Dean was deaf. It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time. Life can have its sinkholes. Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us. Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the day or the moment holds. There is no forward movement in times like these. When our worlds collapse it all becomes about survival because often that’s ...
Dean was deaf. It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time. Life can have its sinkholes. Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us. Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the day or the moment holds. There is no forward movement in times like these. When our worlds collapse it all becomes about survival because often that’s all it can be about. Soon survival becomes the norm where we strive to survive for the sake of survival itself. Life becomes abjectly meaningless other than getting through the day to fight the meaningless that will face us again tomorrow.
Dean was deaf. But he was mentally retarded as well. Tenderly kind, compassionate and invitingly soft underneath it all, he was the by-product of the sink-holes that had scattered themselves all around his life. In the end, it all imploded and he retreated into his deafness and his mental retardation, finding there some seclusion away from it all. He sat along the roadside of life watching some of it go by and ignoring the rest of it. He surrendered to isolation and held the world at bay, barricading himself many fathoms deep within himself. He effectively placed himself out of reach of anything. He was a treasure lost in the stratified subterranean layers of his fear.
He had never mastered his deafness. Some lean into their disability and shape it to serve them. He never leaned into it. Some work to compensate for their handicaps by strengthening the things that are not handicaps. He never compensated. Rather, he decompensated down into a silent oblivion where he sat hunched and utterly alone.
Sign language and the reading of lips never broke him out of the prison that deafness had thrust him into; that place so many fathoms deep that no one could get down there. He was somehow held inside with the world held outside. Each could see the other from their variant vantage points, but neither could bridge the gap nor plumb the depths. Whatever separated him from the rest of us seemed intractably immovable.
A Conviction of Greatness
Life sometimes persuades us to believe that there is so much more to something or some person even though we can’t see it. We engage that thing or that person with a certainty that there lies within them something profound despite the fact that it’s completely hidden. It seems that we walk circles around them, looking and probing for some crack or tear that will grant us a peek inside. We look for some chink to wriggle through or a knob that we can wrestle with long enough until some hidden door opens and grants us entrance to the riches within. There emerges a dogged persistence about it all because we dare not bypass what lies within even though it’s held away from us.
That was Dean. He was a kid that I could not let go of even though there was nothing to hold onto. His mild mental retardation put him even further away; a young man of riches unearthed that always provoked me back to him. He was frustrating and abrasive at times, being unable to break through his own deafness and reach up and out to everything outside of himself. His coarse and sometimes rash behaviors seemed to be an expression of his deeply engrained trepidation of the world, combined with his own frustration of choosing to seclude himself. Because he couldn’t break out, he reinforced his isolation from the inside out, pushing everything away so that he would have a sense that it was he who was locking it all out. Somehow he found solace in thinking he controlled it because it gave him a sense he could get out of it. He couldn’t.
I didn’t choose to be relentless with this kid. I had no choice but be relentless. Sometimes what you see in another is far too convincing and too terribly compelling to let it go of it even when you meet with nothing more than outright rejection and ever-thickening walls. And walls there were; thick, fortified and towering. I found myself relentless in pursuit and then disappointed into withdrawal, only to do it all over again because this kid was somehow just too precious to let go of. He needed to hear, maybe not with his ears, but at least with his heart. I prayed that God would pull Dean aside and open up something that would open him up.
Deaf to Life
Rejection and scorn was his lot due to the assumption of sin that others had about him. The world was loudly silent for him. Something was missing that he could not identify because he had never known it. Life is indeed an orchestra full and complete, absolutely masterful. But for the deaf man it was absolutely silent. The musical pieces and masterful renditions for which life was created were soundless for him. Notes and scores that were casually written across the faces of friends, that were penned in the raucous flamboyance across bustling open air markets, that found subtle notation in droning bees gently drifting from blossom to awaiting blossom all gave the faintest hints of the melodies they illustrated, but the sounds were never there. The sheet music ran in front of him in endless reams, but they didn’t spawn a sound.
The haunting call of myriad geese aloft, the pounding surf throwing itself against a forever beach, or the fingers of the wind rustling through listless treetops were silent for him. The roll of a distant summer thunderstorm on a humid horizon, or the raucous laughter of life rising from the soul of humanity itself was nothing more and nothing less than the sound of silence. Entombed in a vacuum of deafening silence, the orchestra had always played soundlessly for this deaf man; vigorously indeed, but vigorously silent. He was deaf and he was starkly alone.
He attempted to interact and engage with the music and the melodies. But to try to participate in a world you can’t hear leaves you ever outside of that world despite how hard you try. His lips were slow and drawn with words that were ill-formed. He arduously attempted to wrap words around voice and syntax and intonation that he had never heard. He spent himself in perpetually frustrating efforts to do what he couldn’t conceive and could much less imagine, to put sounds to words he’d never heard.
His words were slurred, distorted, verbally twisted and linguistically bent, readily inviting and successfully garnering ridicule, mockery and confusion from those that lived in the world of sound. His was a life forced out onto the fringes of life, exiled there in a lonely land where silence is a hated, but forever companion. There was no breech in the wall to slip back through in order to touch humanity so as to belong to something other than the silence.
Rejection by others was based on the errant assumption that some sin had caused his deafness. This conclusion was elevated as full-fledged fact, rendering him an outcast on the falsest of premises. Rejection and silence are both isolating, the difference is that one is a choice, the other is chance. What they have in common is that the person upon whom they both fell chose neither. It was something like a full emasculation of everything it is to be human. This is what it was to be deaf and mute. And so his life went.
There was a rumor that circulated. A distant murmuring unheard by deaf ears, but caught by others said that Jesus was in the Decapolis. This prophet and miracle worker had come. The verdict as to who this Jesus was remained a point of discussion and debate. Some of that was quite heated and some of it was really rather innocuous. Yet, He was coming and the captivating risk that He was something more than a mortal man was compelling.
Had those around this deaf man tired of his dependency, these friends of his, or did they care for him? Was he little more than an object that could be used to entice a miracle of this prophet? Was their intent little more than a ploy for a cheap thrill? The text is unclear. The motive is foggy and indistinct. But they take the deaf mute to Jesus. It didn’t appear to be an action of the deaf man’ own accord as there is no hint of self-determination or self-initiation. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of remote inkling that the possibility of being ushered into the world of sound is a distinct possibility. How can you possibly know what you’re missing if you’ve never had it? How can you desire something if desire has no place to be cultivated because we’ve no idea that there’s anything to be desired?
Sometimes we see in and through others what we could not otherwise see because it’s not within us to see. Sometimes we experience the passionate and vigorous pulse of desire vicariously through the heartbeat of others and we sense the pulse in them. Sometimes our vision of the possible is only possible because we see that vision reflected in the eyes of another and we watch it listlessly dance about in their smile. Sometimes we actually end up dancing because others have caused us to believe in the dance and have ushered us out on the dance floor even when we can’t hear the music ourselves. Such were the deaf mute’s friends.
And so, the rumor draws them to Jesus. Soon the embedded mass was found. Ushered by these friends, the deaf man pressed through the crowd. The small entourage cuts a swath through a fluid array of assorted humanity that swelled and eddied around Jesus. The clamor of a world of never-ending needs simultaneously sought relief. The world clamored around Jesus seeking some shred of hope and some healing that arises from that shred of that very hope. The crowd swirled around this wandering prophet as if in the grip of the undertow of all creation, an irresistible current from which all other currents find their sole source. Passing through a cultural morass of assembled humanity the deaf man is drawn toward the center.
The aged, stooped and shuffling in the grip of long years wandered about in a cloudy curiosity. Children darted in and out. The blind walked about groping, stretching trembling arms outward, substituting touch for sight and sound for vision. Stumbling, they made their way to Jesus. Crutches that were terribly crude and deeply weather-worn were nothing more than primitive prosthetics that sought a miracle for an absent leg. A cripple, his fingers clawing the arid soil drug useless appendages and tattered garments that trailed in the talcum dirt behind him.
Limp in his mother’s arms an infant teetered on the chilling precipice of death, the pallor of death strangely awash across the face of newborn life rendering his skin hues of suffocating purple. His mother stood on panicked tiptoe, stretching her neck to catch a glimpse of something, anxiously groping toward the center of the mass. It was all silence to the deaf mute. It was all wildly alive, vibrant, turbulent and wonderfully riotous, but deathly silent. From his vantage point, the drama was only partly revealed.
Pressing onward and inward, it was more of the same. The scene was packed tight with shifting layers of broken humanity, the curious, the destitute, the rich and poor alike. Finally the last layer of jostling, clamoring humanity parted like the parting of some glorious tapestry. A man of silent stature stood in the crowd, yet infinitely above it. The nucleus of the swirling mass of people and their needs was deafening in silence. Jesus back was to them. Slightly stooped, His hands gently rest on the shoulders of an elderly woman. The look of astonishment was set in her eyes and splashed across her face. A worn cane lay abandoned at her feet. Something unusual had transpired. It was immediately clear that there was thick compassion in His touch, His stance, and His mannerisms. A parting word to the woman and He turns.
His gaze shifted and panned the crowd. Mussing the hair of a playful child, both smile deeply and invade the heart of the other in a superbly divine intersection. Another step and this Jesus was drawn to the outstretched arms of an ecstatic infant. He moved toward her, His face electrically alive with love and aflame with anticipation. To squeals of laughter He took her, held her high, pulled her to His chest, ran His hand across a misshapen leg and it was straight. The convergence of two souls, He drew her deeply to His face. And then He handed her back to an elated set of parents who now held a daughter who was wholly whole. All of it was too much for words; it was too inexplicable to embrace in the confining catacombs of human understanding. The only question that one can formulate is “Who is this?”
Before the answer can be formulated Jesus is drawn to the pleas of those who have brought the deaf mute, pleas the deaf man cannot hear. The man, this Jesus stepped toward them, fastening His attention on those who had brought the man. He seemed discerning and listening with some sort of intuition and understanding that superseded anything they could comprehend.
He then turned intense eyes and fastened His gaze on the mute. His eyes were more than human, although they appeared to be something that was fully human at the same time. They were infinitely deep, profoundly thoughtful and intensely focused. A soft but chiseled spirit enamored the crowd and drew the deaf man to Jesus. It was all a terrible yet inviting contradiction of commanding power and gentle softness. Jesus’ eyes had the breath of infinity behind them. The deaf mute found himself becoming entirely lost in them until Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the crowd. God was afoot; the Creator of the universe in intentional motion toward an intentional destination. It was all terrifying but exhilarating at the same time.
This fluid mass of humanity parted a second time, but from the inward out. Shifting layers of broken humanity sliced a swath to the edge of the mass. Jesus breeched the fringes of the crowd, walking with a man whose life had been lived on the fringes of life. Jesus was in the process of isolating a man who lived isolated in deafness. In a moment, the crowd was far behind them, their voices falling into a distant murmur. Those that advocated his healing were absent. Suddenly, inexplicably, this deaf mute was alone with God.
Ears and tongue; the world is drawn in through one with the self being released through the other. They both engage in a partnership of exchange, drawing in and letting out. They draw in the world to process it and then release it back into the world with part of the person attached; adding to life, flavoring it, affixing yet another unique note to the chorus of the ages. There, in the world of the deaf, this dance was never initiated. The deaf man was isolated from the world and to the world.
Drawing the man along, Jesus sought isolation. It was within isolation that isolation would be broken. One on one, God and man in relationship echoing back to a lost garden. The Creator and the created rectifying lost creation in an act of recreation. In this joint journey they walked past the rancor and raucous of an open air market filled with bartering and bantering, scales and sweeping gestures. They skirted around scurrying children and walked past stray dogs milling close to tables spread with red meats. A pair of centurions laden with weaponry strode past in the service of oppression, granting Jesus and the deaf mute no notice. Passing priests in ceremonial robes stepped in pompous cadence on errands of perceived righteousness.
And then, an unexpected turn into a vacant alley made up of basalt stones that cut a manmade canyon. The sun found scant room to watch the making of a miracle. It casts angled rays, canting itself to catch the pending phenomenon. The din of the open air market and the jostling of the vendors was put at a sufficient distance, becoming gradually muted and fading soft and indistinct into the background.
Then, a miracle was wrought with gestures that were so familiar to the mute. Gestures were the very means of understanding and the way in which the deaf mute had navigated his world. Jesus was not a God interacting in mystery, but in intimacy. There were no methods cloaked with indiscernible actions or unfamiliar rituals. All was simple, direct and familiar; fingers in ears and a touch of the tongue. Saliva was a symbol of the fullest sharing of self as a participant in the miracle right along with the deaf mute. Jesus engaged the man not as a distant entity cloaked beyond recognition in some sort of misty immutability. Salvia was believed to have had a curative quality; a belief entirely fictional in nature. However, the symbolism of the act provided a needed vehicle that outweighed the myth of the act itself. So Jesus ingeniously chose to use myth as a vehicle for a miracle; a miracle done in the simple language of the deaf mute’s isolated world to obliterate his isolation.
And then there was something for Jesus Himself. Something the deaf man could not hear or participate in. Jesus looked up to heaven. There is a weighted sigh of a God whose love eliminates His ability not to feel. It was a reflection of both His heart and the heart of His Father. It seemed to be the private pain of a God grieving over His own creation, escaping the lethal weight of it all only by virtue of His divinity. Jesus’s sighing was likely the plaintive moan of God once again embracing the awful reality of fallen mankind as manifest in this single, mute life. It was likely the expression of a great angst that arose from an infinite understanding of how far this man’s life was from God’s original intent for him.
There, in that alley God would meet the need of one man. In a few days, He would meet the need of thousands with a scant seven barley loaves and a few small fish. A few months beyond that and He would meet the need of all mankind on a barren hill. It would be a hill that would not be sandwiched between the walls of some abandoned alley, but between two crosses and two worlds. However, there was the need of the moment.
“Be opened!” (Mark 8:34, NIV) said this Jesus. Not just his ears, but his life as no miracle is excluded or in any way restrained solely to the obvious. “Be opened!” Be free to live fully, to hear in perfect pitch the richness of the notes and measures, the scores of life and living. Be opened to engage everything else in life that was open. Be opened so that being closed simply cannot be.
Jesus took a step back and watched life unfold as the miracle reverberated far beyond the miracle; something like when a stone is dropped in a mirrored pool, sending ripples far beyond the point of impact. An alien experience transpired for which the man had no point of correlation. Sounds began to filter through. The orchestra gradually swelled and expanded. The void of silence filled to capacity.
Suddenly, he heard the crunch of gravel beneath his feet, shifting his weight again and again to reproduce the sound his stunned and hungry mind had never imagined. The barking of a dog floated in from afar, the source of the sound and everything that defined it was entirely unknown. Birds darted overhead in tangles of wild flight, cheeps and chirps synchronizing the feathered masses journey. He was caught in the rapture of hearing his own breath. And then words, the first he had ever heard, annunciated clearly, perfectly and concisely. His own voice now came back to him perfect! The cycle was now marvelously complete.
Jesus stood silently, giving the man room and time to embrace the wonder of the moment. Miracles become freeing and claustrophobic at the same time; opening up entirely new venues that are often bigger than our ability to embrace. Time was needed to allow this astonished man sufficient time to reorient to the miracle of a life restored. Maybe Jesus saw in this man, this deaf mute the liberation that the cross would extend to billions.
It may be that the individual miracles, like this one, allowed Jesus to foresee in this solitary face what the cross would do in an endless sea of faces across endless spans of time. Not the kinds of miracles that would eventually fall to the deterioration of frail bodies and the eventuality of death, but miracles that would be eternally fresh because they open up all of eternity to all who seize it. I wonder if maybe it might have been these moments that allowed Him to endure the long moments on a lonely cross.
And then, the first words of another human being that he ever heard. “Don’t tell anyone,” Jesus said. The first words seem irrational and inexplicable. The world of sounds brings with it responsibility to the world it unveils. Miracles bring with them accountability to both the Restorer and what has been restored. A relationship with God brings obedience, the responsibility to act on faith even when that action appears irrational, contrary, odd or plainly wrong. “Don’t tell anyone”. But containment failed. The measure of the miracle was larger than the measure of the man to contain it. But that is what happens when an infinite God interacts within our finite frames. What He does is always bigger than us and bigger than our ability to contain it. Our faith may be big enough to elicit a miracle, but our faith is seldom large enough to embrace it once it happens. Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the alley and into life.
Aside in an Alley
And so, Jesus pulls me aside at times and isolates me in my isolation. He places creation aside and draws me to a secluded place, away from the crowds that surround me and the world that has so often thrust me to its fringes. Often I am afraid to be there because I am confused and frightened to be one on one with God. I would much prefer to have Him heal me at a safe distance, or intersect my life in the companionship of others, or touch me as part of something larger within which I can meld. But one on one in some alley in my life; secluded with God? Sequestered with the Creator? It is both terrible and wonderful.
And then, to have Him connect with me intimately in that place of isolation? The God of the cosmos coming to me in my isolation? Not just in proximity or in earshot, but in my language and in the raw essence of my being. God steps into my isolation and speaks to me there. Not standing outside of my isolation and beckoning me out of it from out there. But coming in, gently taking my arm and gesturing me out of it. Partnering with me and in the partnering coming squarely into my isolation to commandeer me and rescue me. Cutting through the mass of issues, pain, self-absorption, and self-hatred that surrounds me and drawing me along with Him.
And there, in those isolated alleys of my life He frees me. He relishes watching me come to life and then fumble with a life that’s so new that I have little idea how to hold it. He is as amazed at watching me come to life as He was when He first formed Adam from the dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7, NIV). It is just as poignant for Him, never being diminished for a God whose love for His creation rages undiminished. God is always revealing that creation can only exist if it is constantly creating. “He has done everything well . . .” (Mark 7:37, NIV). Harkening to yet another statement . . . “and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, NIV). In that alley God was creating all over again as He always does, doing everything well and good.
Dean’s Alley
It was all experimental, but the doctors said that the surgery might restore Dean’s hearing. He was not enthused at all. Dean walked through the process more like a laboratory rat that had no idea of what was happening or what the possible outcome might mean. He was lethargic through it all, demure and distant.
But the day came quite by accident. I turned and there he stood. My first response was to say “hello” out of some prescribed tedium and routine, knowing that he wasn’t reading my lips. Sometimes rote and ritual turns life lifeless. It robs us of expectation and hope. I felt that way with Dean. But I said “hello” anyway.
He simply looked, canting his head a bit and registering something in those crystal blue eyes that I had never seen. Sometimes we imagine something so much for so long that when it’s ours it’s both wonderful and terribly different than we had ever imagined it being. I think that was the case for Dean. He had heard my voice. The surgery had worked. For the first time, he had taken in the tone and flavor of the single word that I had uttered and had found himself awed by the utterance. He smiled and seemed to wait for more. I paused. “Can you hear me?” I said tentatively, desperately hoping that he was no longer locked in and I locked out.
Instantly he grabbed my arm, turned and in the rush of wonder pulled me down the hall and into his room. He stopped in the middle of that quaint room and pointed at the various objects around us in frantic gestures. It was all so new for me that I had no idea of what he meant. He continued to point in a manner insistent and adamant, walking around the room in a rigid gait and incessantly pointing.
Finally, I realize what he wanted; he wanted me to pronounce what the objects were, to speak their name, to say them so that he could hear them for the first time. Picture, telephone, window, bed, floor, light, wall, rug, Craig; it was a young man surging alive with an urgency that flooded the room with a terrific and wonderful energy. He was hearing it all, for the first time.
Sometimes you sense that you’ve been put in a place of privilege that you are completely and wholly undeserving of. That’s where I was on that day. God came aside this young man through the hands of a caring doctor and an experimental surgery. Now I was privileged to stand beside him as well, inundated in a tsunami of wonderment and life.
It all went on for days and days. I couldn’t wait to see Dean. In indescribable awe, I watched a young man come alive in a way that makes coming alive worth all the pain and disappointment and deafness that we have to endure to get there. A miracle came to me through Dean. Deafness was abated in infinitely more ways that simply physical hearing. Dean reminds me of deafness and what it can do to a person and a life. Dean also reminds me of deafness abated when God comes along side of a single life and renders deafness deaf.
Repeated Deafness
Unlike the deaf mute and unlike Dean, my deafness and my inability to speak to my world come often. Frequently I need Jesus to put His fingers in my ears and touch my tongue. Sin, selfishness and the lure of the world renders me deaf and ill-suited to speak as I should. My condition is pitifully recurrent. God’s presence is likewise persistently recurrent. Daily I am in this alley with Him. While I tire of it and find myself sweltering in embarrassment, He never tires. He likes, it seems, these alley encounters. He relishes taking me aside. And I know that one day He will take me aside for that final time, that time when I will ascend to a place where deafness and speech deficits will simply not exist. Their memory will be vanquished. And there, in that place, I will stand eternally before God in perfection with new worlds perpetually opening up to me. In that place the layers will constantly part to reveal something new. His smile, the relish in His face will never be old, but always new.
Pondering Point
The loud voices in life, those that clamor for our attention are most often not the vital voices. The fact that they have to clamor suggests as much. It is the smaller voices that are weak, thin and easily drown out that are rich. It is these that tend to be the priceless voices. Their worth easily lost in the pompous and presumptuous voices that say much but hold little. It is easy to become deaf. And when we are, we miss the precious voices whose worth is immutable.
Additional Resources
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