Introduction:
Because of a devastating childhood illness at nineteen months, Helen
Keller (1880-1968) was left both blind and deaf. Her life was rightly written
up as a "miracle story" and became a play called "The Miracle
Worker" (1957) with Anne Bancroft starring in the Broadway production
(1959). But the "miracle" Helen Keller experienced was not any return
of hearing or vision. The "miracle" she received was the miracle of
her committed, loving family, and of her relentlessly optimistic and patient
teacher Anne Sullivan.
When Helen was seven years old, trapped in a world where she could only
communicate through a few hand signals with the family cook, her parents
arranged for a twenty-year old, visually impaired teacher to come and work with
their daughter. Using American Sign Language, Anne Sullivan spent months
"spelling" words into Helen's hands. Everything Helen touched,
everything she ate, every person she encountered, was "spelled out"
into her hand.
At first Helen Keller didn't get it. These random motions being pressed
into her palm did not connect with experiences she felt. But Sullivan refused
to give up. She kept spelling words. She kept giving "tactile-verbal"
references for everything Helen encountered.
Finally there was a "watershed" moment, which was indeed water-powered.
Helen's breakthrough moment was as she was having water pumped over her hands
and Anne Sullivan kept spelling the word for "water" over and over
into her palm. Suddenly Helen "got it." Suddenly she realized those
gestures meant something real and tangible. They were naming what she was
experiencing.
The world of communication, reading, literature, human interaction were
all made possible to one person through the gift of another person. The
"miracle" Helen's teacher Anne Sullivan worked was the miracle of
patience. She simply kept on and kept at it, showing Helen there were
"words" for "things," and there was true meaning behind all
Helen's experiences.
Wash Off the Stuff of
the Day:
One of the most successful and personable people on
television is Oprah Winfrey. Movies, book clubs, she does it all. Huge business
operations. While all the other talk shows on television are tearing people
apart and putting all their illnesses out for public humiliation, Oprah is
helping put people and families back together again. . . In a Newsweek magazine
interview the interviewer asked her, "How do you separate yourself from
work?" Answer, "I take a hot bath. . . My bath is my sanctuary.
(Listen to this) It's the place where I can wash off all the stuff of the
day" ((Jan 8, 2001, p. 45).
Baptism is a huge symbol -- it's
the water of creation. . . .we are born anew. . . . life in the Spirit . . .
all the "stuff" of the day is washed off. All of that is true. But at
its basic level, baptism is the death of the old self. Before anything new can
be born, the old has to pass away. (Brett
Blair)
