"Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.” G. K. Chesterton
In part the hope was that the surgery, cutting my back
open, would heal the right foot. It had been getting progressively more useless
prior to the surgery. There was a slight healing, but a full healing, they
said, could take a year…or more. Or never. For the next day, or year or however long I
live God has ordained this limitation of my strength and of my healing. Weak as
I was before, there has been some increase of strength. Strong as I could be,
it appears a significant weakness will remain in my foot. The human body as
designed is bound by weakness. Theologians (h/t David O. Taylor) make the point
that Christ Himself came to us in a limited body.
In Atul Gawande’s book; Being Mortal he says that the end
is ‘just the accumulated crumbling of one’s body systems.” At one point he asks
a well published gerontologist if we have discerned any particular, reproducible
pathway to aging. “No,’ he said, ‘We just fall apart.”
Wrestling with this framework I can see two sides, one depressing
and one positive. The downer is that the body will wear out, break down, fall
apart. The upside is that In this clay frame, in this finitude there is
freedom. A freedom to lean into God, to love one another and to celebrate what
we have.
Photo by meriç tuna on Unsplash
