Go and See #2

Bethlehem

In the swelter of late August, I travel to Kingston, Jamaica and spend ten days with the Missionaries of the Poor (MOP), a Catholic order of brothers and priests. They run several apostolates for the poor and disabled in Kingston, including a home for orphaned children called Bethlehem.

I am the only visitor during my time with the brothers. Almost all of them hail from Kenya, Uganda, India, the Philippines, or Indonesia. During my trip, I form a close bond with many of them, but there is an initial loneliness in coming to a place where I am the only native English speaker, where I spend most of the day with people who either cannot speak or have only the limited capacity for treading over the same square inch of conversation.

These pages are unavoidably colored by my feeling of estrangement. The brothers seem to glide through the days in their flowing white habits while I stand on the periphery in t-shirts and gym shorts. I don’t know where I’m going in life or why I’m here, whether I’m trialing life as a monk or collecting stories for my own creative purposes. I bring my uncertainties with me to Jamaica, and these pages are born, in part, from my attempt to confront them.

During my visit with the brothers, I take voracious notes and write down everything I see. Now, many months later, my experience in the Kingston slums has become fixed into something concrete, a definite set of events that I can bracket aside and make sense of, a story to tell.

Except for the children of Bethlehem.

No matter how much distance I put between me and Jamaica, those children are always there, looking at me through a refracted, ghostly light and tapping on the windowpane of memory, as if they are trying to tell me something that I am too deaf to understand.

****

“How was your day?” asks Brother Michael¹. We sit together on a stone wall waiting for the transport back to the monastery. A mango tree stretches out its arms over our heads.

“Eye opening,” I say.

Brother Michael nods. He is a middle-aged Kenyan with light brown skin and serene brown eyes.

A garbage truck drives through the open gate with a loud burst of fumes. All of the MOP apostolates are fortified by iron walls with small walking doors cut in the middle for the brothers to enter and exit.

“Where do they go from here once they’re grown up?” I ask.

“Well if they live—”

“Do many of them die as children?”

He laughs gently. “Oh yes. We have a cemetery.”

“It seems like such a difficult ministry,” I say, finally.

Brother Michael looks at me and smiles. “You will tell the people back home what you have seen.”

****

One of the first residents I meet at Bethlehem is a bedridden boy named Adisa. He has a distended forehead and legs jammed together and folded beneath his torso, as if they have been smashed by a trash compactor.

“Matthew, Matthew,” he calls from his crib.

“Yes?”

“Come here.” His head twitches back and forth at an odd angle.

I stoop down.

He smiles broadly. “How are you doing?”

“I’m great, how are you?”

“I’m fine. Matthew,” he holds out his hand. I realize he wants to arm wrestle. I let him move my arm at will, but he’s not fooled.

“You’re much stronger than I am,” he says, smiling.

I go out to the courtyard feeling grateful for the interaction, but my gratitude soon fades into horror, exhaustion, and nausea.

****

In the courtyard, one kid writhes face-down on the ground while the staff and brothers go about their business. Another lays collapsed on his knees with strands of drool hanging from his gaping mouth. He stares at me with wild-eyed attention and grunts incoherently. His teeth remind me of a crooked picket-fence.

Tom, one of the few with enough verbal skills to keep up a conversation, hands me a cushion.

“Hold it up. I’ll show you how I box.”

Tom has only one arm and no legs (though he has something resembling a cockeyed foot on one of his hips), but he has a strong right hook, which he promptly uses to wallop one of the other kids on the head. Several children drape themselves over my shoulders. Tom tries to bite me for reasons unknown. Two others drag me onto my feet and yank my arms in opposite directions.

When I pry myself free, a little girl named Anna implores me to sit with her.

“Matthew,” she says in a small voice.

“Yes Anna?”

“You will come back tomorrow?”

“I’d like to,” I lie.

“Matthew.”

“Yes?”

“You’ll come back?” she asks again, as if she can smell my dishonesty.

****

Prior to my time at Bethlehem, I had never visited an orphanage or worked with disabled children. I do not have the language to describe their illnesses and deformities, but it leaves me feeling a general horror.

Most of the larger boys cannot walk or talk. This makes bathing them terribly difficult and strenuous. The smell of excrement and vomit is enough to make me wonder at the people who serve here on a daily basis. I bathe several of the boys, dry them off, put them in shirts and diapers. Some have torsos twisted like pretzels and legs mashed together, unable to bend. I lift one of them in my arms, line up a diaper, and set him back down only to realize the diaper is backwards. I’m so sorry, I half-mutter, clasping the railing of his bed. Sweat pours down my temples. One of them starts punching himself in the head when I try to change him. He wails and cries from the pain of his own blows.

When I return to the monastery that afternoon, I sit down at the desk in my room. In the silence, I hear echoes of Ivan Karamazov:

But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That’s the question I can’t answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I’ve only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony…And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old…

How I am to make sense of what I encounter at Bethlehem? How am I to explain why Adisa or Tom or Anna are born with so little and I with so much? Is it really enough to quote Solomon and say that God’s ways are higher than mine? To shrug my shoulders and hide my questions in that impenetrable box labeled mystery? Is it courage or cowardice to look at these bedridden children, some of them abandoned at birth by parents who could not or would not love them, and repeat Job’s words, “I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know”?

Say what you will about Ivan, but he did not shrug his shoulders at the world’s apparent injustice. He rejected his “entrance ticket” to heaven out of solidarity with all of the suffering children. “It's not God that I don't accept,” he says on their behalf. “Only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not anxious to return my ticket to heaven (if I have one to return, that is), but the children at Bethlehem make me consider the merit of Ivan’s words like I never have before.

****

When I hear people describe mission work, I rarely hear any mention of original sin. But this the crux of why Ivan rejects God—that we are born into a broken world through no choice of our own and suffer the consequences of a crime we did not commit—caught in a predicament not entirely of our own making, as Walker Percy would say.

Heroin addiction passed down from father to son, babies starved to death in war-torn countries, abused children growing up into abusers—who can take full responsibility for the evil in their life? Is this not the consequence of original sin? Here some people might say, “Yes, that’s true, but all humans would have rebelled against God in the garden. Everyone would have taken the apple if given the choice.” To which I echo Ivan’s rebuttal: we were not given a choice. We were not born in a garden but instead a violent dusty plain to the east, where suffering is doled out in uneven portions and children with misnumbered digits and foreheads swollen to the size of ballons are abandoned at the gates of an orphanage through no sin of their own.

But herein lies the mystery of the Incarnation: that God, taking on human flesh, entered into a mess he did not create and bore its consequences. Born in a manger on the dark outskirts of Bethlehem, he woke to the cruelty of human existence with a bounty already on his tiny innocent head. He who knew no sin, original or otherwise, carried the burden of sin in his body and soul, and later, after walking for thirty-three years on this foul eastern plain, was put to death for a crime he did not commit.

The perfect man crucified on a tree: Is there any greater injustice? Or any more compelling way to profane the claim that God is good? Yet through the crucifixion comes the Resurrection; through great tragedy, a greater triumph; through original sin, a more original redemption.

This is the beautiful mystery that Ivan failed to grasp—that our glory as sons and daughters of God is made more glorious through our fall in the garden. He rejected what is good because of the bad he witnessed on earth, unable to believe that eternity might be made more perfect through temporal suffering.

****

Before my visit with the brothers is complete, I return to Bethlehem several times. I see the same faces and have nearly identical, carbon copy conversations. Yet each interaction softens my heart. I begin to understand Jesus’s words about the man who was born blind so that “the work of God might be displayed in his life,” that in great suffering there is something still greater at work.

One morning, I walk into the dormitory for the younger boys. Several of them watch Power Rangers while Adisa lies in his crib.

“Matthew, Matthew,” he says, beckoning me.

“Yes?”

“Bend down.”

I oblige.

“How are you?”

“I’m good, how are you?”

“I’m fine. Matthew,” he reaches out his hand and I clasp it. “You are stronger than me.” He holds out his hand. I recognize my cue and take his trembling hand in mine. I let him curl my arm, but alas, he is not fooled.

“Matthew, you’re stronger than I am,” he says again, smiling. His swollen head is cockeyed, and he has dark brown eyes that look in different directions. His left eye tremors constantly, imperceptibly, back and forth, a trapped tadpole wiggling from side to side.

I don’t know what Adisa’s eyes can perceive. I don’t know what he sees in the world or in me. But I look in his tremoring eye and see the work of Christ on display. How can I justify or rationalize such a thing?

I don’t know.

I’ve spoken of things I don’t understand, things too wonderful for me to know.

****

1. Throughout this collection, I’ve altered names in most cases out of respect for the anonymity of those referenced.