Moments of Truth

One thing that really bothered me when we were in Kenya was all the superstition. For example, AIDS was caused by someone putting a curse on you, you had to pray just right before digging a grave or the dead person would come back to haunt you, and you had to wave branches in a funeral procession to scare the devil away. In the short time we were there, we heard of probably a hundred such cause-and-effect beliefs and were told that the lives of traditional village people were ruled by thousands of them.

Even though our son Steven spent the last four years in a Christian and relatively modern environment, he still retains a number of these beliefs. If you see a certain snake, for instance, you break a stick into seven pieces and it won’t bite you. You have to do certain things—I’ve never heard the specifics—to keep the devil away. The life of the cat is in the tail, and if you cut it off, the cat will die.

Our theory so far has been that arguing with him over these things would be pointless and if we fill him up with Truth, the Error will gradually disappear. It is easy to feel superior and scientific compared to him and his people, but a conversation this evening reminded me that we are not so far removed from the same sort of belief system.

I gave Steven and Jenny cheese and crackers for a bedtime snack and had a few bites myself. Steven watched me eat and then said, "Mom? Why when you eat your eye goes up and down?"

I had forgotten about this little quirk of mine and was rather proud of him for noticing. When I chew, my right eyelid bobs up and down. So I told him the story.

I was born with a big red blood blister on my right eyelid. Mom wasn’t too worried about it since I seemed to see just fine. But one day an older Amish woman pulled her aside and told her what she ought to do. "You take your baby out when the moon is waning," she said, "and you rub the red lump and tell the moon that as it gets smaller, it should take this lump with it."

Thankfully Mom recognized her advice for what it was, the traditional Amish "bracha" (healing power) with its dark and unholy undertones. Instead of asking the moon to take the bump away, she trusted God to take care of it, and by the time I was about a year old it was gone.

My eye looks perfectly normal, but the eyelid still has this odd way of bobbing up and down. Maybe that was intentional, so that forty years later I could teach my new son another nugget of Truth.

And like I said, we are not so very far removed from the traditional African views of cause and effect.


Quote of the Day:
"I was just talking to the furnace about your mom."
--Paul, answering Amy when she burst into the room (where he was telling me about the new heating system) and wondered what was going on. Amy leaned against the wall and howled for about five minutes, then went to school the next day and told all her friends. Paul knew this because he was substitute teaching that day and had to bear the humiliation of Amy’s friends cackling at him.