Sabbath Devotional :: Holy Imaginings

Image from Wikiart: Playing Children/Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky

Before the end of this month, I am going to be deposed. It’s my first ever deposition, and I’m feeling incredulous. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket! I volunteer! How did a nice girl like me get into a mess like this?

My husband and I are suing government workers for neglecting to obtain a warrant before seizing our children after a false child abuse accusation. The experience was, as you can imagine, very traumatic, and since my own family was reunited I’ve spent many hours on the phone with other parents trying to figure out how to get their babies back, too.

This is a cause I care about. There are real families stuck in this system, real parents as innocent as I was whose lives are in chaos, and there are precious few protections for them. So I am glad we are able to file the lawsuit. Most families aren’t so lucky. I hope it helps to secure constitutional protections for parents less privileged than us.

But I am apprehensive, too. Not just because of the deposition itself, but I’m terrified that the defendants might choose to sit in on the depositions as well. The last (and only) time I saw most of these people was at 2:30AM on the street outside our home as they were driving away with my children. I anticipate that it will likely be quite awkward to face someone who I know so little about but who harmed my life so greatly. They probably feel similarly about me. Despite the huge wake we’ve made in each others’ lives, we are almost perfect strangers. I’ve found myself looking the defendants up online, scrolling through their LinkedIn accounts, and filling in gaps with my imagination.

I have imagined all sorts of things about the people listed in our lawsuit. In the hours after we first lost our boys, I sat in a stunned torpor as I waited for the sun to rise; I imagined acronyms I could make about them using only swear words. It was dumb, but it was how my mind passed the time. When we won back full custody and our story was published on the front page of The Washington Post (including a video of the removal where they appear quite cruel), I imagined mailing them a copy with confetti shaped like kissy face emojis. That was dumb, too. And I have imagined — with horror! — that we all accidently end up at the same gyro place for lunch when the court recesses.

“Hate is just a failure of the imagination.” That’s a line from The Power and The Glory, a novel about a profoundly imperfect priest. I’d read it shortly before my kids were taken. The priest argues that if you pay attention, you’ll notice a wrinkle, a certain gait, a scar, something that indicates a whole history behind the human in front of you. And then it becomes impossible to hate them.

My child has a very developed imagination — far better than mine. Under his eye, our living room is daily converted into a faraway kingdom, or pirate ship, or motor track. And he imagines things about people, too. Several months ago over dinner, my boy asked me if I have charity for everyone in the world, like Jesus tells us to.

“No, bud. I don’t.” I said. “Some people are too hard for me to love.”

“Like the people who took me away?” he asked.

I was surprised he brought it up. At the time he hardly ever mentioned the removal, even when prompted. “Yeah. I have a really, really hard time loving them.”

“But God loves them?”

“Of course,” I replied.

He sat quiet for a moment. Then he proffered, “So then maybe I could ask God to help me have charity for them, and then you could borrow some of my charity.”

“Clarence,” I choked, “You are a remarkable boy.”

And my child responded with perfect and guileless sincerity, “Because I can turn invisible?”

Children offer us so much. One of their gifts is pure imagination. For such is the kingdom.

I am trying to imagine better. I imagine that the people in our lawsuit probably have families and possibly children that they care a great deal about. I imagine they probably care about other children and families too, and that they are driven to their work at least at some level by a desire to help. I imagine, and I really hope it’s true, that when the article came out about our story, some friend called them to say “This must have been a really hard day. Can I get you dinner?”

And while I am no less passionate in my advocacy, and I don’t think good intentions are a sufficient excuse for bad behavior or violations of basic constitutional protections, imagining my opponents this way does make it easier to not hate them.

I am grateful for a gospel that gives me the courage to imagine a better world, for a Christ who died for me and for every person I find I cannot love, and for a God whose visage is not the terror of a boundless rage, but the broken hearted agony of loving creatures such as us, in all our complexity and difference, our strivings and imaginations. I trust in the vision of my Heavenly Parents who see all their children clearly enough to heal our wounds, bridge our divisions, and pull us unceasingly homeward.