When I was nine, I saw God in the eyes of
Terry Schiavo. It scared me.

Terry Schiavo had been in the news a lot back then. I knew
that something terrible had happened to her, leaving her with very little brain
function. Legal battles raged for over a decade between her husband, who wanted
to carry out an end-of-life procedure on his wife’s behalf, and Schiavo’s
parents, who argued that she would not have wanted to be taken off life
support. Eventually, federal courts ruled for the removal of Schiavo’s feeding
tube. She died in 2005.

We were getting ready to leave for prayer night
at church, and I remember looking back towards the kitchen table and seeing the
magazine. I remember the front cover: the full-page portrait. It was an
intentionally jarring close-up of her face. Her eyes were open, as was her
mouth—lips parted, expressionless. Haggard. I understood that this woman was
made of the same stuff as me. We bore the same Imago Dei. But there was something gone, something...bent in her.
It unnerved me. I did not want to see her anymore. I felt repulsed and guilty.
I’ve carried that memory with me for the rest of my life.

Children are often
the first to voice discomfort at someone who looks or acts different from them.
They are Other, and Other is not safe. People develop, with time, the empathy
of the Golden Rule. However, there is always a lurking discomfort with the fact
that flesh-and-blood existence necessitates the risk of total loss at any moment. We dread facing our own bodily
fragility in the mirror of our neighbor.

“Then the LORD said to him, ‘Who has made
man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the
LORD?’” -Ex 4:11

We are all operating
on a spectrum of perceived control. We enjoy the fruits of embodied living, and
yet do everything in our power to avoid the reality that sometimes, more often
than we would like to admit, our minds and bodies can betray us—betray
themselves. Vessels can become prisons. Existence as a living being, with all
its raptures, requires the highest collateral. Nothing spared. We are alive!
What a lottery winning. But what might it cost us? And for what purpose? What
part does decay, dysfuncton, disfigurement, play in an embodied Christian life?
Is it simply a stain upon the material world, or does Terri Schiavo have to
something important to tell us?

It can be difficult
to find beauty in that which strikes us as most unnatural. Perhaps to look for beauty in it at all is to
completely miss the point— there can be danger in making appearances the
highest order of value. The more important matter is whether or not we are
looking at all. To turn a blind eye to disfigurement or decay is to turn away
from ourselves, and more importantly, from our brothers and sisters.

It is fitting for the life of a God
incarnated into an upside-down kingdom so populated with those who have often been marginalized due to disability or difference . Christ shows us that to live as fully human involves
bearing witness to the suffering and outcast. It is a cosmic trespass that we
often fail to do the same.

When I was in
college, I found a book of 20th century Scandinavian poetry in the school
library. I opened the book to a random piece: Do you love man?, by Danish poet Nis Petersen. The poem paints a nightmarish
scene in which a grotesque figure is staggering ever closer to the narrator,
repeating the question, “do you love man?” The speaker, horrified at the smell
of rotting flesh and the buzzing of carrion-hungry flies around him, denies
this question again and again. The third and final time, however, the narrator
recognizes the figure: “he stretched his hand toward
me, And lo! the nail-prints flowered red— Up to the shoulders his naked arms
Were covered with black wounds of sin— And then smiled: God so loved . . . !” He awakens from the dream, his mouth full of blood.

This world leaves us much to do; we can easily feel overcome by the expansive suffering at hand. How often do we feel as if God is absent? How often do we cry, “Do You see us, O God? Do you see this suffering?” Perhaps both of these griefs find their answers in the bodies
and faces of those we have hidden away from view. We sometimes feel far from
God because we have kept the unsightly—those that unsettle us in our attempts
to forget our embodied delicacy—at arm’s length. Perhaps it is we that have looked
away. Not God.