The Avowal

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

~ Denise Levertov

⊕ When I was 25, I worked at a United Methodist Home for Children (UMHC) one day a week as an intern chaplain while in graduate school. It was a full-time residence for abused and neglected children from about age 5 or 6 until age 18. Many of the children’s parents were drug addicts and consequently very unreliable. Even while living at the UMHC the children often were let down by parents who said they would come for some dinner or performance or event, but would fail to show. I’ll remember the looks on some of those waiting children’s faces forever, hoping against hope, not giving up, their love and longing exposed as much as their parent’s undependability.

I remember a chaplain intern named Mark who had taken a year off from seminary and was serving as a full-time, live-in staff person telling me a story about an incident one day in the large campus swimming pool.

Most of the children were from the inner-city and the closest thing to a body of water some had seen were street corners that had been washed a couple inches deep from fire hydrants that had been illegally opened with a large wrench on scorching South Philly summer days. As a result, the shallow end of the pool was always overcrowded while the deep end was relatively empty. Some of the children were so afraid they had to be coaxed, lured, or bribed even to get into the water. “Come on, you can do it. It’s okay. I’ll be with you. If you come in, I’ll give you my ice cream at dinner.”

Mark told of the long process of convincing a small boy to come in the water. At first the held child wrapped his arms around the chaplain’s neck and squeezed with all his might. Day after day, the chaplain would encourage the terrified little boy to trust him enough to do a little more in the water. Eventually the child allowed the chaplain to hold his outreached arms and hands and pull him along the top of the water until something would frighten the boy and he would scream and grab frantically for the chaplain’s arms.

Finally, Chaplain Mark was able to get the young boy to lie on his back in his arms as he guided the boy on the surface of the water. Occasionally, Mark would drop his arms a bit from the boy’s back so that the boy was floating on his own, his body buoyant. At first it terrified the boy when he realized Mark had pulled his arms away and left him floating in the water. But over time he became more trusting that if needed the chaplain’s arms would be there. Each day Mark increased this practice and would say to the boy, “Good job! Good job! You’re floating. You’re floating” which usually would send the boy into a mild but shorter-lived panic. Of course, when the boy would get scared, the chaplain would again reassuringly put his arms against the boy’s back and the child would relax.

One day, when the boy was finally learning to relax in the water, trusting completely that when or if he felt he was sinking that the chaplain would keep him afloat, he looked up into the eyes of the chaplain-cum-human life-preserver with wonder and asked, “Are you God?”

QUESTION: Ever had that “sinking feeling”?

ARTWORK: Jules Julien