Icarus's Sister Swallows the Sun by Eileen Romaker
Praise
the Lord …
young
men and women alike,
old
and young together!
And might we add
all “firm and infirm together, all who can leap and run, and who cannot”?
“I don’t mind
talking about MS,” Eileen Romaker says.
“However, I don’t wish to be defined by a wheelchair.”
That’s how the
story begins – the one titled “Breaking the Rules: Art helps Eileen Romaker rise above multiple
sclerosis” in the Go section of yesterday’s Spectator.
It goes on:
A diagnosis of multiple
sclerosis in 1980 forced Eileen Romaker to give up her nursing career. She first focused on raising her family. But then she took a painting course with the
late Gordon Perrier, a well-established local artist.
“I was hooked,” she tells me.
That was 15 years ago. Since then the Ancaster artist has been
painting up a storm. A member of the
Women’s Art Association of Hamilton, she exhibits regularly … [and] her illness
takes second place to her art-making.
“Art,” she says, “has allowed
me [to focus] my energies on the positive things in my life.”
Her repertoire is varied and
flexible. Her style is wonderfully
succinct and barely lifelike.
“Imagination is key,” she
says. “I can easily get excited by a
colour and lose track of my composition, but breaking the rules of art keeps it
original and fresh.”
Breaking the
rules of art – like breaking the rules of life.
Like breaking the rules of how we measure life and evaluate what’s good
and what’s bad in it. The rules around how
we count ability and worth, and whether anything has value and meaning, or
not.
Praise
the Lord, Eileen Romaker,
with
your paintbrush and imagination,
as
you did years ago with your care for others as a nurse.
In
some mysterious way,
praise
the Lord of beauty and grace
not
in spite of, but with
your
MS and your wheelchair as part of your story.
Praise
the Lord, on each stage
of
your very-human, very-mortal journey.
Ian Brown, a
journalist with the CBC, a number of years ago wrote a book called “The Boy in
the Moon” about his son who was born with a genetic defect that afflicts maybe
only 100 people in the world. His name
is Walker, and it seems ironic because the defect rendered him unable to speak
or control his movements, terribly delayed and stalled almost every aspect of his
mental development, and made him prone to self-harm by hitting himself. The book is about Walker, about Ian and his
wife Joanna, and about the way in which their life with and for Walker led them
into understandings of life and world and what it means to be truly human that
most of us only read about in books written by people like them.
In an interview once
about the book and the life behind it, Ian told the story of interviewing a
bishop in England for a story he was working on. In the course of the interview the bishop revealed
he also had a severely disabled son. Naturally Ian asked him how he dealt with that
as a man of faith. What did his son’s
disability do to his view of God? To his
practice of prayer? Did he ever pray for
healing of his son?
To which the
bishop replied no, he never did. It was
a conscious choice he made more than once not to take up the offers of others
to come and pray over his son for his healing.
Because, he said, that would be to say his son was not loved by God as
he was. That he was not capable of being
blessed and of being a blessing as he was.
That his life was not of great value and worth in the life of the world,
as it was. That loving and being loved –
the ultimate meaning of all life, was not possible, as he was.
Praise the Lord, Walker and Ian and
Joanna Brown,
just as you are,
in the unfolding mystery
of
God’s love at work in the world that is,
in
and through your life as it is,
rather
than in the world and in life
as
we think it should be,
or
wish it would be.
I think the
psalmist understands this. Maybe it’s
the wisdom of an earlier age. Or the
fruit of deep faith in God who is, and is in all things.
It seems when we
say “Praise the Lord” today, it’s often just to give thanks and credit to God
for something having happened that we see as good. “Praise the Lord!” we say for a prayer we
offered that’s been answered, for a need or a want we felt that was met, for a
request we made of God’s power that’s been granted.
But I wonder if we
short-change ourselves when we do that? If
it limits our openness to the real presence of God, and the possibility of
praise to God in and to and through all things?
Because did you
notice when the psalmist calls on all creation – all the cosmos, to praise God,
it’s not just the nice bits he speaks to, and calls into the chorus?
It begins with the
psalmist’s call to the heavenly host. In
the ancient world the heavenly host were not just the good guardian angels and
sweet little cherubs that we tend to populate heaven with – creatures that
easily and by habit praise God. The
heavenly host were the great powers of life and death, of good and evil
together and often in conflict. They
were fearsome and beyond human understanding and control, and the psalmist
includes them all because all that is and all that comes, even if not caused directly
by God, is lovingly embraced by God and woven into the fabric of what is.
And when
attention shifts in the second half of the psalm to life on Earth, again it’s
not just the nice stuff – not just the majestic mountains and beautiful flowers
and nice, sunny days and good weather that are called forward to praise
God. It’s also and specifically the sea
monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost.
Things that can
kill us and make us suffer. Things we
fear and take shelter from. Things that
remind us all creation is mortally imperfect and in itself morally
ambiguous. Things that speak to us of
our own imperfection and ambiguity. For
which of us, and what thing in all creation is ever free of what we call defects
and faults, illnesses and weaknesses alongside and interwoven with all the good
stuff.
And yet this is
the cosmos that God calls into being – the chaos he invites into order. This is the body of imperfection that God the
Creator inhabits. And this is the ground
from which God’s praise is sung by us and by all things, just as we are.
Praise be to God!
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