Fearfully and Wonderfully Read online

  Such usages of image—a baby, a professor’s facial expression—shed light on a mysterious phrase from the Bible: the image of God. That phrase appears in the very first chapter of Genesis, and its author seems to stutter with excitement, twice repeating an expression from the preceding verse:

  So God created human beings in his own image.

  In the image of God he created them;

  male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27 NLT)

  The very first humans received the image of God, and in some refracted way each one of us possesses this sacred quality.

  After each stage of creation, God pronounced it “good.” Still, something was lacking until God decided, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us” (Genesis 1:26 NLT). Among all earthly creatures, only humanity receives the image of God. But how can visible human beings express a likeness to God, who is invisible spirit?

  We share with the animals a body composed of bone, organs, muscle, fat, and skin—and in truth, we fall short compared to the abilities of some animals. A horse easily outruns us; a hawk sees far better; a dog detects odors and sounds imperceptible to us. The sum total of our sheer physical qualities is no more godlike than a cat’s. And yet, we are made in God’s image, with our bodies serving as its repository.

  Like a growing child absorbing traits from his parents, like a student learning from his professor, we can take on God’s qualities—compassion, mercy, love, gentleness—and express them to a needy, broken world. As spirit, God remains invisible, relying on us to make that spirit visible.

  It is a supreme mystery that God has chosen to convey likeness through millions of ordinary people like us. We bear that image collectively, as a Body, because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. Yet in all our diversity we can come together as a community to bear something of God’s image in the world.

  Learning from the Body

  I close my eyes, blocking the view outside. Barefoot, I am wiggling the small bones in my right foot, half the width of a pencil and yet strong enough to support my weight in walking. I cup my hand over my ear and hear the familiar “seashell” phenomenon, actually the sound of blood cells rushing through the capillaries in my head. I stretch out my left arm and try to imagine the chorus of muscle cells expanding and contracting in concert. I rub my finger across my arm and feel the stimulation of touch cells, 450 of them packed into every one-inch-square patch of skin.

  Inside, a multitude of specialized cells in my stomach, spleen, liver, pancreas, and kidneys are working so efficiently that I have no way of perceiving their presence. All the while, fine hairs in my inner ear monitor a swishing fluid, ready to alert me if I suddenly tilt off-balance.

  When my cells work well together, I’m hardly conscious of their existence. Instead, I feel the composite of their activity known as Paul Brand. My body, composed of many parts, is one. And that is the root of the analogy we shall explore.

  I picture the human body as a community made up of individual cells. The white blood cell, for example, closely resembles an amoeba, though it possesses far less autonomy. A larger organism determines its duties, and it must sometimes sacrifice its life for the sake of that organism. Yet the white cell performs a singularly vital function. The amoeba flees danger; the white cell moves toward it. A white cell can keep alive a person like Newton or Einstein—or you and me.

  The cell is the basic unit of an organism; it can either live for itself, or it can help form and sustain the larger being. The same principle applies to human groups, such as neighborhood communities and even nations. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” President John F. Kennedy challenged Americans, “ask what you can do for your country.” Membership has its privileges and also its conditions.

  The apostle Paul explored this analogy in 1 Corinthians 12, a passage that compares the church to the human body. His analogy takes on even more meaning to me because I deal with the body’s cells every day. Following Paul’s analogy, I augment it like this:

  The body is one unit, though it is made up of many cells, and though all its cells are many, they form one body. . . . If the white cell should say, “Because I am not a brain cell, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the muscle cell should say to the optic nerve cell, “Because I am not an optic nerve, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an optic nerve cell, where would be the ability to walk? If the whole body were an auditory nerve, where would be the sense of sight? But in fact God has placed the cells in the body, every one of them, for a reason. If all cells were the same, where would the body be? As it is, there are many cells, but one body.

  That analogy conveys a more precise meaning to me because though a hand or foot or ear cannot have a life separate from the body, a cell does have that potential. It can live in the body as a loyal member, or it can cling to its own autonomy. Some cells do enjoy the body’s benefits selfishly while maintaining complete independence—we call them parasites or cancer cells. From the human body, we learn important lessons on how to bear God’s image.

  Chapter Two

  HUMAN MIRRORS

  I STUDIED MEDICINE IN LONDON during some of the darkest days of World War II. Waves of Luftwaffe bombers filled the sky, their engines growling like unbroken thunder, their bomb bays releasing cargoes of destruction. During one period, as many as fifteen hundred planes attacked our city on fifty-seven consecutive nights, with some raids lasting eight hours without pause. Only one thing gave us hope: the courage of Royal Air Force pilots who rose in the skies to battle the Germans.

  If anything, Winston Churchill understated our gratitude when he said, “Never in the history of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” As a fire-watcher, I followed the aerial confrontations from my post on a rooftop. RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires, tiny and maneuverable, looked like mosquitoes pestering the huge German bombers. Although their cause seemed futile, and more than half of their planes got shot down, the RAF pilots never gave up. Each night they sent a few more of the dreaded bombers cartwheeling in flames toward the earth, to the cheers of us spectators.

  Eventually, Hitler decided that Germany could not sustain further losses from the increasingly accurate fighter pilots, and London slept again. I cannot exaggerate the adoration that Londoners gave to those brave RAF pilots. They were the cream of England, the brightest, healthiest, most confident, and often the handsomest men in the entire country. When they walked the streets in their decorated uniforms, the population treated them as gods. Young boys ran up to touch and ogle their heroes. Women envied the few fortunate enough to walk beside a man in air force blue.

  I came to know some of these young men in far different circumstances. The Hurricane fighter plane, though agile and effective, had one fatal design flaw. Its single propeller engine, mounted in front, was fed by a fuel line that ran alongside the cockpit, and a direct hit from a German fighter would cause the cockpit to erupt in an inferno of flames. The pilot could eject, but in the few seconds it took to find the lever, heat would melt off every feature of his face: his nose, his eyelids, his lips, often his cheeks. I met these RAF heroes wrapped in bandages as they began the torturous series of surgeries required to refashion their faces.

  I helped treat the damaged hands and feet of the downed airmen, even as a team of plastic surgeons went to work on their burned faces. An airman commonly endured twenty to forty surgical procedures. Sir Archibald McIndoe and his plastic surgeons performed miracles of reconstruction, inventing many new procedures along the way. Throughout that tedious process, morale remained surprisingly high among the pilots, who were fully aware of their patriotic contribution. The pilots downplayed the pain and teased each other about their elephant-man features. They were ideal patients.

  Faces Forever Chang
ed

  Gradually, however, as the last few weeks of recuperation neared, a change set in. Many of the pilots asked for minor alterations: a nose flap tucked in just a bit, a mouth turned up some at the corner, a slight thinning of the skin transplant on the right eyelid. The realization dawned on all of us, including the patients, that they were stalling. They simply could not face the world outside the hospital.

  Despite the miracles wrought by McIndoe’s team, each airman’s appearance had changed irreparably. No surgeon could restore the protean range of expression of a handsome young face. You cannot appreciate the flexible, nearly diaphanous tissue of the eyelid until you try to fashion one out of coarser skin from the abdomen. That bulgy, stiff tissue will protect the eye adequately, but without beauty. Although technically a good piece of work, the airman’s new face was essentially a scar.

  I especially remember an RAF pilot named Peter Foster, who confessed his mounting anxiety as release day approached. “The mirror is the key,” he told me. For months you use the mirror as an objective measuring device to gauge the progress your surgeons have made. You study scar tissue, the odd wrinkling of the skin, the thickness of lips, and shape of the nose. You ask for certain adjustments, and the doctors decide whether your request is reasonable.

  Near the day of release, your view of the mirror changes. Now, as you gaze at the reflection of a new face—not the one you were born with but an inferior imitation—you begin to see yourself as strangers will see you. In the hospital you have been a hero. On the outside, you will be a freak. Fear creeps in. Will any woman dare to marry that face? Will anyone give it a job?

  “As you prepare to enter the world with your new face,” said Foster, “only one thing matters: how your family and intimate friends will respond. The surgeons’ skill in remaking the face counts for little. What matters is how family members react to the news that the surgeons have done all they can. At that critical moment, do you sense a flicker of awkward hesitation or the assurance that they love and accept you regardless?”

  Psychologists followed the airmen’s progress. Some had girlfriends or wives who could not accept the new faces and quietly stole away or filed for divorce. These airmen tended to stay indoors, refusing to venture outside except at night; they looked for work they could do at home, alone. In contrast, those whose wives and girlfriends and families stuck by them went on to successful careers and leadership positions—they were, after all, the elite of England.

  Peter Foster belonged to the fortunate group. His girlfriend assured him that nothing had changed except a few millimeters’ thickness of skin. She loved him, not just his face, she said. The two got married shortly before Peter left the hospital.

  Not everyone reacted so positively. Many adults looked away quickly when they saw him. Children, cruel in their honesty, made faces and mocked him. Peter wanted to cry out, “Inside I am the same person you knew before! Don’t you recognize me?” Instead, he learned to turn toward his wife. “She became my mirror. She gave me a new image of myself,” he said. “Even now, regardless of how I feel, when I look at her, she gives me a warm, loving smile. That tells me I am OK.”

  Quasimodo Complex

  Two decades after I worked with the airmen, I read a fascinating article, “The Quasimodo Complex,” in the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. Two physicians reported in 1967 on a landmark study of eleven thousand prison inmates who had committed murder, prostitution, rape, and other serious crimes. Medicine has long known that emotional conflict may produce physical illness. These doctors raised the possibility of the reverse syndrome: physical deformity may lead to emotional distress that results in crime.

  According to the article, 20 percent of adults have surgically correctable facial deformities (protruding ears, misshapen noses, receding chins, acne scars, birthmarks, eye deformities). The researchers found that fully 60 percent of the eleven thousand offenders had such deformities.

  The authors, who named the phenomenon after Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, raised disturbing questions. Had these criminals encountered rejection and bullying from school classmates because of their deformities? And could the cruelty of other children have bred in them a response of revenge hostility that later led to criminal acts?

  The authors proposed a program of corrective plastic surgery for prison inmates. If society rejects some members because of physical appearance, they reasoned, perhaps altering that appearance will change how they are treated and thus how they behave. Whether a murderer on death row or a pilot in the RAF, a person forms a self-image based largely on what kind of image other people mirror back.

  The report on Quasimodo prisoners reduces to statistics a truth that every burn victim and disabled person knows all too well. We humans give inordinate regard to the physical body, or shell, that we inhabit. It takes a rare person indeed, someone like Peter Foster’s wife, to look past that outer shell and see the true person inside.

  As I ponder the Quasimodo complex, I realize that I too have judged and labeled people by their external appearances. I think back to a family tradition I used to practice with my children. Each year during summer holidays I invented a serial adventure story that featured every member of the family by name and character. I tried to weave in some useful aspects: the children heard accounts of themselves showing courage and unselfishness that perhaps they would aspire to in real life.

  The plots also included villains who lured the children into scary situations from which they would have to extricate themselves. As I now recall these stories, I remember with a wince that my chief villains, who reappeared in the stories annually, bore the names Scarface and Hunchback. The two antiheroes would attempt to disguise their features, but sooner or later one of the children would see through the disguises and unmask the villains.

  Why, I now wonder, did I give the bad characters in my stories those names and characteristics? I was following the stereotype of equating ugly with bad and beautiful with good. In so doing, did I encourage my own children to equate ugliness with evil, potentially making it harder for them to love people with deformities or scars?

  After reading about the Quasimodo complex and recognizing the bias in my own storytelling, I started noticing how culture influences our standards for human worth and acceptance. If we judged the American population by the images that appear in magazines and on television, we would conclude we live in a society of perfect bodies. I have seen how the glorification of physical perfection affects my leprosy patients, who will never achieve the status of an Olympic athlete or a beauty queen.

  And I have watched more subtle forces at work in my own children during their school days. A child who is clumsy, shy, or unattractive makes an easy target for mocking and bullying. The “mirrors” around us help determine our images of ourselves. How many Salks or Pasteurs have been lost because of rejection by classmates or colleagues?

  I have spent my medical career trying to improve the “shells” of my patients. I strive to restore damaged hands, feet, and faces to the body’s original design specifications. I feel deep satisfaction when I see those patients relearn how to walk and use their fingers and then return to their communities with an opportunity for a normal life. Nevertheless, I have an increasing awareness that the physical shell I work on does not constitute the whole person.

  My patients are not mere collections of tendons, muscles, hair follicles, nerve cells, and skin cells. Each of them, regardless of deformed appearance and physical damage, is a vessel of God’s image. Their physical cells will one day rejoin the basic elements of earth, the humus. I believe their souls will live on, and my effect on those souls may have far more significance than all my attempts to improve their physical bodies.

  Although I live in a society that honors strength, wealth, and beauty, God has placed me among leprosy patients who are often weak, poor, and unattractive. In that environment, I have learned that all of us are, like Peter Foster’s wife, mirrors. Each of us has the potential to summon
up in others the spark of godlikeness in the human spirit. Or we can disregard that image and judge on the basis of external appearance.

  Mother Teresa used to say that when she looked into the face of a dying beggar in Calcutta, she prayed to see the face of Jesus so that she might serve the beggar as she would serve Christ. In an often quoted passage, C. S. Lewis expressed a related thought:

  It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one of these destinations.

  Person to Person

  My mailbox bulges with appeals from organizations involved in feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, visiting prisoners, housing refugees, combating sexual trafficking, healing the sick. They describe the desperate conditions of a broken world and request my money to help relieve the pain. Often I give because I’ve worked among such needs and I know these organizations do indeed spread love and compassion. It saddens me, though, that the only thread connecting millions of donors to that world is the impersonal medium of direct mail. Ink stamped on paper, email blasts, stories and photos edited to achieve the best results—these offer no personal connection.

  If I only express love vicariously through a check or credit card, I will miss the person-to-person response that hands-on love summons up. Not all of us can serve in parts of the world where human needs abound. But all of us can visit prisons and homeless shelters, bring meals to shut-ins, and minister to single parents or foster children. If we choose to love only in a long-distance way, we will be deprived, for love requires direct contact.