Garret’s arms twist at sharp angles. His eyes, vacant and unfocused, stare fixedly away into a void, veiled windows to a soul suddenly plunged into primordial darkness. His brain fires primeval charges summoned from deep within the tohu wa bohu, his body tensing and releasing with their staccato rhythm. Slowly the seizure subsides and he comes back, my little boy again inhabiting the body that betrayed him.
Nothing messes with your theology more than your own child’s disability. My boy has “epilepsy and apraxia of speech”: a diagnosis that tells me what I already know, that he has seizures and can’t process language. We communicate with some halting words, some signs, some pantomime. We medicate and wonder when the seizures will strike again, if they will ever cease.
In the dark watches of the night my soul cries out to the Lord: If he “cannot hear, how can the preacher share the good news with him,” to follow up on St. Paul’s vexing question in Romans 10? What is “faith” for a boy with a miswired brain? What is “hope” for the man whose heritage is shattered by rogue synaptic currents no one can control or predict?
Jaideep’s arms twist at sharp angles. His eyes, vacant and unfocused, stare fixedly into a void. His brain fires its last chaotic charge, the death rattle shuddering to a stop. Born on the trash heaps of Mumbai, dysentery and malnutrition absorb him into their hoary embrace. He lived and died a Hindu without hearing of the carpenter from Nazareth. Where were faith, hope and love for this eikon of God? Is he any less precious than my epileptic apraxic boy?
God of the mucky stable afterbirth, bearer of sharp-glassed leather on bare back, wearer of spit and thorns, whose arms were twisted at sharp angles fastened with nails, abandoned, god-forsaken Son with agonized cry for eternal perichoretic dance interrupted by Death’s convulsions: how will you redeem this suffering? Do you hear Garret and Jaideep’s cries?