Pop89: You’re Jesus

By Madonna Hamel

Not long after his stroke I was standing with my brother in his garden on Cortes Island when, looking into his eyes, I became overwhelmed by a sensation of being both deeply loved and imbued with the capacity to be infinitely loving. As Dougie's eyes filled with tears they began to sparkle, enhancing his tender gaze tinged with both wistfulness and helplessness. It's a look his loved ones are often privy to, witnessed most often when he takes up the invitation to say grace at dinner, when, whispering over his meat and potatoes, he sighs a huge gasp of unrestrained gratitude, striking a posture of what I can only describe as a form of brave grace. I wish I could take such a posture myself, especially in times when I feel less than thankful for so much of my present challenges.

I don't know what we were talking about at that moment, standing in the garden between the wild bramble and the broken gate, but it prompted me to suddenly blurt: "You're Jesus!" The half-laugh and half-cry came out almost like an accusation. It was an inescapable observation. This is what it must feel like when you get so close to someone who seems to be nothing less than the embodiment of love, when they spill over with the spirit of tender regard that just being the recipient of their gaze makes you feel you could survive any sadness or hardship, at least for the time being.

All I do know for sure is Doug was smiling, broadly, and the wide scoop of his smile was holding, reassuring me, encouraging me. I never got a lot of insight into the personality of Jesus to know if he laughed a lot, joked a lot, smiled with such strange and relieving assurance, but I imagine his gang of followers did experience a kind of confidence that comes from smiles like my brother was dishing out that day. And that's no small feat, as he was destabilized by a major blow to his occipital lobe, still is, and it was causing all kinds of other troubles, including navigating the reality of immediate time and place. What day is it, how long has this been going on, where do I go from here, who do I turn to. These are all familiar questions for me in my own situation, living with a brain tumour, so in retrospect, I can relate whole-heartedly with Dougie.

What I was especially impressed by was his decision to place love before fear.

That, as we sat eating lunch after our foray in his island garden, he turned to me and my sisters and said: "I think I'm going to miss this."

Of course he would not miss not being able to see, nor bumping into things that seem to suddenly pop up out of nowhere. What he was going to miss was the deepened relationships with people around him. I know I would miss seeing Jesus standing before me, beaming with such energy that its force would bless me in a way that helped hold my own fear at bay.

To "be Jesus" is to be like Jesus, I suppose. To send rays of mercy and acceptance and love outward to others, not necessarily in a deliberate way, where you feel compelled to do so, but to have a spontaneous inspiration, a spark of the divine fly forth from within. I think of it as that moment when an artist gets an idea for an image, a tune, a poem. And I am reminded of a moment in Kelowna when I started attending mass with my dad and on one Sunday at coffee, standing at a table laden with baked goodies, talking with a parishioner named Bev, I gazed up at an image of Jesus pointing to his heart from which emanates giant shards of blue and pink light. The image comes from a painting inspired by a vision beheld by a young Polish nun named Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, who believed her vision was meant to be a portrayal of divine mercy. It is called the Image of the Merciful Jesus, also known as the Image of Divine Mercy, and it was painted in 1934 by artist Eugene Kazimirowski, who followed the mystic Sister's instructions faithfully.

As I say, on that Sunday, standing at the snack table with Bev, I happened to look up and see Jesus shining down on me and I actually staggered backward at the intense jolt I felt aimed at my chest. "What the heck is that?" I blurted. Once the story behind the painting was revealed I've never been able, nor wanted, to shake the sensation I received that day, and every time I see the Divine Mercy holy card or image, traces of its energy remain with me. I think it was mercy that provoked me to "accuse" Dougie of being Jesus. Mercy, tenderness, compassion mixed with deep knowing that we are all family, all in this together.

To be like Jesus is to be filled with wonder, like little children, is to consider the lily, not worry about what to wear or how hard and impressively one must toil and spin through a culture bent on achievements and accomplishments, to remember we are siblings all, and to stand in the garden and weep tears of joy. Joy, laughter and humour were steady fare shared among the apostles, Fr. James Martin reminds us in his book "Between Heaven and Mirth." And I think of that often when I think of the apostles as siblings and buddies, bringing out the Jesus in each other. And then, just recently, I had another dream wherein someone insisted Dougie was Jesus. This time I was dreaming we were walking along a bridge over the South Saskatchewan River when Bob Dylan walked up to us and pointed to Doug and proclaimed: "You're Jesus."

I hope these stories and columns serve as a reminder how lucky we are to serve our world with smiles and tears and songs in the way Dylan reminds us in his "Gotta Serve Somebody."