Dogs like me
Mark 7:24-30
7:24 From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 7:25 but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 7:26 Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 7:27 He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”7:28 But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 7:29 Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go–the demon has left your daughter.” 7:30 So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
New Testament lectionary reading for Sept. 6, 2009, Proper 18
Just when I have a moment of imagining Jesus as some sweet godly guy who’d I’d enjoy hanging around all day long, someone gentle and cute like a kitten, someone who floated slightly above it all in a spiritual guru kind of way, walking on air when he wasn’t walking on water, I run across a story like this. Here’s a different sort of Jesus than the one I carry around in my imagination. He reminds me of a new celebrity learning how to deal with the paparazzi, a miracle worker being followed everywhere by all kinds of strange people. And he doesn’t seem so happy with it. He seems overwhelmed by it, like he’s afraid he may freak out if he can’t get away from everyone. He doesn’t seem so sure of himself, he seems exhausted and haunted and maybe even overwhelmed by his own power, his own abilities.
And he also seems like a jerk. Like Sean Penn after eating bad sushi. This Gentile woman finds him in his hide-out and asks for his help and he snaps at her: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” So dear darling Jesus basically calls this woman a dog and calls her demon-possessed daughter a dog too, and tries to kick her away.
Makes me want to slap sweet baby Jesus silly. Because, of course, I am that Gentile woman, that dog.
Jesus views this woman like all Jewish men of the time did– like he’s been culturally conditioned to see her…as less than, as a stray dog, as not worth his time/attention/love. Which is very similar to how society, our culture, views fat women. When I have been at my heaviest, weighing in the mid-200s, I can remember several occasions when I was just walking down the street minding my own business, and people yelled at me from cars–yelled things like “Get off the street, Fatso.” Like I was such an offense to their eyes. Like they were angry I was taking up so much space on the planet.
Of course, this is also how I’ve seen myself. Still see myself. And this is also how I see other fat people, other people like me with eating disorders. With disgust. And contempt. Which is part of why I hate going to OA meetings.
I went on Saturday morning. Ready to feel contempt and disgust again. Ready to think how annoying and stupid and clueless these people were, how un-hip, uncool, ready to once again feel like I was not like them, that yeah, even though I have an eating disorder, I’m somehow not really a part of this club. But it didn’t happen.
Well, it did happen at first. I walked into the church school library (the “learning center”) where the group was meeting. I got there right at 9 am and there were 3 other people there besides me, sitting around this large table with copies of “the brown book,” the OA version of the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions spread out on the table in front of us. An older woman seemed to be in charge–she had the 3 ring binder with the instructions on how to conduct the meeting. The other two women were probably younger than me but dressed like old suburban ladies with old suburban lady hair. I was wearing some low, tight jeans which showed off my thin, toned legs, and a black jean jacket to cover up my belly where I carry most of my fat, where I carry so much of my shame. But I looked pretty good, I told myself, for a 54 year old, reasonably stylish, not overweight, with good hair and good jeans and a nice pedicure–definitely better than these other women.
The leader woman started the meeting–and soon other people wandered in and the table was full–there were 8 of us in all. It was a meeting in which people take turns reading from the Brown Book and we were on Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. And then we started the sharing time with people reflecting on the reading and about their lives and that’s when the barriers that I put up between “them” and me started breaking down. Because, of course, what’s on the inside of me is so much like what’s on the inside of them.
One woman, Mary, talked about being afraid to get too close to God, afraid of what might happen. She said she’s the kind of person who has to stay alert at all times on an airplane because she feels she may need to take over and fly the plane at any moment. This guy, Dom, the only man there, who looks and sounds like someone from The Sopranos, like he does whack jobs for a living, talked about binge eating, about his problems with alcohol and going to the track and gambling, how it feels like one little thing will set him off and he’s out of control, doing what he doesn’t want to do. One woman talked about how’s she’s not only an overeater but she’s a “hoarder.” She hoards crafts supplies. She buys more than she needs and surrounds herself with stuff she’ll never use. She talked about how it’s not so different from the eating stuff. And everyone talked about how hard it is to be still, to stop running around, to be quiet and meditate, and rest.
And all these stories…pretty much everything out of their mouths, was something I could have said. It’s what I feel, what I experience. It’s my reality which I keep hidden and never speak of because it’s so stupid and strange and contemptible and weird.
It’s what makes me feel like a dog. A stray dog who doesn’t even deserve scraps from the table. Who’s more likely to be kicked than petted.
