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In college, I took a class with Toni Morrison based upon a collection of her essays called Playing in the Dark. The premise of the essays, and of the class itself, was that American literature has been shaped from the beginning by the unsettling presence of "American Africanism." There is no need to get into the nuances of her argument here. I mention it only because after I took Morrison's class, I read books differently. I was attuned to marginal figures. I noticed how black people were portrayed, or how their presence was avoided. I noticed motifs of darkness and light. I watched movies differently too, attending to the way certain racial groups were used as props instead of being presented as real characters. That class taught me to see differently.
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Having a child with Down syndrome is also teaching me to see differently.
I think, for example, of the time when I attended a conference at a monastery in South Carolina. Our first night at the conference, we gathered for a short Bible reading and blessing before supper. An elderly man, one of the brothers in the monastery, held the responsibility of reading and praying for us. He walked unevenly to the podium, with his head tilted to the side. He stood behind the Bible, flipping through the pages, back and forth, with a puzzled expression. Finally, he looked to another brother and said, "I can't find Genesis 1." The other brother gently turned to the beginning of the Bible, and the first brother began to read. His speech was imperfect. He stumbled through the words and they came out somewhat garbled.
A few years earlier, before our daughter Penny was born, I would have been filled with impatience and cynicism. I would have been thinking, why can't they find someone who can read, who at least knows where the first book in the Bible is located? But that night, I stood with rapt attention, grateful that I could receive the Word of God from this man. I was able to see him as a fellow Christian, offering a blessing on my behalf. I was able to see him as a messenger of hope, a vision of a community in Christ that might one day include my daughter, and even include her as one who could read God's Word publicly, who could offer a collective prayer.
Mikeal Parsons' Body and Character in Luke and Acts: The Subversion of Physiognomy in Early Christianity invites readers to see differently. As he explains early on, "throughout history it has been commonplace to associate outer physical characteristics with inner qualities; it was assumed that you can, as it were, judge a book by its cover. The study of the relationship between the physical and the moral was known as 'physiognomy.' " Parsons offers sundry examples from the Greco-Roman, Jewish, and early Christian worlds to demonstrate the prevalence of what he calls a "physiognomic consciousness," the assumption that physical appearance indicated moral stature. Being short, for instance, was understood to reflect "smallness in spirit"; weakness of the ankles could be correlated with "weakness of soul." Noses, foreheads, backs—every body part could be seen through an interpretive lens that corresponded with positive or negative character judgments.
At the midpoint of his book, Parsons moves from historical analysis to exegesis of four texts from Luke/Acts: Jesus' healing of the bent woman, Jesus' interaction with Zacchaeus, Peter's healing of the lame man outside the temple, and Philip's encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch. The strength of Parsons' analysis lies in his ability to use these stories to demonstrate Luke's knowledge of physiognomic assumptions—and Luke's desire to subvert those same assumptions. For instance, upon first reading the story of the woman with the bent back, it would seem that Luke accepts the cultural norm, that this woman's physical condition is merely a reflection of her spirit. Parsons explains, "To the physical description of the woman as bent over and unable to stand up straight, Luke appends the observation that she had 'a spirit that crippled her' (lit. 'spirit of weakness,' Luke 13:11), thereby connecting the physical and spiritual in physiognomic terms." But Parsons also points out that in the same passage, Jesus calls her a "daughter of Abraham" and uses a present participle (being a daughter of Abraham) in order to demonstrate that she has been a member of God's family all along. Jesus' declaration indicates that it was not his healing of this woman that caused her to become a "daughter of Abraham," but rather, that her status as a precious child of God had been wrongly denied by her community. Now they can see her for who she is.
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