Living in Love

Preached at Prescott Memorial American Baptist Church

August 12, 2012

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Psalm 23

I am a storyteller and that’s how people know me. I am often asked about stories and storytelling. It’s what I do; I dig up stories, pull them together, dust them off and then find a place and an audience for telling them. It’s what I love to do. I’m going to share the secrets of good storytelling with you…

A good story needs to be set in a place and listeners like to be taken there in such a way that they can see it, feel it and really be there. The place needs to have people in it, people the listener can care about. Somebody in the story needs to have a struggle or pain, some kind of soft spot so listeners recognize themselves in the story. The people in this story place need to move along in some kind of familiar pattern that establishes normal. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk through normal until the people reach an intersection.

Something crosses the path of the people in their normal walk. And everything changes. Maybe the change is small but small can be significant, significant enough to create a new normal. A disease, a new love, a robbery, a college education, a death, winning the lottery…something creates an intersection. And the people in the story walk into a new normal. That leaves room for the listener to imagine what might happen next. The best stories leave room for the listener to imagine what might happen next.

Our lives are stories, this movement from the old to the new. Our stories, our real life stories, are fueled by human emotions. In the beginning we are born.  The place is the bright and sterile labor and delivery room at the hospital. Strange sounds and smells. Such anticipation sprinkled with anxiety and fear, pain, gritted teeth, screaming, tears, blood and absolute joy floods the room as a head arrives and then a shoulder. Then there it is: a baby. 

A person emerges, a new character for the story. A beginning for the baby and an end of a pregnancy for the mother.

Our stories end as we leave this familiar world. Family, friends, the minister gather reverently around a bed and hold hands, wait, sing songs, say prayers and cry as one person leaves the rest of us in the old normal and escapes to a new normal beyond our reach. We cry and grieve because we have been left behind, because the absence created by death leaves us, whether we like it or not, to deal with our own new normal. 

We live our lives from one story to the next and our stories move from one emotion to the next. It is part of the beauty of being human. In writing to the church at Ephesus, Paul encourages the members of that congregation to recognize the flow of their emotions and their life stories. No matter what your pattern has been, in spite of your old normal—there is room for a new normal, new places and people. Life always offers intersections. And Paul reminds us that we make choices in those places. The new normal can be about making room for love, imitating God and recognizing ourselves as beloved children of God. We can choose to be the people in the story who live in the love of God.

If you have not yet read the memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, by Neil White—you are in for a treat. Neil shares his story about the intersection in his life when he moved from kiting checks, writing bad checks, and living as a wonderfully successful man in the field of publishing, to being found out and convicted of bank fraud. It was a new normal for Neil to go to a federal prison for eighteen months.  

His story moved to a prison in Louisiana, Carville. A place surrounded by tall trees and the Mississippi River. The people in Neil’s story were not only other federal prisoners but also people who were living with the disease of leprosy and its devastating consequences. Lost limbs, lost families, the residents of Carville who lived with leprosy were living in a new normal that included being isolated and forgotten in an old brick building near the swamp far, far away. Along with federal prisoners Neil came to know over two hundred people living at Carville who had leprosy. Many of them had been living there seventy and eighty years. The place was a sanctuary for outcasts and a prison for criminals. All of them were trapped in one way or another. Neil came to know his new normal in this place.

Upon his arrival at Carville, Neil saw a man in a second story window. “The man’s face looked flat and when he waved there were no fingers on his hand.”  Neil moved into his room in the prison and was terrified of the people he saw who had no nose, no fingers and no legs. He was infuriated that the federal corrections system would think so little of federal prisoners as to put them at risk with these frightening people and their terrifying disease. 

But the eighteen months went by and over time the prison became a home for Neil. The people became his friends, his family really. The people who lived with the disease of leprosy had much to give and Neil received a new normal, a rich inheritance that allowed him to shed his old skin and take on a new life, a life that included love for the sacredness of life itself, appreciation for the simple gift of living and being loved.  

Society’s most dreaded outcasts had the power to lead this man who had lost everything he owned to a place of redemption. 

Nobody really knows how the disease of leprosy is transmitted, who is naturally immune and who is susceptible. But fear of the disease is universal. People came to Carville, the national leprosarium, whether they wanted to go there or not.  Carville became a leprosarium in 1894 when an old plantation in Louisiana was purchased and turned into the place where people with leprosy were deposited – for good, for life, until their deaths. There is a huge cemetery on the rolling hill behind the old brick building. Many of the graves have numbers and no names. Many of the names on the tombstones are aliases because the people with the disease changed their names in an effort to protect their families from the awful social stigma that came with being anywhere near the disfiguring disease.  

Ella was an old woman by the time Neil White went to prison and met her. A black woman in her eighties, Ella lived in a wheelchair because she had no legs. Neil learned to love her, even cling to her for all she had to give him.

In 1926 Ella was eight years old. White spots on her leg caught a doctor’s attention in the one room school where she was in the third grade. The doctor poked the white spots with a needle and Ella felt nothing. This was the beginning of Ella’s new normal but she didn’t know it yet.

The following week a white man, a bounty hunter who would be paid ten dollars for this job, pulled up in front of the school. He had a pistol in his belt and a big sign in his truck that said, “Quarantine.”  The teacher put her hand on Ella’s shoulder and led her outside and to the back of the truck. Ella’s classmates looked out the windows of their classroom as she was driven away. It was her last day at school.  

The man with a pistol in his belt drove Ella home. He hammered the big wooden sign, Quarantine, to the side of the sharecropper’s house where the little girl lived with her family. Ella’s father came in from his work in the field and spoke to the bounty hunter. “She’s my girl; I’m taking her.”

The family had a holiday meal that evening, the kind of celebration that was rare for a poor family. They ate an entire chicken, greens, biscuits, pumpkin pie. It was Ella’s last meal with her family. 

In a burlap bag Ella gathered two picture books, a copy of Saturday Evening Post, a pair of boots, a few every day outfits and a hand-me-down yellow dress for Sundays. Her father drove a mule-drawn wagon that took Ella and her father out on the road before the sun was up the next morning. They were leaving home, Abita Springs, a town that advertises itself as a place where people can experience nature’s miracle cures by drinking the free flowing water of their artesian wells. Ella’s trip to Carville from Abita Springs would take two full days. 

The father and daughter stopped for a picnic under a shade tree. They picked blueberries and ate them beside a pond. When they got to the Mississippi River, Ella’s father let her take her shoes off and wade in the muddy water. Then the man suggested to his daughter that she put on her yellow Sunday dress. She looked nice when they arrived at the gates of Carville and a man came out to meet them. 

The man alerted one of the Catholic sisters who came to meet Ella and scared the child. She had never before seen a nun. “Big white bird wings on her head scared me stiff,” she would say later—after the old had passed away and Carville had become the new normal. Ella held her burlap bag and looked at her father. He looked at the huge building looming in front of them and nodded toward it. The nun put her arm around the little girl and led her toward the building. She turned at the door and looked back at her father for the last time. Then she walked into the building that would be her home for the rest of her life. She would spend her life with others whose lives had been intersected by a dreaded disease, who had become outcasts by no fault of their own. 

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” the familiar psalm begins. And we can hardly remember the last time we did not want something. We want more money, a vacation, a new car. And as soon as we get what we want we choose to want something more, something new. It is as if our life stories are propelled into the future by what we want and how we get it for ourselves. 

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” We have to wonder if we are being led by the wrong shepherd or if our shepherd’s power has run out over the generations since that psalm was first sung. We want and we want it now. 

Certainly Ella must have figured the good shepherd had turned his back on her when she was imprisoned behind the walls at Carville. If she or any of the patients inside wrote letters to people on the outside the letters were baked in a hot brick oven. Sometimes their letters were scorched so badly that the receiver could no longer read what was written on the paper.

“Ella remembers in the early days when the Coca-Cola distributor from Baton Rouge sent chipped and cracked Coke bottles to Carville so he could refuse to accept the return bottles. He was afraid of public boycott if customers discovered the glass containers had been touched by the lips of leprosy patients.”

In the fifties when an inoculation was discovered to stop leprosy’s spread, the patients at Carville were given the shot and the doors of the leprosarium were opened. The patients could move out and find a new life, begin a new story with this intersection of health. They could enter a new normal with freedom. 

But the scars of leprosy were not nearly as deep in the Carville residents as were the scars of the social stigma that came with the disease. The majority of the Carville residents lived out their lives inside the brick building, protected from the fear and rejection of the outside world. 

Neil White, a man who wrote bad checks and built an empire on his own dishonest behaviors, found the freedom to start a new life through his friendships with people who had leprosy, people who had been shut away and rejected until being shut away and rejected took on its own normalcy and power. He and Ella met in the dining room. They merged their stories and shared their feelings, their needs, their strength and hope. 

Ella taught Neil how to move into his new normal: Live simply, hide nothing and help others. Do this and you will no longer find yourself in prison, even if you live behind tall walls, even if the bounty hunter brought you here or a federal marshal. You can be free if you choose to connect with the love of God at life’s intersections. 

Live simply, hide nothing and help others. The good shepherd comes to us again and again at so many intersections offering us the possibility for a new normal. 

Choose to make your story a grand love story; live in love and be free in your new normal. 

Amen