And, surprisingly, what ends up being a meditation on Easter
I have begun a new phase in my injury experience: walking on my own two feet, no crutches. I can walk AND carry things in my hands. I’m only a few days in, so, more hobbling than true walking– it takes me about fifteen minutes to go upstairs to bed now (I’m sleeping in my own bed again!), five minutes just to head back to the bathroom. But man, I’m so glad. Just walking is going to catapult me towards normalcy. Walking is what will break through the stiffness I have from not walking for two months. It has gone so fast, and while my leg muscles need to be built back up, the rest of my body feels much the same. I’ll try climbing soon, and I’m sure by body will give me an emphatic reminder that things are NOT yet back to normal. But given a little bit of time, I should get back to my own usual self. For the most part.
The chronic pain part of the picture is the one thing that I knew was going to happen but what I have little patience for. No, not patience. That’s not the right word. There is a continual ache I feel in my right let, not just my ankle but in all the muscles and tendons that haven’t been used correctly. For a while, the ibuprofen I was taking all the time took care of some of that pain, but now that I’m trying to be medication free, it’s there almost all the time, from barely an ache in one part, like my hip or a toe, to an all out conflagration that roams up and down my entire leg. This chronic pain that is always present wears me out. It’s the one thing that can get me down.
I have surprised myself these months, that even as soon as I knew the extent of this injury on Saturday, February 10, seconds after I had fallen, I’ve been in relatively good spirits. I’ve spent little time saying, oh if only I hadn’t decided to climb on THAT day, or if only I hadn’t tried THAT problem at the end of the session when I was tired. Even though mere days before I broke my ankle I made a list of all the 5.12s I still wanted to do at the New River Gorge, the list of routes I was going to start checking off this spring (a few weeks ago had I not been injured), I haven’t spent a lot of time crying about it– truly a surprise because I normally tend to focus on the negative side of things. That list will be there when I’m rehabilitated. I may even climb one or two routes on the list this fall, or if I can allow myself to top rope and convince Brian or Oren to put a rope up on something for me, maybe even this summer. Instead of downtrodden, most of the time I feel curious, like this is a new experiment in what has become a lifelong pursuit of a thing called climbing. I can relax about the numbers and how hard I’m climbing for a little while, because, well, any climbing I get to do is going to feel hard while I work at getting strong again.
When walking is working out, anything else beyond that becomes a pleasant surprise, a welcome boon.
The chronic pain and the lack of sleep due to it, however, are what get to me down and make my positive outlook on this part of the journey positively bleak. I begin to understand how people become hooked to pain meds, how opioids turned out to be way more addictive than originally thought. My few remaining tablets of oxycodone literally call to me some nights, though I’m able to avoid them. While there is going to come a time when this chronic pain dwindles to almost nothing for me, thank God, I’m going to have to learn how to live with it for the time being. I’ll probably be one of those old ladies who’ll always be able tell that it’s about to rain because of the pain that flares in the scar tissue of some old injury.
So what does this have to do with Easter? Well, let me attempt to share…
I cannot separate my experience with this injury from the movements in the Christian church calendar I have participated in this season. I can’t ignore that, for the forty days of Lent, I spent keeping myself down, fasting one might say, acknowledging my brokenness. I was required to leave space for healing– a kind of redemption of this imperfect body. I can’t ignore that on Easter morning, when I put on two shoes and limped into church and slowly and painfully made my way to the front to receive the eucharist, I felt I was experiencing a kind of personal resurrection. Sure, it could all be a coincidence and really nothing close to true resurrection, but I choose to let these moments of seeming happenstance serve as a reminder of the spiritual side of life. My body healing in this way, however slowly and imperfectly, is a hint of something that is veiled at the moment but that I believe is literally true– that our bodies were meant for healing, they were made to knit themselves back together.
This is true for me with a broken ankle, true for my friend who struggles with an autoimmune disorder that attacks his intestines at the times when he most needs to be strong, true for my uncle who is dying from a third kind of cancer, true for my aging parents who deal with the pain of a deteriorating body on a daily basis, true for my nephew who we already lost to a brain tumor, true for another friend who just had his knee replaced, true for my kids’ grandparents who have been long gone, true for a sister diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, true for my great aunt who sits alone most of the time in a nursing home with hardly a memory of anything more than the Psalms and the faces of those most familiar to her, and true for all the other people whom we have watched suffer and die in our lifetime. Just because complete healing does not happen here and now, does not mean it isn’t going to happen.
This is absurd and foolish to many people. But for Christians, the resurrection of the body– the story we retell on Easter morning, that Jesus, the Son of God, appeared to his followers, the women and the men, alive and in a new body but with the lingering scars of his terrible death– is not an allegory or a wish but a real occurrence that is to come and gives us true hope. Real for us as human beings, but also equally real for the earth and the whole universe. The earth and all that is in it was meant for more than sickness and death, meant for more than the war and violence and destruction and disaster that burns our eyes and our ears on a daily basis. For as much as this hope sounds absurd, really truly crazy-cuckoo, it is the only thing that ends up making sense to some of the rest of us. It isn’t any more crazy than to think that this earth and our existence is all to be lost in senseless war and the stupidity of our frail human nearsightedness. The beauty we encounter now in pith and pittance will someday be the whole picture.
So we Christians go through the movements of the church calendar, and on our holy days at the very least if not every time we congregate, we rehearse and retell this story again and again, every year at the same time so that we might not lose hope while we live out our sometimes meager existence in these dark times. We look for the tiny little hints of paradise in our ordinary-everyday-lives, and we let them remind us to pray, come Lord Jesus, come and make all things new.
