When the opportunity to return to India finally came, I stipulated a one-year contract, still uncertain about my future. I taught in the Christian Medical College, performed surgery, and filled in daily hospital duties. After a few months I scheduled a visit with my sponsor, Dr. Robert Cochrane.
A renowned skin specialist, Bob Cochrane supervised the leprosy sanitarium in Chingleput, a few miles south of Madras (Chennai). My own hospital did not admit leprosy patients, and I had little familiarity with the disease. Bob showed me around the grounds of his hospital, nodding to the patients who were squatting, stumping along on bandaged feet, or following us with their unseeing, deformed faces. Gradually my nervousness melted into a sort of professional curiosity, and my eyes were drawn to the hands of the patients.
I study hands as some people study faces—often I remember them better than faces. At the leprosarium, hands waved at me and stretched out in greeting. But these were not the exquisite paradigms of engineering I had studied in medical school. They were twisted, gnarled, ulcerated. Some curled into the shape of a claw. Some had missing fingers. Some hands were missing altogether.
Finally, I could restrain myself no longer. “Look here, Bob,” I interrupted his long discourse on skin diseases. “I don’t know much about skin. Tell me about these hands. How did they get this way? What do you do about them?”
Bob shrugged and said, “Sorry, Paul, I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”
“Don’t know!” I responded with obvious shock. “You’ve been a leprosy specialist all these years and you don’t know? Surely something can be done for these hands!”
Bob Cochrane turned on me almost fiercely, “And whose fault is that, if I may ask—mine or yours? I’m a skin man. I can treat that part of leprosy. You’re the bone man, the orthopedic surgeon!” More calmly, with sadness in his voice, he told me that to his knowledge not one orthopedic surgeon had studied the deformities of the fifteen million people who suffered from leprosy.
As we continued our walk, his words sank into my mind. Leprosy afflicted more people worldwide than the number deformed by polio or disabled by auto accidents—and not one orthopedist to serve them? Cochrane blamed a basic prejudice. Because of the stigma surrounding leprosy, most doctors kept their distance.
A few moments later I noticed a young patient sitting on the ground trying to remove his sandal. His disabled hands refused to cooperate as he attempted to wedge the sandal strap between his thumb and the palm of his hand. He muttered that things were always slipping from his grasp. On sudden impulse I moved toward him. “Please,” I asked in Tamil, “may I look at your hands?”
The young man arose and thrust his hands forward. I held them in mine, a bit reluctantly. I traced the deformed fingers with my own and studied them intently. Then I pried his fingers open and placed my hand in his in a handshake grip. “Squeeze my hand,” I directed, “as hard as you can.”
To my amazement, instead of the weak twitch I had expected to feel, a sharp intense pain raced through my palm. He had a grip like a vise, his fingernails digging into my flesh like talons. I cried out for him to let go and looked up with irritation. Immediately, the gentle smile on his face disarmed me. He did not know he was hurting me—and that was my clue. Somewhere in that severely deformed hand were powerful muscles. They were obviously not working in coordination, and neither could he sense the force he was using. Could those muscles be liberated?
I felt a tingling as if my whole life were revolving around that moment. I knew I had arrived in my place, the place where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger would somehow meet.
That single incident in 1947 changed everything for me. From that instant I knew my calling as surely as a cell in my body knows its function. Every detail of that scene—the people standing around the sanitarium grounds, the shade of the tree, the face of the patient whose hand I was holding—remains etched into my mind. It was my moment, and I had felt a call of the Spirit of God. I knew when I returned to my base I would have to point my life in a new direction, one that I have never doubted since.
Decades later, I look back with profound gratitude on the time I spent in construction and engineering. Hardly a day goes by that I do not use some of those principles in trying to perfect a rehabilitation device or design a better shoe or apply engineering mechanics to surgery techniques or set up experiments on repetitive stress. And I am equally grateful for the detour that forced me into surgery.
I have stood under the thatched roof of our New Life Center in India and reflected on God’s pattern in all those years. As I watch patients do carpentry in our workshop, and the smells of wood shavings and rhythmic sounds of tools rush in, I flash back to my days in a London carpentry shop among my fellow apprentices. I quickly stir from my reverie and see the differences. These are all Indian leprosy patients with reconstructed hands and tools adapted to protect them. God has permitted me the honor of serving them on several levels: as a doctor treating their disease, as a surgeon remaking their hands, and as a carpentry foreman helping to fashion new lives for them.
Only the zigzag course of guidance allowed me to interact with my patients on all these levels. At any point—if I had gone to India earlier, for example, or had bypassed those years in construction—I could easily have strayed slightly out of line and thus have proved less useful. In hindsight, I have a settled sense that God was planning out the details of my life even when the movements at the time seemed like detours. I take great comfort in the promise of Romans 8:28: “Moreover we know that to those who love God, who are called according to his plan, everything that happens fits into a pattern for good” (Phillips).
Chapter Twenty-two
GOD’S LIKENESS
The modern ambiance of the Sistine Chapel distorts Michelangelo’s original vision for his magnum opus. Visitors to the Vatican enter in groups of several hundred at a time, many of them clasping white plastic headphones to their ears. Instead of looking up when they walk into that splendid room, they follow the trail of red tape on the floor that marks an area where the audio guide is being transmitted.
Nothing can prepare the visitors for what they see when, on cue, they raise their heads. Magnificent works of art cover every inch of the walls and vaulted stone ceiling: the division of light and darkness, the creation of the sun and planets, the days of Noah, the Last Judgment. In the focal center, the calm eye in the swirl of frescoes, Michelangelo has rendered the creation of man.
I linger in that sublime room after most tourists have left. Twilight approaches, and the light has ripened to a golden hue. My neck aches slightly from supporting my head at odd angles, and I wonder how Michelangelo must have felt after a day’s work on his scaffold. My eyes drift over to the pivotal scene of God imparting life to the first human, their fingers almost but not quite touching. In a boldly controversial move, the artist did not shrink from portraying God in the image of man. In fact, if you snapped a digital photo of Adam’s face, aged it around the eyes, and crowned it with flowing white locks and a beard, you would have Michelangelo’s depiction of God the Father.
Can any artist render God? The Old Testament insists that God is spirit and cannot be captured in a graven image; one of the Ten Commandments explicitly forbids it. After living in a country where graven images and idols abound, I understand the prohibition.
Hinduism has thousands of gods, and I can hardly walk a block in an Indian town without seeing an idol or representation. As I observe the effect of those images on the average Indian, I note two results. Most commonly, the images trivialize the gods: they lose any aura of sacredness and mystery and become rather like mascots or good luck charms. A taxi driver mounts a goddess statue on his taxicab and offers flowers and incense as a prayer for safety. At the other extreme, some gods personify powers that evoke a sense of fear and oppression. Calcutta’s violent goddess Kali has a fiery tongue and wears a garland of bloody heads around her waist. Hindus may worship a snake, a rat, a phallic symbol, even a g
oddess of smallpox.
Wisely, the Bible warns against reducing the image of God to the level of physical matter. Any such image limits our understanding of God’s real nature: we may begin to think of God as a bearded old man in the sky, like the figure in Michelangelo’s painting. The notion of an omnipotent Spirit who spoke the universe into being gets lost. “With whom, then, will you compare God?” asks Isaiah. “To what image will you liken him?” (Isaiah 40:18).
God Incognito
Christians believe we got a true and authentic image of God in the person of Jesus Christ. The Spirit took on flesh, a human body of skin and bone and blood and nerve cells. The book of Hebrews describes Jesus as the “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). In other words, if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.
Ophthalmologists warn against looking at the brilliance of the sun, even for an instant. Doing so will overwhelm light-receptors and sear the retina like a brand of fire. For thirty-three years Jesus gave us a clear image through which we can perceive God’s own self—something like the pinhole camera that allows us to see a solar eclipse without going blind. Here, though, is a strange truth: the image Jesus revealed surprised nearly everyone.
Those of us familiar with the Jesus story may not appreciate the shock, the cataclysmic shock, of God incognito. Jesus missed the people’s expectations of God so widely that some asked, incredulous, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” An ethnic slur followed, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Even Jesus’ brothers did not believe him, questioning his sanity. One of his inner circle betrayed him and another denied him with a curse.
Jesus claimed to be a king greater than David, but little about him suited the image of royalty. He carried no weapons, waved no banners, and the one time he permitted a processional he rode on a donkey, his feet dragging on the ground. To put it bluntly, Jesus did not measure up to the image expected of a king—and certainly not of a God.
We instinctively think of Jesus as a perfect physical specimen, and religious art usually portrays him as tall, with flowing hair and fine features modeled after the accepted ideals of the artist’s culture. On what basis? From the evidence, nothing about Jesus marked him as a physical standout.
Once in my childhood my gentle Aunt Eunice came home from a Bible study enraged. Someone had read a description of Jesus, written by the historian Josephus, that characterized him as a hunchback. Aunt Eunice trembled with shame and anger, and her face flushed scarlet. It was blasphemy, she declared. “Utter blasphemy! That is a horrid caricature, not a description of my Lord!” An impressionable child, I could not help nodding in sympathetic indignation.
Although the notion disgusted me at the time, now it would not upset me at all to discover that Jesus was no ideal physical specimen. Although the Bible does not include a physical description of Jesus, there is a description of sorts, in a prophecy of the suffering Servant in Isaiah:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. (Isaiah 53:2-3)
Furthermore, Jesus identified most closely with those perceived as unattractive and useless. He said of the hungry, the sick, the estranged, the naked, and the imprisoned that whatever we do for one of the least of these people, we do for him (Matthew 25:40). We meet the Son of God not in the corridors of power and abundance, but in the byways of human suffering and need.
In terms of the image the world admires—the image we exploit today in status rankings, beauty contests, and Forbes’ lists of the wealthiest—Jesus made no special mark. Yet that one from Nazareth, a carpenter’s son, a bruised body writhing on a cross, even he could express the exact likeness of God. I cannot exaggerate the impact of that truth as it fully dawns on a person who will never measure up: a leprosy patient in India, for instance, unspeakably poor and physically deformed. For such a person, Jesus becomes a harbinger of bright hope.
The Same Mindset
I had never grasped the revolutionary pattern Jesus laid down until I began working among leprosy patients. Again and again I saw these people, so cruelly ostracized from society, somehow radiate the love and goodness of God. They had a natural right to bitterness, yet the spiritual maturity among patients who chose to follow Jesus shamed us doctors and missionaries.
As if the image of God that Jesus presented was not shocking enough, the New Testament makes clear that Jesus’ followers should express that same image. What he modeled—humility, servanthood, love—become the standard for his Body. Recall the passage from Philippians that says plainly, “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).
I search my memory bank for the people I have known who best express this “same mindset.” As a child, I often attended large churches and retreat centers where I listened to some of the most famous Christian speakers in England, many of whom demonstrated eloquence and erudition. Instead, another kind of speaker holds a special place in my memory: Willie Long.
I encountered Willie Long in a Primitive Methodist church at a seaside resort. As Willie mounted the pulpit, the fish scales still clinging to his blue fisherman’s jersey filled the hall with a pungent aroma. Yet this uneducated man with a thick Norfolk accent, unconventional grammar, and simple faith probably did more to nudge my own faith in those formative years than the entire company of famous speakers. When he stood to speak of Christ, he spoke of a personal friend, and the love of God radiated from him, through his tears. Willie Long, of little consequence in the image of men, showed me the image of God.
Later, in India, I observed with awe the spiritual rapport that bonded patients to the surgeon Mary Verghese. One of my most promising students, Mary suffered a horrific automobile accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down. For months she lay in her hospital bed, resisting physical therapy. She was staking her hopes on divine healing, she said, and rehabilitation exercises for paraplegia would waste her time since one day soon God would restore the full use of her legs.
Ultimately, Mary gained the courage to relinquish that demand for miraculous healing in exchange for the sense of a spiritual power best revealed in her weakness. Against all odds, she completed her surgery requirements and became a dynamic force in the Christian Medical College hospital.
In addition to the paraplegia, Mary had also suffered severe facial injuries. After a series of operations to rebuild the bony infrastructure of Mary’s cheeks, the plastic surgeon had no choice but to leave a large, ungainly scar right across her face. As a result, she had an odd, asymmetrical smile. By standards of physical perfection, she did not rate high. Yet she had a singular impact on the patients at Vellore.
Dejected leprosy patients would loiter aimlessly in the hallways of their wards. Suddenly they would hear a small squeak that announced the approach of Mary’s wheelchair. At once the row of faces lit up in bright smiles as though someone had just pronounced them all cured. Mary had the power to renew their faith and hope. Thus, when I think of Mary Verghese, I see not her face but its reflection in the smiling faces of so many others, not her image but the image of God poured through her broken human body.
One last figure towers above all others who have influenced my life: my mother, Granny Brand. I say kindly and in love that my aged mother had little of physical beauty left in her. She had been a classic beauty as a young woman—I have photographs to prove it—but not in old age. The rugged conditions in India, combined with crippling falls and her battles with typhoid, dysentery, and malaria had made her a thin, hunched-over old woman. Years of exposure to wind and sun had toughened her facial skin into leather and furrowed it with wrinkles as deep and extensive as any I have seen on a human face. She kne
w better than anyone that physical appearance had long since failed her, and for this reason she adamantly refused to keep a mirror in her house.
At the age of seventy-five, while working in the mountains of South India, my mother fell and broke her hip. She lay all night on the floor in pain until a workman found her the next morning. Four men carried her on a string-and-wood cot down the mountain path to the plains and put her in a jeep for an agonizing 150-mile ride over rutted roads. She had made the same trip before, after a head-first fall off a horse, and already had experienced some paralysis below her knees.
Shortly thereafter, I scheduled a visit to my mother’s mud-walled home in the mountains in an attempt to persuade her to retire. By then she could walk only with the aid of two bamboo canes taller than herself, planting the canes and lifting her legs high with each painful step to keep her paralyzed feet from dragging on the ground. Yet she continued to travel on horseback and camp in the outlying villages in order to preach the gospel and treat sicknesses and pull the decayed teeth of the villagers.
I came with compelling arguments for her retirement. “Mother, it’s unsafe for you to live alone in such a remote place, with good help a day’s journey away,” I told her. With her faulty sense of balance and paralyzed legs, she presented a constant medical hazard. Already she had endured fractures of vertebrae and ribs, pressure on her spinal nerve roots, a brain concussion, a fractured femur, and a severe infection of her hand. “Even the best of people do sometimes retire when they reach their seventies,” I said with a smile. “Why not move to Vellore and live near us?”
Granny Brand threw off my arguments like so much nonsense and shot back a reprimand. Who would continue the work? There was no one else in the entire mountain range to preach, to bind up wounds, and to run the farm and training center. “In any case,” she concluded, “what is the use of preserving my old body if it is not going to be used where God needs me?”
Fearfully and Wonderfully Page 25