In The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an Angel (or a foreign sailor with dirty wings) lands in a poor couple’s back yard. They are puzzled at first, but invite over the neighbors to help them figure out what they are encountering. Soon, they have stuffed the old man into the chicken coop, where the chickens groom his wings and charge admission to see the angel. They do nothing to protect him from the elements or the people they bring in to see him, and throw him scraps to eat.

In the end, when his wings grow in more fully, he stands up and flies away, leaving the family behind him, I think that what the old man stands in for is the most important aspect of this story. It is clear that he represents something, but I see numerous things that could fit what he stands in for. Literature is partially about empathy; learning to appreciate the differences in people and see through another’s eyes.

One interepretation that fits him, I think, is that he could be the representation of how we treat those who are different than ourselves; of another race or gender. In the text, we know that he speaks another language, and when the family hears him, they don’t understand it, but from hearing it, think that maybe he’s not an angel, but a lost foreign sailor. (The neighbor convinces them that he is indeed an angel, but that just goes to show how human he was, and that they recognized that.)

Yet, human or angel, they thought it was okay for them to stuff him in a chicken coop and let people throw things at him. What they did, regardless of the humanity they saw in him, was treated him like he was less than human. An animal. Which is what humans do when they come in contact with the strange. During the pre-civil war era, Americans decided that Africans were not human, (and it is a very very dangerous thing to keep narrowing your view of what a human
is) and thus treated them as beasts of burden. Deciding upon your superiority is very dangerous.

At one point, they said that they didn't have the "heart" to club him to death, as if had they not been so squeamish, that would have been an acceptable, or even the correct, thing to do. This, along with the ending (where the wife felt "relieved ... both for herself and him") where the wife is glad that he is out of her hair, also made me think of the impact of being so selfish that you can only think of yourself as complex and multi-layered, but others, especially those who are unlike yourself, as props, that you an stuff into th chicken coop for your own amusement or personal gain, which, when you think about it, is a very slave-owner mentality.

Reading The Boys Next Door, I kept wondering if it was okay to laugh. Some scenes walked the line carefully and made me wonder if laughing would entail laughing at the “boys” because of their handicaps, or laughing with them because of humorous moments they had, as people with disabilities.

I found myself so amused when Barry went into his pro golf, but that seemed less amusing when he was talking to his abusive father; I was laughing when Arnold was threatening to move to Russia, but immediately felt guilty.

The whole play I walked this line, although I got comfortable. Then, near the end, Tom Griffin hit me straight in the heart with the line, by Lucien (in this breaking-the-fourth-wall lucidity). “I stand before you a middle-aged man in an uncomfortable suit, a man whose capacity for rational thought is somewhere between a five-year-old and an oyster. (pause) I am retarded. I am damaged. I am sick inside from so many years of confusion, utter and profound confusion. I am mystified by faucets and radios and elevators and newspapers and popular songs. I cannot always remember the names of my parents. But I will not go away. And I will not wither because the cage is too small. I am here to remind the speices.. of.. the species. I am Lucien Percival Smith. And without me, without my shattered crippled brain, you will never again be frightened by what you might have become. Or indeed, by what your future might make you.”

Is that true? It certainly sounds profound. Do the damaged among us – anyone who is less than fully whole – make us uncomfortable because w e know but for luck or the genetic lottery or grace of God, we could be like that? The handicapped are less than functional; they are not less than human, and this play was so … humanizing; giving them humor and heartbreak and silly little dates where they sat on couches and talked about keys.

I think that this play goes out of its way to create not sympathy, but empathy for our fellow man who is a bit (or a whole lot) different from what we have come to expect as the norm. Even the title ‘The Boys Next Door,’ places them not far away, but as people who could literally live down the street, who could work in our mom and pop corner stores, frequent our libraries.

This play made me uncomfortable, made me see the ugliness inside of people; inside of me. (The heart is deceitful above all things and no man can contest.) It was like looking into a mirror and seeing how ugly people are, in the same way that Lord of the Flies does, but it also was very, very beautiful and touching.

I give life half of my attention. I've always been quick on my feet, and most of what I encounter makes sense to me after giving it a few moments of thought, or reading through the instructions, the explanation; write it out to me in words and I get it; explain it to me and I don't usually need to ask you to repeat yourself.

But I don't open myself up; I don't let things change me because I can do them on autopilot. I don't have to dissect words and look them up, for the most part, because I see them and they make sense and in my head I'm already making connections and picking out allusions to T. S. Eliot and Emerson and Thorough.

Reading Reading for Transformation, I just kept thinking about the way I read. Granted, I do get into what I read, I understand it, and I can break it down into thematic elements later, but I rarely give it all one hundred percent, don’t pull it in close and let it change me. I’ve lost that high school breathless wonder that expected each piece of literature to be the one that changed my life, because I was right back then, Whitman and Salinger (PBUH) and Oscar Wilde and The Love Song of J. Alfred; they meant something to me, held me captive while I thought about what they had to say, but it’s never been a spiritual practice.

I’ve never “meditated” on poetry that wasn’t from the book of Psalms, or Song of Solomon (and even that I give sketchy half-attention to because I’m a bona fide child and that book sort of weirds me out sometimes), giving it a chance to reverberate in my bones. I let words into my head, drenching my thoughts, and permeating my language, but not into my heart; my heart is off limits. I’m going to try it that way.

"Darkness is a question that must be asked seriously. Quick or sure religious answers to darkness offer us no hope because they shut down the question."

I love the set up of this syntax; the idea of "darkness" as something of a question, and not as something to be avoided. Corrigan has been drilling in the same idea, the same turn of phrase bout this subject since the beginning of the semester: there are no pat answers, or, there is no reason to rush towards them. That our faith and lives are not defined by the fact that we have questions, doubts, uncertainties, but how well we go about our journey for answers. Wrestling with grief, with sadness, with uncertainty doesn't make you any less of anything.

Jesus wept. Showing up four days after his friend had died, Jesus didn't arrive in a flowing superhero cape, toss aside the stone at the door of his tomb with one hand and fix the situation with a phrase called out in a booming voice: he wept. He was not an observer of Mary and Martha's suffering; he experienced it with them.

We imagine God as this supernatural Mr. Incredible, coming just in the nick of time in response to our cry for help, instead of as a co-sufferer. We forget that in Jesus living a human life with human limitations and exposure to temptations, he really does understand. I imagine him sometimes, facing temptation with a serene face instead of a twisted brow, his character out-of-line with the idea that temptation might actually, well, tempt him. But if Jesus came down here with no desire to sin, with nothing in his physically human makeup trying to warp him towards saving his own life, or towards his own glory, living a sinnless life means little. It's like saying that the only way a snake can "sin" is to grow wings and fly, and thus, snakes are saints.

I'm not rushing to an answer, because when I shake in the dark, I want to know where is God when little girls are getting sold into child prostetution, or when people literally starve to death on one side of the globe and people spend tens of millions on researching the cure for a disease called "having unluscious, short eyelashes" or any number of things that make me sick to my stomach, but when I finally do get there, and you can't call it a pat answer, because it doesn't leave me settled; it doesn't fit over my face like a snug, warm, blindfold, but I know that God is suffering, too. I think it's especially important to remember that today; that Jesus suffered and suffered hard so that we, as his people, could bring more pain to his heart, every day, but also so that some of us could be spared, if we'd only say "yes."

Happy Easter, everybody.