My First Priest

             

 

When I was five, I began to live at a rehab center.  My parents sent me there, because the best doctor in the country for the treatment of my disability told them to, so I could learn basic life skills—skills like walking and dressing myself; skills that come naturally to kids, unless they have cerebral palsy.  Physically, it was the best.   Taught me everything I know.   Emotionally, it was hell.  Felt like complete separation from love, from any sense that I was special, that I mattered.  Except in the most generic sense.  As in, If we don’t keep her healthy, there will be hell to pay. We will get in trouble.  I’m not even sure they would have.  It was 1963.  There was less oversight of such places than there is now.  Who cared what happened to a bunch of crippled kids?  I stayed there for five years, only seeing my family every 3 months for two weeks.  The experience remains my definition of hell to this day.

 

Into this pitch black abyss, God dropped 3 things:  Chocolate pudding, rubber animals, and an Episcopal priest.  Well, the first two of those things didn’t really drop in.  They sort of came with me—The love of chocolate pudding if not the actual item, and my collection of rubber animals.  I put them in the very large pockets which the grandmother who adored me sewed to the countless big buttoned dresses she made for me.  Big buttons specifically for hands which had not yet developed fine motor coordination.  Big pockets specifically for my rubber animals—So they could accompany me while my hands gripped two crutches and I walked through the halls.  But the priest?  He did drop in.  One Saturday a month.

 

Some staff member took Babby, David, and me to an empty classroom where we met with him.  Babby was a girl my age.  David was a teenager. He had been confirmed. The priest gave him a wafer.  Babby and I hadn’t been confirmed, but the priest gave us a wafer too.  I knew he was breaking the rules, and that made me smile.  Once, the priest told me that anyone named Mary was named after the mother of Jesus.  I thought I was hot stuff after that.  Not much made me feel like hot stuff back then.

 

The priest is probably dead now, but I need to write him a letter.

 

 

Dear Mr. priest,

 

That five-year-old girl you gave a wafer to grew up to become a priest herself, although the denomination she chose doesn’t call ordained people that.  When she went to college, she learned that Jesus cared especially about “marginalized” people; that God had a “preferential option for the oppressed.”  Some of the books she read in seminary said that too.  And now the people where she goes to church remind her of that every week.  But you were the first person who showed her that.  Because you gave her a wafer.

 

She teaches a Bible study at the place where she lives now.  Sometimes she wonders if it makes any difference.  There seems so little she can do to make the people feel loved; like they matter. 

 

I wonder if you felt that way—when you left those sad faces—on all those Saturdays.

 

And on that Sunday afternoon in June of 1989, I hope you were part of the congregation.  I hope Jesus gave you a front row seat.  I hope he leaned over and whispered in your ear,

 

“Remember when she was five and you gave her a wafer? 

 This day began at that moment.”