I have never liked my hands. I have been trying to make peace with them since I was a little girl. The longer I’m in Babylon, the more I realize my hands are probably the best tool I have for living here. I look at my hands and I think about the generations of grandmothers behind me, and I imagine the millions of chores they did by hand, how work-worn they must have looked, as they were brushing hair back from fevered foreheads, replacing buttons, darning socks, picking cotton, swatting flies and small children, clasping hands with their husbands around dinner tables or fires, managing horses and wagons, weeding kitchen gardens… lighting Sabbath candles, or sage bundles, or funeral pyres.
Those women understood that their hands meant something powerful, and that wasn’t just about cracking pecans or wringing chicken’s necks. They understood that hands can sink or save you in Babylon. They understood that we can either use our hands to build more walls around this place, or we can glove up and start tearing the old walls down, and go back to where we belong.
I know that's an especially silly thing for a woman to say that she doesn’t like her hands: it’s so painfully and indulgently self-aware, a typical whine of an early 21st century Western female. I mean, Nora Ephron (who I happen to think is a fantastic writer, and who has won many of my hard earned greenbacks in exchange for her work) wrote a book called I Feel Bad About My Neck. She’s the lady that wrote the films “Sleepless in Seattle”, “When Harry Met Sally”, and “Julie and Julia”, which are three of my all-time favorite go-to PMS emergency movies. I like her, I am not angry with her. I’m just saying, I understand the whine, and I am whining, too.
I mostly hate how my hands look. Sometimes, I can’t even stand to look at the speedometer when I’m driving, because all I see are these huge hams, with the long fingers, looking like they ought to be peeling mountains of potatoes in some industrial kitchen, socked way way way way in the back of where the people with the pretty hands hang out, trying on rings and smoking cigarettes and getting manicures with the polish that won’t chip for two weeks GUARANTEED. There are days when I look at my hands, and try to be uncritical, but all I can see are the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and I am afraid that I will be put there to do the weeding, and I’ll never get my feet on the ground, ever again.
My mothers, my grandmothers, my aunts, my god-mothers, my friends...all of them have beautiful hands. Even the men in my life have lovely hands, down to a person. They are the first thing I notice about a person, even before I look at his or her face. For the longest time, every time I looked at my hands, I was disappointed in them, disappointed in myself. My hands were a reflection of what I felt about my whole self...so close to being good, but not actually good, at all. I looked at them and all I could see were the improvements that needed to be made, the things that had slipped through them, the things they had broken that could not be mended, or lost and couldn't be found. My pinkies will always look like they were both slammed in a car door, even though I was born with them that way. My palms will always be ten degrees hotter than the rest of my body, and most likely will always be a tiny bit damp. There is no amount of weight I can lose, water or otherwise that will ever make my knuckles smaller. There’s just not a lot I can do about my hands.
But I am not my hands, anymore than I am my hair or my teeth or my kidneys. My hands are just a part of who I am, and no one besides me really gives a shit about them. Unless of course, I’m trying to deliver a baby or check a prostate, neither of which I have tried to do, nor would try to do, as I am not a medical professional. But I bet if I did do either of those things, the person to whom I was doing them would notice and probably bitch about how huge my mitts really are.
I used to get in so much trouble when I was little for being messy, for losing things, for not keeping track of things, for going too fast and messing things up, for not putting things away. I track it all back to my hands, which always seemed bigger than the entire whole rest of my body, in sum total. I have made every effort to put away that messy child, to get all the Barbie wash-off nail polish off her ragged cuticles, to keep her from biting her nails, from flicking her hair over her shoulder compulsively. She still peeks out from time to time, and rolls her eyes when I make my bed in the mornings. She also has a real problem with the weekly dusting, almost ritualized in its pattern every Saturday. I sometimes give her the finger, just to watch her look insulted, and then I go scrub the toilet…without gloves.
I am not one of those people who can just have fun...it makes me feel guilty, and nervous that the bottom is about to fall out. That is part and parcel of living here, but not being from here, in the Babylonian sense. I know, I know, I’m supposed to trust God, my fellow humans, etc. Who doesn't have fun, right? Here's another thing: I can only let myself have fun and enjoy something if I feel like I’m learning something, making sense of questions in my head and heart, doing something that is Important and Impactful, because there is a part of me that has a hard time having fun for the sake of having fun. No, seriously. I know, it's fucking sick to do that to myself, and it’s even less fun to watch, as a by-stander. This is why (ok, it's one of the reasons why) I see a therapist regularly.
Anyway, I usually extend the "there is nothing more fun than learning" principle into my work life, as well. And that is how I ended up with my hands (the hands I cannot make myself learn to like or love) full of mysterious red dirt inside a very small church in an even smaller town in a remote part of New Mexico.
I am fascinated by miracles...not just healings, although they are the show-stoppers. I love the stories that go with miracles. Like my friend Dreyton says, “Miracles are like magic, but they aren’t magic.” Stories about mundane things, ordinary people, everyday heartbreak that seems to collide with extraordinary grace, mercy, angels, and (like Aeschylus said to Agamemnon) the awful grace of God. I had been fascinated by miracle shrines like Lourdes, Fatima, and Chimayo for years before I ever thought about visiting one of the sites. But I found myself organizing a trip for some of Church Children centered around Chimayo…and the Santa Fe ski area. There is nothing like a road-trip around Babylon to provide one with all sorts of teachable moments with the Church Children. I planned a fun trip, but we were also BY GOD GOING TO LEARN SOMETHING VALUABLE AND ADD TO OUR CHRISTIAN FORMATION. Lest we all forget, there is nothing more fun than learning.
So I took the children skiing. And I took them to the Loreto Chapel in downtown Santa Fe. We lit prayer votives, we read the story of the miracle of the carpenter who showed up to help the nuns at that church. I threatened the boys with their very lives for trying to sneak under the velvet rope and climb the stairs. We prayed. We shopped. We ate obscene amounts of food, junk and otherwise. We haggled with street vendors and had late night ice cream on the plaza. We went on a ghost tour.
The kids liked the skiing. They tolerated the ghost tour. They begged to sleep in and rent movies on the hotel tv’s. They made me wonder if I really wanted children of my own, one day. They fought learning tooth and nail, and they let me know that I was a Mean Lady for not just letting them have their ski trip, just a plain old ordinary ski trip, just like all the Methodists, and Baptists, and Presbyterians got to take, every Spring Break. They moaned and groaned the day I told them we weren't going up the mountain, we were going around it. They were not happy. At all.
We talked about miracles the day we went to Chimayo, for a long time. I told them the story of Chimayo, which you can read someplace else, if you like, and you should because it’s worth reading. They seemed sort of underwhelmed, but were willing to go along with me, because all the snacks were in my hotel room, and they hated to be hungry worse than they hated my little classroom moments. We talked about whether we believed in miracles, what constituted a miracle, why miracles do or don't happen depending on the situation, etc. They were smart kids, and had really amazing and incredible thoughts on miracles, grace, mercy, and what kind of people of faith they wanted to be.
Getting them to engage was really difficult, mostly because I was speaking what amounted to a foreign language to them, and we traveling at a snail’s pace, miraculously speaking. Once we got to the church, we debussed and stretched our legs, and tentatively explored this new place. The children began to grow quiet, preparing themselves to be still and do some thinking and praying (I hoped). I was very proud of them. It was funny to watch how we meandered all over the property, circling in closer and closer until we were all ready to go in, together. God, I get all mushy just thinking about it, right now.
We ended up inside this impossibly little worship-space (a building that seemed much too tiny to have had such power and force emanate from its walls) wandering through the maze of liturgical furniture, saying our prayers, thinking our thoughts, not really whispering or talking or anything, but being quiet and thoughtful. And all of a sudden, we were in a different room, filing in front of this little hole in the ground, full of the most beautiful red dirt I had ever seen. Redder than the dirt in the back yard where my father grew up, redder than any dirt I had ever imagined could exist. It looked like some color mediums my grandmother used to mix her china paints, when I was little. It looked like magic.
I realized that people around me were reaching for little boxes or baggies they had brought, to take some of the dirt home with them. I hadn’t even thought about that, nor had I included that in the Church Children’s list of Things To Pack, and for a split second, I felt really bad about that, and then I just stopped thinking, altogether.
The dirt is supposedly the vehicle of miraculous healings that have taken place at Chimayo...healings, pregnancies, relief from chronic pain--every possible bad thing I could imagine wanting to pray away was written in letters or photographed in pictures that were taped in layer after layer on the wall. The walls of the little room with the little hole were also decorated with crutches, wheelchair parts, pictures of babies: symbols and signs that Something had happened, and that was Something unexplainable, and un-doable, on our own. Something like magic happened to all those people. And they were never, ever the same, ever again.
I remember feeling this overwhelming compulsion to put my hands in the dirt and rub it across my palms, through my fingers, up to my wrists, like I was washing my hands. So that's what I did, running a double hand full over my hands like it was water from the rock, and in a way, I suppose it was. I was in the desert, real and other wise. Babylon has always been a study in extremes and opposites, and so this made sense to me, in a side-ways kind of way. I knew that I had to hurry, because there were other people being herded through the sanctuary and into the room with the dirt well in the floor.
I stood, hovering above that well, all of 25 years old, feeling the weight of Babylon without the words to know that’s what it was, with two handfuls of red dirt, staring blankly at a pair of hands that really no longer looked like mine, and frankly no longer looked detestable to me. Time seemed to stand still. The room seemed to go quiet and dimmer, somehow. Something had happened, and it wasn’t magic, but it was like magic. I can’t sit here and tell you that I’m entirely sure what happened, exactly, because I don’t have those kinds of words. I can tell you that I felt like the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree had been turned on inside of me, and I was reasonably sure for a split second that I was going to explode, but in the holiest and most excellent way imaginable (yes, even better than that other Very Special Feeling we sometimes have that usually involves being naked with another person and also feels like ALL the lights have been turned on inside of us). And I can tell you that nothing--not a pen, glass, phone, i-pod, battery, fork, coffee cup, Book of Common Prayer, dirty diaper, washcloth, sewing needle, lighter, nothing-- has felt the same in my hands, since that day.
I’m sure in real time, I “washed my hands”’, and then brushed the excess dirt off them in a few seconds. In my memory, it seems like it took hours. I remember putting my palms up to my face, and breathing in the earthy aroma of that glorious red dirt, and smelling the ten thousand smells that make up what something really smells like, and they were all perfect.
I was honestly tempted to lick my hands, but since I was in the presence of impressionable Church Children, and a member of the clergy (who would not have minded in the least if I had, in fact, licked my hands), I restrained myself, but only barely. We promptly and politely exited the little room with the little hole, and allowed the next herd of pilgrims to take our place. I kept looking at my palms, and they were glittering...there was quartz in the dirt...it looked like God’s version of craft glitter, and was going to be even harder to get off, and those flecks honestly never came out of the jeans I’d wiped my hands on that day…not even three years after I had wiped them. It was like magic.
Nothing has been the same since. NOTHING.
In Babylon, I try to be about the business of tearing down the walls, knowing full well that I will never be finished. (And sometimes, on days when I manage to bring down a course or two of bricks, it feels like I’m helping to do something that is like magic, but is really a miracle.) Tearing down those walls is the only way I’ll ever be able to see which direction home lays, the colors of the sunrises or sunsets, who is coming or leaving, where in the sky the moon rises. Tearing down those walls is the only way I can find a way to hold the people I love. It’s hard work, it is manual labor. It’s work for big hands. And even on days when I can’t find a way to look at these hands of mine with any real love, I remember the color of the dirt and the way it slid through my fingers, and I know that all things serve the purpose they were meant for... even my hands.
mil besos,
rmg
