Picture Perfect (or, a Picture of Perfect Health)

The denomination to which my church belongs puts out a magazine, and this month's issue is all about seeing weakness as a strength. I have been thinking about this in terms of "beauty". One of the hardest things about losing my hair is looking sick, when I'm actually quite healthy. Hair is a sign of health, and the absence of hair usually means the presence of illness. And that makes people uncomfortable. It doesn't feel like a strength to have the essence of my femininity be missing from the face I see in the mirror. This week some dear friends lost their baby boy, Drake. He lived for 3 days. Looking at the pictures they posted of him, he looked so...healthy. He had perfect little fingers, a cute button nose, all the things a beautiful newborn baby is "supposed" to have. The problem was with his heart, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the pictures. It was heartbreaking to look at him and try to wrap my head around the fact that this perfect-looking body had a weakness that could not be surmounted. Where did the phrase "a picture of health" come from anyway? No one is in perfect health, physically or emotionally. Why do we feel the need to project images of health? Yes, of course it's normal to desire good health. That's the way it should be. Drake's passing was so hard to accept because, truthfully, we know that babies should not die. We know that tragedies should not happen. Drake's passing, though hard, was a precious moment inhabited by love and surrounded with prayer. That beautiful moment highlighted, for me, the dark reality that babies and children are dying by the hour all around the world--and that should not happen. We know this. But we want to see a different reality on a daily basis, a picture perfect world where health is in and illness is out of sight, out of mind. In my ESL reading class at Loyola we are reading Lois Lowry's The Giver. In this dystopian novel, we see a community where sexual desires are "treated" with pills that suppress natural thoughts and urges. This led to a group discussion about how our society tries to manage and control things like hyperactivity, anxiety and depression with medication. We don't want to be confronted with illness, weakness or deviance. We want to convince ourselves that life is essentially safe by avoiding the sights that remind us how messy and fragile life actually is. This post is not meant to make anyone feel guilty. This blog is dedicated to the idea that we can and should begin viewing ourselves and our world differently. If we can't yet see beauty in tragedy and weakness, at least we can push ourselves into closer encounters with people who do not present us with a picture of perfect health. Then we can begin to discover the beauty in suffering as it helps us to see God showing himself through community.