Would you eat it in the favela? (Part 3)

The last of three posts on Green Eggs and Ham: Click here for the first and second.

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            It turns out that Marília had her own Sam-I-Am, her friend Adriano.  Adriano is a classic “good kid,” but even when Marília was deepest in the gang, he always insisted on their friendship.  “He wasn't pedantic,” she told me.  “He never told me what to do, or that I was being bad, but he was always there, living a different kind of life from me and my friends.”  They chatted in the alleys of the favela, he listened to the funk lyrics she composed, and from time to time he would invite her to join the dance group he organized.  And one day, months after her boyfriend had murdered her sister's boyfriend, when Marília felt like the funk gang had gotten boring, when she was tired and run down, Marília heard Adriano's voice.  She accepted his invitation to dance in his group, and together they invented a choreography that told the story of her life.

 

Adriano (the "Sam-I-am" of this article) with Helena and me in
Triunfo, in the interior of Pernambuco.

           In Dr. Seuss's story, it took a train crashing into a boat and everyone nearly drowning before the un-named nay-sayer decided to say “yes” to green eggs and ham.  The series of tragedies that befell Marília were more violent, but something similar happened in the favela of Arruda: exhausted and beat up, she decided to try something else.  In the end, though, the result is the same: “Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-am” was mirrored by the depth of gratitude I saw on Marília's face as she and Adriano described their choreography.  “Thank you,” she told him, that secular manifestation of grace.

            The recent craze among parents for Pamela Druckerman's Bringing Up Bébé, a book about the superiority of French parenting, brings to light a fantasy adults have about their children: that kids need not force adults out of their perfect, ordered, and pleasant lives, that children need not disrupt.  For Druckerman, French parenting means that babies always sleep through the night, kids eat all their food, and mothers can continue to talk about fashion and art with their friends as they sit in cafés.

            But whether it's Sam-I-Am, street kids, Adriano, or my daughter, we have to remember that children disrupt.  That's what they do.  They threaten our comfortable order, our received ideas, our schedules, our sense of propriety and modesty.  This threat is painful, difficult… and in the end, liberating.  I spent most of my life declaring that I never wanted kids, but when my daughter Helena came along, I found out that I did, in spite of all of my protests, like green eggs and ham.  That conversion didn't come with a lightning bolt out of heaven, but with laughter and crying and playing, sleepless nights and the constant learning of a baby.  Working in the midst of gang wars, child soldiers, and gangsters, I've had lots of opportunities to walk the road to Damascus, but nothing has changed me like Helena has.  I think most parents would say something similar.

            One can make a pretty good argument that iconoclasm in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a way of saying, “Religion is not about a person's relations with things, rituals, or symbols.  The only route to God is by loving and being just to other people.”  Iconoclasm delivers this message in the visual realm, but I wonder if we can't say something similar in the field of hearing: might the disturbing silence of God be a way to force us to listen to the other?  Instead of listening for the voice of God, does that silence force us to listen directly to widows and orphans and foreigners, those three great figures of Levitical law? 

            Sam-I-Am and Adriano remind us, I think, that our listening isn't enough.  The silence of God also means that street kids, undocumented immigrants, and others who stand in for the orphans and sojourners of lore have to talk.  God isn't going to do it for them.  They needle and irritate and offer and persist… until finally we hear the call of justice in strange words like “Would you like them in a box?  Would you like them with a fox?”

            I wonder if Sam-I-Am doesn't also help us to re-read the Bible.  Saul walking the road to Damascus may have a parallel in Green Eggs and Ham, when the train falls into the boat: the voice of God is only the final moment in a long story.  As Saul persecuted Christians, can we imagine victim after victim looking into his eyes with a persistent, questioning “Why?”  Or seeing a child pull at his cloak to say, “Please don't hurt my mother!”  Without them, would Saul have been able to hear God's voice?  Saul and God get the leading roles in the drama of Acts, but in his desire to tell a clear and compelling narrative, Luke may have missed the real protagonists of the story.

            Dr. Seuss and the favelas of Brazil make for a strange juxtaposition, but for me, conversion and grace will never look the same again.