Christmas Story 2008

I am alone. The blanket of loneliness that weighs me down has more substance than the feeble cloak that covers my body. I live among the lonely in a group that seldom speaks and never touches.
I am a leper.
No one may touch me. I stand ten feet from the nearest person and shout my shame. My clothes are torn and I must cover my mouth with my cloak as I speak. No one looks at me. Not even the merciful, who lay a small coin or a loaf of bread in the dirt for me to recover after they leave, would think to look me in the eye, to say a word of kindness.
I am invisible to them. I have become invisible to myself.
I am a leper. More than that, I am a Samaritan living among Jews. My isolation is complete.
We share our meager meals. Even a Jewish leper recognizes the bond of leprosy and the need to share the always inadequate sustenance that keeps us alive. Alive for what is a question that we never speak aloud. Our punishment is great and public enough without bringing on the humiliation of a suicide to our already shamed families. That I am a Samaritan separates me even more, but I am still a man. All that we have left among our pitiful company is our link of manhood. We are not women.
It was not always this way. I was once part of a family. My father owned his own land and had three sons and a daughter. I am the middle son. I was the middle son.
My sister died in childbirth. After three times producing only dead children, she died herself. Her husband seemed relieved, freed from her to find another who could give him sons. She was the first one of my family to be lost to me. I mourned her, remembering how she cared for me and spoiled me before leaving to be a wife. She was 12 and I was eight when she left. I never saw her again. They lived in the next town but she was never able to visit. She had one pregnancy after another until she died. Her husband remarried after her death. I suppose I should be thankful that he did not divorce her. We never saw him after her funeral.
My oldest brother was next, killed by bandits as he took our crop to a better market. My father was never the same. It was his suggestion that we might make more money if we took our goods to the next town. He spent most of the next year at the synagogue, where he died one day in the midst of his prayers. They brought him back to my pregnant mother, who began an early labor and soon joined her daughter, son, and husband.
Men are not supposed to love their mothers as I did, and mothers are not allowed much affection towards their sons once they are weaned. But my mother would touch me as she set my food on the table, a seemingly incidental touch, and never often enough to catch my father’s notice, but her touch was like a fire of love. I could sense her watching me and feel her love in everything I did.
I loved my mother fiercely.
And when she died, I cursed God in my heart.
I was so angry. Why had he taken my family from me? I was 20 years old, much too old to need my parents. I was a man. And yet, their deaths filled me with such grief and anger that I could barely breathe. My brother and I said kaddish over my father. My brother openly cried, although he too was a man of 18. I did not cry. I said the prayers from a heart of stone.
It was then that my flesh began to decay. It was not long before I was discovered and banned from society. I accepted my shame. I knew the cause of it. I had cursed God and he had cursed me.
Of all my family, only my youngest brother still lives, and he is lost to me forever.
My aloneness hurts all the more for the memory of him and how he begged me to stay. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I would not look into his face to see my leprosy in his eyes. I could not bear how much he loved me. He wanted to help me, to provide for me, to love me in spite of the obvious punishment God had inflicted upon me. I could not bear such love.
My thoughts bring me to my feet and I lose all the comfort my stillness has given me. Movement brings the itch. Movement brings the pain. I know that I am lucky in my feeling. Most of my fellow lepers feel nothing in their putrid flesh. Thomas awoke this morning with another finger gnawed to the stub by the nighttime creatures that seem to know in which pile of rags to seek their prey. I always awaken when they come to me, jerking awake at their first timid nibble. My pain is a blessing and an irony. That my leprosy is different from the others matters less than the fact that I am a Samaritan.
Leprosy is a life sentence. The only cleansings are deep in our shared history, and those who were cleansed were forgiven my God. No such hope exists for me or my brotherhood of lepers. We will die lepers. All of us.
I am hungry. Pain gnaws at my stomach and my head aches as I walk. I am weak and dizzy. I should rejoin the others. My companions have been to the synagogue where they are still allowed to worship in their isolated space, as long as they arrive before all the others and leave without any contact with their unblemished Jewish peers. I am not allowed. My temple of worship is at Mount Gerizan, close to my home, to my brother whom I will never see again. Why can I not stop myself from thinking of him? It has been ten years since I left him and still the thought of him haunts me. When will I stop missing him?
I try to quicken my steps, to distance myself from this inner longing that is more painful than my leprosy or my hunger, but I am too weak. My steps are slow. I can only put one foot in front of the other and try to ignore the itching of my feet as they encounter the small stones on the path. Soon the sun will hover over my head and I will sweat. At that point, my whole body will burn. I should be thankful for the morning coolness. I will try.
* * * * *
“Jesus is here!” they shout. “We heard of him in the synagogue. He will be walking through the town.”
Even in the outskirts in which we live, where Jews and Samaritans coexist but never mingle except in the community of lepers, we have all heard of Jesus, the rabbi who speaks to the poor and enrages the rich. We have heard of his generosity and kindness. He has fed thousands some have said. He has cured the lame and the blind, and even raised the dead. I cannot believe these last rumors, but the thought of bread and of seeing this famous rabbi moves our feet to the edge of town. Here, if we keep our distance, we may shout of our distress. Perhaps he will pity us with bread.
We can see the dust of many feet in the distance. He is coming. No one else would travel with such a crowd. It may be that we will never actually see his face. Probably he will walk in the center of the crowd and will never notice us or hear our cries.
The men will walk together with the women behind, or so I think until they come closer. To my surprise, there are women scattered among the men. This rabbi is truly different. No wonder he makes people angry… to let women walk among the men. This is amazing. Truly, this is a man who might acknowledge a colony of lepers, who might offer food to our hungry assembly. My belly turns with the hope of food.
We creep as close to the road as we dare, covering our mouths and beginning our litany of begging with our heads bowed. Sneaking my eyes upward, I can see many on the edge of the crowd look with disgust and move away from us.
And then we see him. I don’t know how I know that this is Jesus. I cannot say what it is that makes him so different from the others. Certainly it is not his dress or his looks. And then, I know.
It is his eyes. He looks at us. At us, not on the ground before us, as even the most merciful do. He looks at us. He sees us. His dark eyes look long and steadily at each one of us.
When his eyes come to me, I am filled with a burning desire to go to him, to kneel before him and beg for his mercy. I feel that he would touch me and that I would feel the same fire I felt at my mother’s touch.
Suddenly, I have a vision of my brother’s birth. My father has put him into my arms. I look into his dark eyes. I carefully touch his wet hair. I marvel at his tiny fingers and breathe in the newness of his smell. I am overcome with love. The vision is so real that I cry out with my longing for my brother.
Jesus speaks. “Go. Show yourself to the priests.”
As one, we turn and head towards the town and the synagogue. It makes no sense and yet we never question that it is what we will do. Our hunger is forgotten. We only move to do as he says.
One by one, there are shouts of joy among my companions. Thomas raises his arms and begins to praise God. I cannot believe what I am seeing. He is raising two perfectly formed hands above his head. He has been healed!
That is when I realize the absence of my own pain. I do not itch. I do not hurt. I sit and examine my feet. They are perfectly normal. I slowly examine every inch of my body. My leprosy has gone. I, too, have been healed.
I cannot move. I am overcome by what has happened to me. I am filled with such joy that my heart is racing; my breath comes shallow and fast. I think I may faint.
The others leave me, leaping for joy, running towards the priests who will announce to the world that they are cleansed. As they go, I realize that they are running to rejoin a society that will still not accept me. I have no reason to join them.
This does not sadden me. My heart is so full of gratitude that there is no room for anything else.
Where is the man who has given me my life back? I feel not only cleansed, but forgiven. I have cursed God and yet he has had mercy on me and sent this prophet to make me whole again.
The crowd has moved on. I must run to catch them. Every step is a joy. I am free. I can run. I feel as if I can fly.
I see him. I call his name. I fling myself in the dirt before his feet and shout my thankfulness.
I feel his eyes upon me as he speaks.
“Where are the others?” he asks. I know he does not speak to me but to his followers. “Were not ten healed? Only one comes back to thank me, and he is a foreigner.”
His words do not wound me. His reprimand is not for me. I do not feel the hatred that usually accompanies that word, “foreigner”. It is his followers that bow their heads in shame.
“Rise and go,” he says to me. “Your faith has made you well.”
Tears of joy spring to my eyes as I raise them to encounter his. I know where I am to go. To my brother. I go to my brother.