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I greet you with Good News on Easter Sunday.
This day seems, perhaps, an appropriate occasion on which I might confess to an incident that I think of as a “religious experience” from my childhood. You might recall my telling of, or, at least, I think I have written about it, the time when I, in first grade, prayed that I would be chosen to be one of two students in Mrs. Simonds’s class to be chosen by lottery to join the school principal for lunch one noon hour in the school cafeteria. I prayed for it, I got it, and I, in my little-boy mind, did not at that time spend much energy on contemplating Correlation vs. Causation.
I will tell you now sort of a similar story, and if it’s not entirely accurate, complete, and true, it certainly seems to me today to come pretty close.
When I was born, I had a deformity of my right foot. Clubfoot, I later heard it called. It was treated with braces and casts until I was five years old, and then it was substantially corrected by an osteotomy of my tibia. As I understand it, and as I understood it at the time, in October of 1954, I was placed under general anesthesia at Walter Reed Army Hospital, and an orthopedic surgeon made a vertical incision on my right shin, a cut of, uh, let’s see, I’ll measure it, I still have the scar, okay, two-and-a-half inches, beginning just below my kneecap. Then he, the surgeon, a male surgeon, a Caucasian, male, Army surgeon, went in with instruments to cut the bone and rotate it a bit to get my toes to point forward, and then he stitched up the wound, applied a plaster cast, marked a blue-ink rectangle on the front of the drying plaster to locate where to cut to get at the stitches later without removing the cast, and, a few days after that, my parents fetched me home. We lived in Hyattsville.
When a week or so passed, Dad and Mom took me back to the hospital, where the same surgeon used a little power saw to cut out that blue-ink window. He carefully pried the window open and scissored through the stockinette material that lay protectively between my leg and the plaster. I could then for the first time see my healing wound, which had been sutured with stainless steel “thread” that sparkled under the bright lamp of the exam room. So far, so good. But then the doctor, using nippers and a hemostat, roughly removed those stitches, tugging so violently, so unapologetically, that I cried out in pain, cried out tearfully and angrily.
Let’s now skip forward about one year later, to sometime in my first year of elementary school. By then I was out of casts and braces and probably walking pretty normally, maybe even able to trot or run a little. I know I learned to ride a bike in the summer of ’55. One afternoon, in the fall of 1955, I came home from school—Parkway Elementary was only a few blocks from where we lived—and my mother greeted me at our apartment’s door. Soon as I set down my lunch box and bookbag, Mom held out to me that day’s issue of the Washington Evening Star, folded to display an article with a small photo, an official portrait of a uniformed army officer, and she asked me, “Do you recognize this man?”
“No,” I said, “who is it?”
“You probably haven’t seen him wearing a hat,” Mom said. She placed a thumb over the service cap and said, “Now do you know?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said then, “that’s Dr. (So-and-So)!”
“Well, Buddy,” Mom said, sadly, “I am sorry to tell you, this article says he was driving his sports car, and he picked up a hitchhiker, and the hitchhiker killed him!”
“Good!” I said. “He hurt me! I prayed that God would kill him, and now he’s dead!”
I don’t recall my mother’s response to that. She probably didn’t say anything about Correlation vs. Causation. And I can tell you for certain, when I was a high school senior applying for admission to Lutheran colleges, I left this story out of my “How I Feel Called to Ministry” essays.
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