Blind Faith

All children are blind to some degree. When I was little I certainly had more than my share of delusions and misperceptions. I blame my parents for this, mainly, because they lied to me on a regular basis. Why did they lie, you ask? Probably because it was funny.

For example, on the occasional winter evening we took a family walk in Morse Park. About 20 minutes in, Dad inevitably stopped us in our tracks and pointed to something up in a tree drooping with snow. “What is that thing?” he asked. Alan and I slowly plodded over, beleaguered by our coats and snow pants. We could never see what he was pointing at. “Up there!” He kept pointing emphatically until we got close enough for him to shake the tree branch and pelt our little faces with snow. Mom sighed and dried us off while Dad clutched his sides with glee.

Apparently, I was also especially fun to scare because Dad singled me out as fodder for the fake gorilla at Casa Bonita. (That restaurant created more shock and awe during my childhood years than possibly any other single location. It also happens to be the place where I strangled a puppet because it was teasing me, but that’s a story for another time.)

Somewhere near the diving pool, the Casa Bonita staff performed little dramatizations that involved some kind of “varmint” who had just robbed a bank. Occasionally, a bumpkin zookeeper would stumble onto the scene and start freaking out because the local gorilla had also gotten loose. (What kind of town was this?) While the village idiots debated about how to address these pressing issues, a teenager in a gorilla suit stealthily peeked out from behind a fake palm tree.

Then, without warning, the gorilla snarled and began swinging between the restaurant tables. Certain that I was about to be eaten alive, I clawed at my dad’s legs, begging him to pick me up. Instead, he turned me around, held my shoulders so that I couldn’t run away, and laughed maniacally while I stood frozen – a mere three feet from the clutches of that child-eating gorilla (who surprisingly never captured me, but I was all skin and bones back then).

Dad’s lies weren’t all bad, though. At Christmastime, he always stayed up with us in order to keep the Santa myth alive. It was basically impossible to get us to sleep on Christmas Eve, so we all piled into my little twin bed and determined that, come hell or high water, we would stay awake until Santa arrived. We had to stay absolutely silent, and no one was allowed to fall asleep.

We waited patiently amidst the shadows in my bedroom. “Keep listening for tinkling reindeer bells,” Dad whispered. “It will be very distant at first.” Slowly, our eyelids began to droop. Our heads grew weary and started to sink into the pillow. Then, just as we were drifting into dreamland, Dad jolted us awake. “I think I heard a bell!” he shouted. Instantly, we all shot up and clamored for the window.

“Where? Where?” I whispered. My eyes strained into the night with such intensity that I could practically cut the glass with my pupils. I was searching harder than I had ever searched for anything in my life. My heart pounded with excitement and my whole body stiffened, hands clutching the window sill, balancing on my toes in desperate anticipation of that sleigh in the sky. After a few seconds Dad let out a sigh. “Nope. I guess I was wrong,” he said as we settled back into the mattress. “Let’s just keep listening.”

It’s weird, but when I recall those early Christmases, I can almost re-create that strained feeling in my eyeballs and that anticipation in my chest. For some reason I like to recall that memory because, even after I became a Christian, I never again experienced that level of childlike faith. I was just thinking about it the other day when my friend Laura called and asked me to take her to the eye doctor. Because of some kind of infection she couldn’t put in her contacts in and she’s basically blind without them.

I was kind of surprised by how much I enjoyed driving around “blind” Laura. Maybe it was some kind of power trip. Not that I would have driven her off a cliff or anything, but I could have pretty much taken her anywhere I wanted to go and she wouldn’t have known the difference. It was amazing how much she trusted me. Later that day, I was mildly disappointed when Laura’s boyfriend offered to be her chauffer instead of me. But maybe it was for the best. I am my father’s daughter after all, and the impulse to play a joke might have overtaken me.

Though I like being an independent adult, occasionally I get nostalgic for the days when someone had to drive me around, when my Dad could still pick me up, and I still believed whatever he said no matter how stupid it was.

You know, in the gospels, Jesus says we’re supposed to come to him like little children. I often puzzled over this verse, since most of the little children I know come to me with sticky fingers and/or a load of crap in their pants. But what I think it really means is, in order to have faith in God, we need to go back in our minds to a time long before our experiences with rejection and disappointment. Back to the days when we were able to trust our Father without hesitation and we believed without seeing.

More than anything, we need to go back to a winter’s eve when our eyes were scanning the darkness with deep yearning. A time when we knew, with absolute certainty, that something wonderful was coming our way.