Lent. Meh. This was the most spiritually indifferent six weeks before Easter I've ever experienced.
I thought about adopting some sort of new, Lenteny discipline, but anything that came to mind seemed forced. So I plodded through the usual: morning devotion, get kids to school, plow through one more book on Merovingian France, eat dinner, run, family time, evening prayer, sleep, wake up from anxiety dream about comps, go back to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.
On Sunday I did change it up by not going to the library and going to church.
I could tell it was spring, but I couldn't tell it was Lent. Why not? I chalked it up to the misfortune of my Saint Matthew's Passion CD ruined by crayons melting on it in the car, and my grad school budget ruling out purchasing a new copy.
I chalked it up to the practical atheism inherent in being a religious professional. How many of us are so earnestly interpreting texts and the tradition and yet utterly oblivious to their power to interpret us? We become Wizards of Oz. Behind the curtain, we conjure up mission, meaning and even God himself for those who listen to our words.
I also chalked it up to the subject matter that confronts me every day in my carrel. I swear to God, if I read one more story about a Christian bishop conspiring with a Christian king to have his half-brother and his infant nephews assassinated...
But I figured out what it really was when I got up this Easter Sunday morning, opened the Times-Dispatch, and saw a classmate of Ethan's on the front page:
For 17 years, Karl and Linda Peterson have been fighting — in courtrooms and schoolrooms, in doctors' offices and living rooms — to bring consistency to a child born to chaos.
On this Easter morning, a time of rebirth, James Peterson has never been closer to revealing himself as the young man his family prayed lay within the labyrinth of his autistic barriers.
On Good Friday, in Mechanicsville, James — the young man who for years wanted to be alone and barely spoke — went bowling with friends.
"We are on a long journey, and there is a long way still to go," said his mother, Linda, as James padded around the family's Hanover County home last week. "But the signs of accomplishment and growth we had always hoped were there have never been more obvious. He has become a new person from what he had been."
This month, James, 17, ended six years of schooling at Dominion School for Autism, which began in Westminster Presbyterian Church and is among the few intensive, hands-on learning and behavioral treatment centers in the area specializing in helping autistic children.
"James became someone who was incredible in wanting to engage, who thrives when he's congratulated, who grew with positive reinforcement and developed a strong sense of self-advocacy, which he'd never had before," said Jennifer Morgan, his teacher there.
His entry two weeks ago into Northstar Academy, a private school in Henrico County for special-needs children that expects a high degree of behavioral self-control, was a long-sought goal. "Years ago, I told myself if he ever was able to go there, I would be the happiest mom on Earth," Linda Peterson said.
That quote by Linda Peterson in the fourth paragraph--I could say the exact same thing about our situation. Things were very, very bad this time last year, but then they started getting better. And they keep getting better.
Pastor Janet announced that she was organizing a new Sunday School class for middle schoolers and pretty much told us that Ethan would be in it. Now Ethan had never made it through a Sunday School class before. But we did as we were told, and he loves it. The other boys in the class (they're all boys) have accepted him, or at least put up with him. I suspect this is due in part to the fact that they have their own issues as well, and due in part to the fact that Ethan earned a little street cred with them one Sunday when he lifted up his shirt and showed them his surgical scars.
Laura has said that one of her biggest fears about leaving Salisbury was finding a church that would accept our whole family. They loved Ethan at John Calvin Presbyterian, but he was theirs from three months of age. When they aren't yours, they're harder to accept unconditionally. But the Gayton Kirk has.
I could go on and on. He broke his camera last summer, and instead of beating one of us up over it, or breaking a lamp, he spent his own money on a new one. He came up with that idea all by himself.
I attribute his success to his having the right amount and variety of medication in his system, the outstanding education he's getting at the Dominion School, and to his own maturity.
When he was younger we grew afraid of punishing him for misbehavior because it just threw gasoline on the fire. That's a maddening feature of autism--when you're so curved in on yourself that you don't respond normally to carrots and sticks.
Then we became acquainted with ABA therapy, which counseled us to ignore the bad behavior and lavishly praise the good behavior. So we started doing that, and it did seem to pay off (although you'd never want to raise a non-autistic child like that; you'd be raising a sociopath).
But by late last year we seemed to have gotten all the mileage we could have out of that technique, and still there were an annoying set of misbehaviors we weren't having success with. So one day, fed up, I rolled the dice. I said, "If you do that again, you'll lose your allowance for this week." Well, he did it. So I said, "No allowance."
"You can't do that!" he yelled. "I am doing it," I replied.
More misbehavior. "Now you've lost a second week's allowance," I said. And on it went until poor Ethan had lost a year's worth of allowance.
So I made him a deal. No misbehaviors, and he could earn back a few weeks every day. And he did! Rationality! God be praised!
And so this, you see, is why I had no zeal for Lent this year. Because for me, Easter had already arrived. What I described above as the seeming drudgery of my life is actually the secure rhythm of a rather settled life, unpunctuated by broken furniture, raised voices, bruises, and tears of rage, regret and fear, which was how our life was for a long, long time. Like Hawkeye Pierce, who only belatedly would realize that the shelling had stopped, it was only this morning that I realized that, in a penultimate but nonetheless real sense, The strife is o'er; the battle won/The victory of life is won.
Naturally, one would not want to reduce the Resurrection to mere normalcy. And there are those theological rigorists who decry comparing the unique event of the Resurrection to any old death and rebirth experience, like Springtime, for instance. Or even, I suppose, to coming out of the tomb of developmental disability.
But the New Testament makes some large claims for Jesus Christ, namely that all things were created through him. And the Church has made some equally large claims for Jesus Christ, that in the Incarnation he assumed human nature itself, and not merely one, particular human personality. So it seems reasonable, if not irresistible, for Christians to refer all events to the one in whom all things hold together. Or, in the words of the hymn In the Cross of Christ I Glory:
Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure
By the cross are sanctified
Peace there is that knows no measure
Joys that through all time abide
We made it through church today as a family! We sang Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, and Pastor Janet admonished us, in the words of Wendell Berry, to "practice resurrection." We hung out this afternoon, chatting on the phone with loved ones. We went to Bryan Park and walked among the azaleas. We ate a delicious dinner my wife prepared. And now I am going to go to bed.
Today we "sat under our own vines and under our own olive trees and no one made us afraid." If that's not practicing resurrection, I don't know what is.
Recent Comments