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“Sincere Meditations”
Sometimes, if you are lucky and brave, you can watch someone who's met with serious illness or loss do the kind of restoration that I suspect we are here on earth to do. If you've ever seen David Roche, the monologist and pastor of the Church of 80% Sincerity, you may have already witnessed this process.
David and I met years ago through a friend we had in common. The first time we spoke was on the phone, and we talked about God for half an hour. He mentioned that he had some facial deformity, and I thought, Well, whatever, and we talked some more. Then he came to my church, and it turned out he had one of the most severe facial deformities I've ever seen.
He was born with a huge benign tumor on the bottom left side of his face; surgeons had tried to remove it when he was very young. In the process, they removed his lower lip, and then gave him such extensive radiation that the lower part of his face stopped growing, and he was covered with plum-colored burns.
He is fifty-five now, with silvery hair and bright blue eyes. I first saw him perform at a local community center, at a benefit for refugees in Kosovo. He was wearing a plum-purple dress shirt, which exemplifies the tender and jaunty bravery I have come to associate with him. He stepped out onstage before a hundred grown-ups and a dozen children, and stood smiling while people got a good look. Then he suggested we ask him, in a conversational tone and in unison, "David, what happened to your face?" When we did, he explained about the tumor, the surgery, and all those radiation burns.
He told of wanting to form a gang of the coolest disfigured people in the world, like the Phantom of the Opera, the Beast from
Beauty and the Beast, Freddie Krueger, and Michael Jackson. They'd go places as a group -- bowling, or to a makeover counter at Macy's.
"People assume I had an awful childhood," he continued. "But I didn't. I was loved and esteemed by my parents. My face may be unique, but my experiences aren't. I believe they are universal."
Wouldn't you think that having a face like his totally messed with his adolescent sex life? Of course it did, he said. And he was stocky, too, a chubby little disfigured guy. But these things were not nearly as detrimental as having been raised Catholic, having been, as he put it, an incense survivor.
As he told his stories through a crazy mouth, a jumble of teeth, only one lip and a too-large tongue, David's voice did not sound garbled but strangely like a burr, that of a Scottish person who just had a shot of novocaine.
"We with facial deformities are children of the dark," he said. "Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: we can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we
finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society and even to God.
"All those years, I kept my bad stories in the dark, but not anymore. Now I am stepping out into the light. And this face has turned out to be an elaborately disguised gift from God." David spoke of the hidden scary scarred parts inside us all, the soul disfigurement, the fear deep within us that we're unacceptable; and while he spoke, his hands moved fluidly in expressions that his face can't make. His hands are beautiful, fair, light as air, light as a ballet dancer's.
He described his first game of spin-the-bottle, when the girl who was chosen to kiss him recoiled in horror, and he said to her, debonairly, "You know you want me." Then he admitted sheepishly that he didn't actually say that for twenty years, but that in soul time, it's never too late. He told of loving a teenage girl named Carol, of how it took months to ask her out, and then when he did, she accepted. They went to the movies and then afterward sat on his front porch; he kept trying to put his arm around her but couldn't quite do it, so they talked and talked and talked. He wanted to kiss her but was too shy to ask; he was afraid it was like asking her to kiss a monster. Finally she said, "I need to go home now," and he said, "Carol, I want to kiss you," and she said, "David, I thought you'd never ask."
That was a moment of true grace, and from this experience, he built a church inside of himself. There is no physical church, but his own life: both his performances and his work teaching people to tell their stories, their marvelous, screwed-up and often hilarious resurrection stories. Voilà: a church.
"We in the Church of Eighty Percent Sincerity do not believe in miracles," he said. "But we do believe that you have to stay alert, because good things happen. When God opens the door, you've got to put your foot in.
"Eighty percent sincerity is about as good as it's going to get. So is eighty percent compassion. Eighty percent celibacy. So twenty percent of the time, you just get to be yourself."
It's such subversive material, so contrary to everything society leads us to believe -- that if you look good, you'll be happy, and have it all together, and you'll be successful and nothing will go wrong and you won't have to die, and the rot won't get in.
Macy Gray, Barbara Dramain, Joep Schrijvers; Tom Otterness sculpture
In the Church of 80% Sincerity, you definitely don't have to look good, but you are supposed to meditate. According to David's instructions, you sit quietly with your eyes closed and you follow your breath in and out of your body, gently watching your mind. Your mantra should go like this: "Why am I doing this? This is such a waste! I have so much to do! My butt itches..." And if you stick to it, he promised, from time to time calmness and peace of mind will intrude. After some practice with this basic mediation, you will be able to graduate to panic meditations, and then sex fantasy meditations. And meditations on what to do when you win the lotto.
When David insists you are fine exactly the way you are, you find yourself almost believing him. When he talks about unconditional love, he gives you a new lease on life, because the way he explains it, you may, for the first time, believe that even you could taste of this. As he explains it, in the Church of 80% Sincerity, everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with a shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. Instead of beating yourself up because you feel it only fleetingly, you should savor those moments when it appears. As David puts it, "We might say to our beloved, 'Honey, I've been having these feelings of unconditional love for you for the last eight to ten seconds.' Or, 'Darling, I'll love you till the very end of dinner.'"
David has been married to a beautiful woman named Marlena for the last few years. After listening to his lovely words, his magic, this doesn't seem at all strange. There he is, standing in front of a crowd, and everyone can see that just about the worse thing that could happen to a person physically has happened to him. Yet he's enjoying himself immensely, talking about the ten seconds of grace he felt here, the ten seconds he felt there, how those moments filled him and how he makes them last a little longer. Everyone watching gets happy because he's secretly giving instruction on how this could happen for them, too, this militant self-acceptance. He lost the great big outward thing, the good-looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brilliant mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue eyes, those beautiful hands.
The children, sitting in the front rows, get him right away. Maybe they don't have so many other overlays yet, of armor and prejudice so Spirit can reach out and grab them faster. Maybe it's partly that they're sitting so close, but whatever the reason, they gaze up at him as if he were a rock star. "I look different to you now, right?" he asked the kids that first time I saw him, when he was almost finished, and they nodded, especially the teenagers. To be in adolescence is, for most of us, to be facially deformed. David makes you want to help him build a fort under the table with blankets, because it looks like such fun when he does it. He builds the fort, and then lets you lift the blankets and peek in, at him and at you. You laugh with recognition, with relief that your baggage and flaws are not vile, unmentionable. It's like soul aerobics.
"I've been forced to find my inner beauty," he said in closing. "Doing that gave me a deep faith in myself. Eighty percent of the time. And that faith has been a window, so I can see the beauty in you, too. The light in your eyes. Your warmth. So thank you." There was thunderous applause, and he bowed shyly, ducking his head and then looking up, beaming at us all. He holds his palms up as if about to give a benediction. His hands caught the light like those of the youngest child there.
-- Anne Lamott
Liam, Don, and Michael
Robert, Walker and Dave
Steven
Michael
Marta
Stephen
Angel and Jeff
Enzo
Marianne
Michael
Jerry
Mitchell
Joan Armatrading
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