It was given to my mother to die without pain, slowly and gently, for three years. Her sentence came while she lived with me at seminary. The doctor told us she had a rare kind of tuberculosis. No one could catch it from her. It was not contagious from one person to another, but had to pass through the soil first, like Valley Fever. Given her frailty, it would be terminal. Probably about three more years he said.
Mother went through the usual stages of being terminal. Denial first, then rage, then acceptance. Soon she developed a quiet patience, and in her final year, a luminous sweetness. And she told me then about things I never knew before. This is one of them.
This happened when she was about six. Here is her picture from that time.
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(Click on picture to enlarge)
She was always tiny, so must have been a tiny six year old. This would have been about the time World War I started. Her mother took her to an elegant resort in the country. Everyone there dressed for dinner, and dressed in fine clothes during the day. Here is her mother, looking about like she must have dressed at that time and in that place.
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(Click on picture to enlarge)
It was a gracious pre-Civil War mansion, converted to a summer resort hotel out in the countryside. There was a grand hall stretching through the center of the mansion, from the front door to the back door. Like most places in those days, it had no indoor bathrooms. (As can be seen in President Johnson's boyhood home in Johnson City, Texas, which was ahead of its time in having running water and a bathtub in a bath room, but still, no toilets.) Instead, there were men's and women's outhouses out back, at some distance from the back door of the hotel.
When her mother introduced my mother to the ladies' outhouse, she pointed out that one of the holes where one sat was slightly broken so that it was somewhat too large - dangerous for a small girl. "Be careful!" she warned Mother, "so you don't fall in there. If you do fall in, you won't be worth saving!"
(Of course most of you are not old enough to have ever been in a functioning outhouse, but you have probably seen the cartoons of a closet-sized small house with a door in the front. Just to give you the background, right inside is like a wooden bench-high cabinet going all the way across. On top would be a hole about the size and shape of a toilet seat. One sat on the hole in the customary way. Needless to say, the place reeked. And looking down through the hole into the deep, dark, smelly pit below was pretty disgusting, often with a pile right under where the seat was. So with that background...)
My mother began to look down as she told me. One day she went to the outhouse by herself. She was not careful enough and fell through the hole into the pit underneath. Somehow she managed to climb back out, made it to the back door of the hotel and entered the grand hall just as her mother, dressed all in white, was coming in the front door. When Mother saw her, my mother cried out - and her voice became again the anguished voice of that six-year-old as she told it to me - "Mother, can you save me?"
Mother said her mother cleaned her up, and never, ever told anyone about it. "I never told anyone either, until now," my mother finished. She sat silent, as if she still felt the awful humiliation and fear.
I was silent too, seeing the vivid picture. The tiny, unspeakably filthy little girl, covered with dark, lumpy slime, dripping, stinking, cringing at one end of the grand hall, afraid she was beyond being wanted, being loved, even beyond saving. And her cry to her elegant, immaculate, white-clad mother at the other end of the hall, "Mother, can you save me?"
It made me think of how we must look to God. And how willing he is to clean us up and save us anyhow. Just as her mother was so happy to see her poor daughter - who could have died in that pit - and so eager to clean her up thoroughly, and comfort her, and dress her in white again. And who would have gone into that pit instantly to get her daughter out, if only she had been there.
Isn't that like what God has done, and still does, for us? Who did not send his son into the pit of the world to condemn us, but to save us?
