For Priscilla 10 comments

By Bradford Winters

I am uncomfortable writing this. I was uncomfortable enough writing a previous post (“Redeemed”) which told the story of the miscarriage my wife and I recently experienced. I wrote that earlier post because of the arguably transcendent (which is not to say happy) note on which the story ended (at that least numinous of locales, a New York City tow pound).

No sooner had the piece posted than I received several affirming replies that made me feel better about the choice to publicize something so private. A year and a half into this blogging endeavor, and I’m still feeling out the self-imposed protocols of candor and transparency.

Surely I was at my most candid—for better and worse—in giving voice to my anxious prayer for a healthy baby, that is, a baby not born with Down Syndrome: a blood test during my wife’s pregnancy with our second daughter had indicated an above-average risk, and though she was born as healthy as can be, I knew the risk would be greater, and with it my fears, should we try for a third child with my wife in her early forties.

Then came a reply from a reader that broke my heart. Affirming, yes, but also a rebuke if you read between the lines. Certainly one of the more gentle rebukes out there on the Internet, but so very appropriate and downright necessary:

Brad, this is a beautiful piece. I both sympathize with your prayer for a healthy baby and feel...well...something else too. I am not healthy myself, have not been for a long time. I will let a quote from Peggy Rosenthal's current post speak for me:

"Living with illness that stabs at my psyche as much as at my flesh, I’ve been clinging these days to the words of Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche communities for people with developmental disabilities, as quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in The Christian Century (12/8/08). Woundedness is 'inherent in the human condition,' says Vanier, and 'what we have to do is walk with it instead of fleeing from it. We cannot accept it until we discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the Holy Spirit, in a mysterious way, is living at the center of the wound.'"

peace,
Priscilla

I felt the peace she sent, but I also felt shame, and self-reproach. Not that she intended the latter by any means. To think I hadn’t thought that someone like Priscilla—whatever her disability or illness—might read the piece and feel what she felt about my despair at the thought of an “unhealthy” baby. I could hardly do the shame justice with my trammel-mouthed reply:

Thank you, Priscilla. I did mean to indicate a certain weakness in me that lay behind the anxiety and prayer, whether or not this came across clearly enough in the piece. If it didn't, I should have done a better job of it.

To put it lightly.

Now, to be fair, it’s natural for any parent to hope for a healthy child. On the other hand, the walk of faith that Vanier describes only finds its rhythm in the supernatural, and clearly I have some vertical work to do, as the instinct to flee seems to indicate an infinitely horizontal mind.

Easy as it would be to critique myself and my culture at this point, let me instead pick up where the previous post left off, as it didn’t exactly end where it ended.

Having described the moment at the tow pound where, within a few hours of discovering the miscarriage, I was handed a receipt for my car that bore the word REDEEMED in bold red caps, I ended with a line that was pointed as much to myself as to the reader:

“Call it what you want, a sign or coincidence, and I will do the same.”

The photograph that accompanied the post was of a desolate tow pound full of cars waiting to be redeemed, and though I hadn’t paid much mind to it, a shining and shaft-like detail in the background left me altogether unsure as to what that thing was.

Then, a week or so later, around the time I received Priscilla’s response, I found myself staring at the image above, taken from The Birth of Christ frontispiece to the Gospel of Luke in The Saint John’s Bible, which is the first illuminated Bible in over 500 years.

Familiar as I was with The Saint John’s Bible, many times over the course of the pregnancy I had looked at this image of the Nativity, and at that golden shaft of light pouring down from heaven.

Wait a minute.

I seemed to recall something similar in the photo of the pound, that unidentifiable whatever-it-is shining like a shaft of light in the back of the lot. And when I made my way to a full-size image of it on Google Images, I still couldn’t make out exactly what it was.

But when I hold these two images side-by-side in my mind, I have no choice but to end on the same note that I did the last time:

Call it what you want, a sign or coincidence, and I will do the same.

And then some. I can’t be sure this post will find its way to Priscilla, but I can only hope the illumination’s quote from the Song of Zechariah finds its way to me:

“By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us.”