”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part Three

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Dean was deaf. It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time. Life can have its sinkholes. Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us. Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the day or the moment holds. There is no forward movement in times like these. When our worlds collapse it all becomes about survival because often that’s all it can be about. Soon survival becomes the norm where we strive to survive for the sake of survival itself. Life becomes abjectly meaningless other than getting through the day to fight the meaningless that will face us again tomorrow.
Dean was deaf. But he was mentally retarded as well. Tenderly kind, compassionate and invitingly soft underneath it all, he was the by-product of the sink-holes that had scattered themselves all around his life. In the end, it all imploded and he retreated into his deafness and his mental retardation, finding there some seclusion away from it all. He sat along the roadside of life watching some of it go by and ignoring the rest of it. He surrendered to isolation and held the world at bay, barricading himself many fathoms deep within himself. He effectively placed himself out of reach of anything. He was a treasure lost in the stratified subterranean layers of his fear.
He had never mastered his deafness. Some lean into their disability and shape it to serve them. He never leaned into it. Some work to compensate for their handicaps by strengthening the things that are not handicaps. He never compensated. Rather, he decompensated down into a silent oblivion where he sat hunched and utterly alone.
Sign language and the reading of lips never broke him out of the prison that deafness had thrust him into; that place so many fathoms deep that no one could get down there. He was somehow held inside with the world held outside. Each could see the other from their variant vantage points, but neither could bridge the gap nor plumb the depths. Whatever separated him from the rest of us seemed intractably immovable.
A Conviction of Greatness
Life sometimes persuades us to believe that there is so much more to something or some person even though we can’t see it. We engage that thing or that person with a certainty that there lies within them something profound despite the fact that it’s completely hidden. It seems that we walk circles around them, looking and probing for some crack or tear that will grant us a peek inside. We look for some chink to wriggle through or a knob that we can wrestle with long enough until some hidden door opens and grants us entrance to the riches within. There emerges a dogged persistence about it all because we dare not bypass what lies within even though it’s held away from us.
That was Dean. He was a kid that I could not let go of even though there was nothing to hold onto. His mild mental retardation put him even further away; a young man of riches unearthed that always provoked me back to him. He was frustrating and abrasive at times, being unable to break through his own deafness and reach up and out to everything outside of himself. His coarse and sometimes rash behaviors seemed to be an expression of his deeply engrained trepidation of the world, combined with his own frustration of choosing to seclude himself. Because he couldn’t break out, he reinforced his isolation from the inside out, pushing everything away so that he would have a sense that it was he who was locking it all out. Somehow he found solace in thinking he controlled it because it gave him a sense he could get out of it. He couldn’t.
I didn’t choose to be relentless with this kid. I had no choice but be relentless. Sometimes what you see in another is far too convincing and too terribly compelling to let it go of it even when you meet with nothing more than outright rejection and ever-thickening walls. And walls there were; thick, fortified and towering. I found myself relentless in pursuit and then disappointed into withdrawal, only to do it all over again because this kid was somehow just too precious to let go of. He needed to hear, maybe not with his ears, but at least with his heart. I prayed that God would pull Dean aside and open up something that would open him up.
Deaf to Life
Rejection and scorn was his lot due to the assumption of sin that others had about him. The world was loudly silent for him. Something was missing that he could not identify because he had never known it. Life is indeed an orchestra full and complete, absolutely masterful. But for the deaf man it was absolutely silent. The musical pieces and masterful renditions for which life was created were soundless for