, but there were no shelves jammed with books and toys, no overflowing containers of crayons and markers and paints and bubble blowers, Nerf guns, or piles of half assembled Lego structures, Bop Its or Jenga logs, My Little Ponies, or hammocks heavy with stuffed animals. They had no “stuff.” Rejoining the parents in the kitchen, she realized it wasn’t just the children who’d been deprived. The family seemed to have just the things they needed and not one thing more. No one had to sit on a milk crate at dinner or eat with their hands, but the whole house still felt sparse. She asked the mother about this later, and the mother just said that they had what they needed and they didn’t need anymore. They were going for the proverbial lilies of the field approach to life.

In America this is bizarre, some would even think it unhealthy, damaging to the phyche or creativity of those poor kids, a hair away from neglect. For the most part, we Americans don’t hope to have our needs met, our “daily bread” as it used to be called, we feel entitled to have our wants met. We are great worshipers of variety, easily bored, easily disenthralled with acquisitions. We delight in opening our closet in the morning and seeing a bounty of options for how to fashion ourselves today, or opening our cupboard and seeing a bounty of options of delicious things to eat today. How often do we clothes shop or grocery shop, bemoaning how “there is NOTHING to eat in the house!” or we have “NOTHING to wear!” when of course, technically there is food in the pantry, but it’s those potatoes and canned vegetables and bags of rice that have been in there forever because you haven’t had the energy to do anything with them. What we mean is there is nothing yummy to eat. And of course, there are garments in the closet as well, pieces of fabric that would aptly hide your body from the eyes of strangers and protect you from a draft, but there are no fun clothes, there are no new clothes, there are no clothes of a particular pattern, cut or shade. And that feels like deprivation.

Now lest you misread me as self-righteous and judge-y, let me say that this is all coming from self-examination. I am judging, but I’m starting with myself. This lust for the unessential and for variety manifests itself in all kinds of ridiculous ways in my own life, from my excess of shoes, to the three types of shampoo in my shower and two types of conditioner, not counting leave-in conditioning sprays, of which I have two. My two-year-old son has no less than four pairs of crocs, all in different colors. My bookshelves hold as many books that I haven’t read as those I have because secretly I want my own, in-home, bookstore. I have an unconfessed desire for a constantly stocked collection of wine; I pretty openly aspire to an impressive array of tea flavors, and I have an admitted fondness for cute coffee mugs, which is why I have a whole cupboard shelf of them. I could keep going.

Sometimes I have the acute sensation that my home is a black hole gently, quietly sucking things into it. This is the consumer economy we speak of with pride, a country dotted with black holes gently, quietly sucking things into them, “driving the engine” of the economy. This is why the middle class is getting so much attention in this crisis because our economy is buoyed up by the force of this sucking. These hundreds of thousands of black holes sucking are just like hundreds of thousands of little cogs and wheels turning and making this thing run. Our insatiability keeps the lights on in this country. That is why we must be put back to work, so that we can get back in our over-sized vehicles and drive to Target and Walmart, T.J Maxx and Best Buy, like the dutiful, avaricious consumers we’ve always so dependably been and buy things that will add that old spice to our lives, Variety.

This is what makes me uncomfortable about our economy; it is dependant on vice. Or if that is too strongly stated, let me rephrase it. Certain virtues are destructive to the vitality of our economy, virtues such as contentment, thrift, frugality, resourcefulness, and quality workmanship. We have been blasted to bits by our lack of financial prudence, by our over-reaching, by our lust, and it seems that the way forward that is being proposed is to return to those same foolish habits as quickly as possible. Consumer confidence is rated and reported daily, as though our greed were some idiot turtle that must again be coaxed out of its shell. We must not learn any lessons, we must not reign in our appetites, we must not scale back, do without, repair, reuse, pay cash, eat in, grow our own food, or play cards around the kitchen table. Those things are dangerous to our economy. The nightmarish premise for the next apocalyptic film could easily be, The Day Every American Became Content With What They Already Had; systems would come crashing down, lower Manhattan would be reduced to rubble. Maybe the system needs to come crashing down because a system threatened by virtue is inherently unsound.

I came across an incredibly apropos quote the other day. Henry James in The Varieties of Religious Experience writes:

“Poverty…may…be…the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.

Among us English-Speaking people especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor…We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul…the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have…

I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”

We have come so far from where James stood that we’ve probably never even heard of any “ancient idealization of poverty,” and when he says that we have “grown literally afraid to be poor,” most would probably knit their brows and think “…and that’s bad??” Fear of poverty seems to us middle class Americans as basic and unquestionable as the fear of death. But as everyone knows, the old recipe for overcoming a fear is facing it. Our grandparents and great grandparents faced poverty, looked it square in the face, and in the voices of the ones I’ve talked to I hear this undertone of pride. They’re proud of what it made them, proud of the industriousness and self-sacrifice it called out of them, proud that they know the worth of five left over green beans that would have to sprout wings and fly away before they were ever thrown in the trash can, proud of something as silly as knowing how many squares of toilet paper were actually necessary to get the job done without wasting a one, proud that they turn off the shower to lather and then turn it back on to rinse. They do peculiar things like collect the postage paid envelopes that companies send to people in the mail or hold onto appliances forever meaning to fix them, when we would just dump them and buy a new one. They do these things because they know the true value of things. Everything is cheap and disposable to us, so we look around and don’t see the mammon piling up around us.

I was in Egypt for a while just out of college. I remember the first morning, waking up and looking out of the window of my hostel at the crammed crazy city of Cairo, and noticing on every rooftop, people sleeping on mats or families rising in the early cool hours and gathering around some burner for breakfast. The floor of their home was the roof of the building, the walls of their home were the draped clothes-lines around them and their roof was the sky. It rocked my world.  It completely recalibrated my sense of what was necessary for life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anyone with an actual four walls and a roof over their head is bourgeois swine, I’m just asking what would happen if we reset our standard of living? What if losing a ranch house and being forced to move into an apartment wasn’t experienced as a kind of Jobian catastrophe, but was just ok? Maybe the practice is still too much for us spoiled children to muster, but what if we at least reestablished the virtue of asking only for “our daily bread,” of desiring only what we need and no more.

My mom told me about a guy who comes to the shelter where she serves breakfast on Saturday mornings. He told her that everyday he wakes up and thanks God he has a roof over his head. This is humorous because he lives in his car. He means it to be funny but he’s also dead serious. My mom was chastened by that, so now she wakes up each morning in a house that she may lose and thanks God that she gets to spend one more day in it.

Some might hear me and think, well she just hates wealth! Why’s everyone got to be hatin’ on wealth. My like or dislike of wealth isn’t the point, my point is that if your happiness is in things your happiness is extremely fragile because the unavoidable fact is that things are subject to destruction and decay and theft and the stock market. It could all be gone tomorrow. My aim isn’t to make people feel guilty for what they have, my point is that our society is in a bind for sure, and right now we have choices as to how to forge ahead. The choice I see us making is to do whatever it takes to get the money back, get the stuff back, reopen the playground gates and let our greed play again. I see us not learning a damn thing. I’m saying what if instead of trying to get things back to the fragile, unsustainable way they were, we tried changing ourselves instead? What if we tried learning from our mistakes, redistributing our values, and becoming more grateful people, who humbly ask just for what we need, and rejoice with gratitude if and when our cup spilleth over? What if we forced our economy to adapt to fit people of virtue and character rather than require immaturity and avarice? The great irony is that all the wanting and spending and getting is all about feeling good, but it doesn’t feel good, not ultimately. It’s just sand in a sieve, but being content with what you have, even if it’s very little, that actually feels good. Eh, it’s a pipe dream, I’m sure, but I had to say it.