Unbecoming
Unbecoming
“But what
about you?” he asked. “Who do you say that I am?”…
excerpt from
Mark 8:29 NIV
I
think that if I had to pick a favorite Bible verse, this one would be easily in
the top 3. First because when I was practicing pediatric OT it was this pair of
questions, typically unspoken, that permeated all the other questions dealt
with in therapy; and second, because when the mud hit the fan in my own life
and I went ahead and started a big old midlife Christ-is, it was the single
biggest question I realized I needed to wrestle over too. “What about you?” she
asked. “Who do you say that I am?”
Somehow
I jumped to this. A critical teaching in therapy is simply this: a person is
not their condition. We don’t call the gentleman in room 8 “the spinal cord injury.”
We call him Luke. He happens to have a spinal cord injury, and we are working
on dressing skills with adaptive equipment. The child that comes in at 9am for
sensory therapy is not “the autistic one.” She is Anna. She is working with us
on regulating her behavior to improve her home and school life, because she is
happens to have autism. The woman whom I go to see on a home visit is not “the
home visit hip injury.” She is Rachel. We’re working on finding the right bath
seat, and bars for Rachel’s home, so that she can safely use the bathroom. There
is a bit of “playing the role of God” in this because you “call them each by
name” – not by their human medical condition. It is the basis for establishing
hope, grounded in the truths that conditions are very different from person to
person, and conditions change.
Some
of the same needed to be self-applied, or unapplied as the case should be. I
realized that I had spent, as we all spend, so many years becoming. Becoming a
child in this world. Becoming a daughter or son. Becoming a grandchild. Becoming a sibling, a cousin, and a
friend. Becoming a student. Becoming an athlete. Becoming a teenager. Becoming
an adult. Becoming a sports team fan. Becoming a volunteer. Becoming a
church-goer or not. Becoming a hobbyist. Becoming wounded. Becoming victorious.
Becoming a professional. Becoming an expert. Becoming an owner. Becoming a
patriot or ex-pat. Becoming a member of any endless number of groups. Sometimes
becoming a couple. Sometimes becoming a parent. For us, becoming military. All
of this busy “becoming” into the many conditions of this life, paradoxically
leads into the natural process of its balancing opposite - unbecoming. We begin
to lose friends and family along the way, we change or lose job titles, friendships
and intimacies evolve and devolve, we move cities and add or subtract sports
teams, we may fall in and out of the many varied religious, political, and
social circles, we get our ups and downs with our physical and mental abilities.
Much of what we work hard to become, eventually somehow also requires a heck of
a lot of unbecoming.
I’ve
been thinking about this word for a long while. Unbecoming. Looking at the
scarred body of a tortured, naked, and dying man on a cross is an incredibly
“unbecoming” sight. There are, no doubt, worse images that we see on the news
or on the internet, but the message of “unbecoming” that the cross carries for
Christians, for me, is what has been settling on my mind and heart - especially
this Lent. It is the heart of a message that in one word can make us both turn
away because we don’t want to see what is so very visually “unbecoming,” and it can be the saving grace of
untethering ourselves from our labels and conditions and the processes of “unbecoming”
enough to be called simply by name. Then, so enabled, do the same for others.
So,
I look at Him on the cross and ask “Who do you say that I am?” and He looks
back at me and replies, “Who do you say that I AM?” and we sit with this question
together for a very long time, smiling, with an infinitely long, infinitely
loving answer. Unbecoming.
