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"Unclean!" shouted the leader of the mob, smugly secure in his own perceived perfection, as they rained stones on the small band of lepers, forcing them back into the pit. |
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Sometime during my childhood, I saw a movie with a scene that made an impression on me that has lasted until today. My memories of childhood are like that – just a few snippets of events and experiences like movies that I can recall very clearly. Unfortunately, most things in my personal memory bank are long gone. Those powerful memories were created by powerful emotions at the time they were experienced. This tendency in all of us is the psychological basis for our use of rituals for important social events. But I digress - let's get back to the movie. The scene that moved me so powerfully was of a leper colony. That one scene is the only part of the movie I can recall, so I don’t know the name or even much of the context of the movie other than a vague sense that it was in Biblical times. The image is of a sunken area; perhaps it was an abandoned quarry. There was only one path in or out, making it a natural prison of sorts. The Hollywood-created image had the people living there with sores on their bodies, disfigured faces, clothed in rags, and moving about aimlessly if at all, their eyes dull and lifeless. The emotion I felt so strongly back then, which is why the scene was etched permanently into my memory, was compassion. One other important thing from that memory (I did connect it to Biblical times, remember) is the image of a person (Jesus?), walking among the lepers. Juxtaposed against the other people, who dumped scraps of food into the pit but kept their distance for fear of catching the disease, was this serene man who walked gracefully among the inhabitants, with no fear. He treated them with respect, and he personified that same emotion I had felt so strongly in myself, compassion. All the other non-afflicted people displayed fear and scorn instead. This scene must have been my first impression of a class of people who were condemned by their difference to suffering isolation and derision. They were outcasts, and they kept to themselves. Being a curious child, I probably asked my mother, that font of all wisdom, about the lepers when the movie was over. She probably reassured me that leprosy was a thing of the past. Maybe that scene kept me from feeling any fear some years later, when my cousin and I caught armadillos to play with, in spite of the country lore that armadillos carry leprosy. I don’t know. In truth, leprosy, which is caused by a bacterium, is not very contagious. Only 5 percent of the spouses of those infected ever contract the disease themselves. However, since the untreated effects are very disfiguring, the fear of catching the disease colors our perception of the true risk. Leprosariums for quarantine of patients existed in this country into the 20th century. When leprosy declined in modern times, it was replaced by other social afflictions. Whether disease, religious belief, mental condition, unusual sexuality, physical abnormality, or political ideology, small minority groups continue to be isolated and quarantined. Even more revealing of the power of social ostracism is how common it is for such people to choose some measure of quarantine for themselves as preferable to living among those who revile them. Our cities are full of these collections of unusual people who band together to form a society within a society, hoping the majority will leave them alone. They build their own leper colonies, referring to them as “communities.” For many, as long as the basic human needs are available in the colony, it provides a safer, less stressful place to live. Separate but almost equal. When I started thinking seriously about religion as a teenager, and specifically about my assigned religion of Christianity, I think the leper scene was working powerfully in my subconscious. Somehow, I had assumed that all those insensitive people in the movie who treated the lepers so badly were a scourge of the past, just like the disease. Modern people were like the Jesus-ideal, tending the sick and showing kindness and compassion to those with afflictions. But gradually, my shell of naivety was ground away by the abrasive reality of life. I didn’t heal well. Whereas most people scab over with self-interest and recover rather quickly, my wound became an open sore, and I bandaged it as best I could, hiding it and not speaking of it. It never went away. As the years passed, I learned to recognize the rare people who would walk among the modern day lepers and honor them as they are. These people, just like that Jesus-ideal from the movie, were so secure in themselves that they had no fear of our social lepers, and spoke no ill words about them. They had no concern that they might become afflicted simply by being in the midst of the afflicted. They rejected the myths that portrayed all atypical people as evil, sinful, or even contagious. These people, hard to find as they were, became my role models. They kept my own wound from becoming gangrenous. A day came, a few years back, when I realized why that wound from my youth wouldn’t heal. It was the day I realized that I was one of the unclean. Can you guess my particular strain of social leprosy? Everyone who experiences such an epiphany goes through a grieving process. When we lose our claim to healthy, “normal,” or even attractive, we are wounded emotionally just as surely and suddenly as a soldier shot in battle is wounded physically. It may be superficial, or it may be terminal. We may bounce right back, we may be long in recovery, or we may not make it. Unfortunately, for most of us, at the very least some of the gloss fades from our eyes. We tend to feel cheated and resentful. We are destined to go through the rest of our lives with an additional burden, and we ask, why me? Those wounds cannot heal until we quit asking that question. No matter what affliction it was we discovered in ourselves, healing of the emotional wound always leaves a scar, and maybe even some loss of sensation. But we can learn to accept our affliction, wear our scar without shame, and make the best of the only life we have. In time, we may even perceive that our difference is not an affliction at all, but merely a marker of our uniqueness. All people should recognize that in some way, most of us are modern-day lepers of some sort. Rather than fearing one another from within our enclaves of people like ourselves, can we not be more like that Jesus-ideal in the movie? What might happen if we ventured into the other colonies of lepers, without fear, with respect and compassion? Our travels might lead us to understand that whatever strain of leprosy sets our group apart; we gain nothing by despising the others. Perhaps we could begin to heal our own emotional wounds if we greeted others with compassion and respect. Society creates lepers where we might least expect them. During the darkest days of the cold war, the people of West Berlin were quarantined because of political ideology. Surrounded by communist East Germany, a wall was built through the city in 1961 to prevent the people of East Berlin from escaping to the west, and freedom. A blockade of food and supplies by land routes to the isolated city had already been overcome 10 years before with a massive airlift. New threats against air travel across East German airspace to reach Berlin were being made by the Soviet Premier, Nikita Kruschev. In the face of this new crisis, the obligation of all free people to support one another was reinforced by the U.S. president. In 1963, JFK, who would be assassinated just five months later, addressed the people of West Berlin, declaring from the steps of their city hall, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Today, Berlin is a free city in a reunified Germany. But there will be many people with deep emotional wounds living there until the generation who experienced that persecution and isolation is gone. The example of the people of Berlin is an apt metaphor for any group of people, or even an individual, isolated and scorned by others, for something beyond their control. It is a modern day example of people forced to live in a leper colony. And most importantly, it shows us that even people who think of themselves as perfectly normal can suddenly become lepers. If it could happen to any of us, perhaps we should follow the wonderful example of compassion from that movie scene, and from that event back in 1963, and give hope to our fellow humans who are suffering from isolation and persecution by declaring, “I too am a leper.”
11/25/00 |
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Last Update 4/5/04 |