A Lesson in Falling

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

A few days ago I took a tumble down the stairs of our back deck. 

It was windy and I was carrying an empty flattened packing box in one hand, and a house fixture I’d just painted in the other, taking it all to the garage, when a gust caught the cardboard like a sail, threw me off balance, and I went down headfirst. (I know: Really dumb.) I got a nasty scrape on my side on my way down and at the concrete landing five or six steps below I bruised my elbow and sprained my wrist. I didn’t hit my head at all, thanks be to God. No bones broke. But it had been getting dark, my wife Jill was inside the house—unaware—and I was a tad stunned. 

I gathered my wits and checked for what I hoped was not a broken arm (sore though it was, it wasn’t). Then I was able to hoist myself up and get to the back door to call for her help. As Jill ushered me into the house and checked my bruises, I begin to shiver, my teeth lightly chattering from the jolting trauma to my body.

What befell me (pardon the pun) was in some sense a blip on the screen. I’ve known parishioners who have met far worse, plummeting down basement staircases or toppling off ladders. I know people with chronic conditions that feel like an assault to their dignity every day. And I am grateful that my trip-up and gangly fall left me with only small hurts. Still, I am feeling my vulnerability. My lower back still aches and my swollen, tender hand slows my getting things accomplished as we move into our new house. Jill has said to me more than once that I don’t seem quite myself. There’s a tentativeness. A wariness. She cautions me against pushing myself, too, not rushing the healing of my wrist, knowing that I don’t like the new limits my body is asking of me, at least for now. I realize again the body’s frailty.

I’ve been reflective, more aware of the contingency of my human life. Who knew that I could so easily, within seconds, be knocked off my feet? As a friend put it, “One minute you’re standing and the next you are down at the bottom of the steps.”

Whatever the occasion, it’s no good trying to forget our mortality. Especially when pondering our humanity widens our view, deepens our perspective.

And the season we are in—that helps! Lent is the time par excellence for calling to mind our infirmity and precarity, setting our normal human condition in a larger, spiritual frame. At the outset of the season, on Ash Wednesday, I heard a priest say to me at an altar rail, “You are dust and dust you shall return,” imposing with her thumb the gritty ash on my forehead. I’m dust and blood and bones and tissue that can bruise and scar and turn to ash. But there was promise after promise through the service for mercy and grace gathering and following me wherever I go. So sober reminders but also hopeful glimpses.

***

This morning I got an email newsletter from a teacher and author with a psalm that helped me in all this: “Lord, make me to know my end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am” (Psalm 39:4, KJV). There’s a counterintuitive comfort here in confronting what we often ignore. When we do face intimations of impermanence we can do it in conversation with God.

I’ve moaned over the tender-sore places and gotten irritated with new restrictions, but I’ve also been in dialogue with an eternally loving God. I find my defenselessness to a body’s abrasions and bruises driving me to a source of life more lasting and enduring. The other morning I came across yet another psalm that prayed, “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (90:14, NRSV). I’m trying to see how that vantage point fits in the day-in and day-out.

So I’m wanting not to whine, and even better, not to resent my jumbled, jarring trip down the back steps. The body’s vitality depends, ultimately and intimately, on God sustaining it. I’ve had some lessons there. This season, about more than mortality and sober reflection, is also about the astonishing news of God’s love in Christ, made bodily in his Incarnation. Here is one who, as the apostle Paul put it, came close to the life he lived “in the body,” and who “loved me and gave himself for me.” How can I be glad on days I’m hurting? It has to do with being loved, no matter what. With the bodily, visceral love of God in the crucified Christ.

With each year, I get older, of course, a little more creaky (even when I haven’t fallen), and a bit more aware of my frailty. Still, a kind Presence underlays my coming and going with permanence, with something more sure than my foolish, faltering, clumsy steps. That belief tells me that God will surround my coming and going with renewed life and steadfast love, every day.