Who Sees Me

            My mother treats it like it was just an affair with a married man that ended badly as they all do.  “Mary Jo, you are not the first girl to get jilted.”  She has never seen me.  When I was 20 years old, I called her from the darkly lit lobby of a hotel in Athens, Greece.  Men were listening. “Mom,” I hesitated, having just suffered a brutal rape, “I just need to hear your voice.”  She has repeated the story over the years to neighbors and extended family members for laughs, “My daughter … from Athens! … what could I do?”  At 52 having suffered ten years of therapy abuse, I do not try to explain how he was more than just a married man.  I know it was different, and that is enough.  I went to him for help.  He knew all my vulnerabilities.  He had fiduciary responsibilities to me as a patient.  But there was more to it than that.  We read the Bible together.  I told him all my mind.  He called me Ruth, his savior from beyond the tribal pale, and I uncovered his feet.  He pretended to do the duty of spiritual kinsman, telling me that we had a covenant that would be immoral for either of us to break.  When he broke it, I panicked and the world lost its color.

            Was that why in the week after the initial shock I convinced my daughter to go with me to the Flint Art Museum?  “I just want to look at one painting,” I told her, “it won’t take long.”  The painting I wanted to drink from is one of Martin Heade’s salt marsh pictures.  I needed to imbibe stillness.  But I also needed tangible frames around reality, perhaps because I had been too open, too porous.  Katya and I wandered from painting to painting, from scene to scene.  There was water everywhere—pools into which cows waded, puddles reflecting autumn sky at dusk, and the saltmarshes—peaceful but not quite the refreshment needed and found when I stared into what might have been a mirror.  A woman with brown hair pulled back wearing a dress of severe cut the color of moss regarded me out of her own flat and featureless world.  She was standing with a young son whose expression was fiercely pure.  I didn’t have to read her name to know what had happened to her:  she had been betrayed, abandoned, sent back to the nature from whence she had come.  Exhaustion resignation dejection disgust.  “Hagar and Ishmael” I read. 

            The story is a simple and awful one.  God promised Abraham seed as numerous as the dust and stars, but at 86 he was still childless.  It was Sarai’s idea to put her own Egyptian maid, Hagar, to bed with her husband so that she could be a mother through her.  When Hagar conceived, Sarai began to harass her, and she fled.  God found her by a spring of water and told her to return.  She obeyed, delivered Ishmael, and stayed with the Abram and Sarai until they received “h”s for their names (h indicates God’s spirit) and a gift child, Isaac, for their legacy.  It took Hagar 14 years to leave, and she didn’t get the satisfaction of leaving on her own terms.  Once Isaac was born, Sarah would not countenance a rival.  Get rid of her, she demanded.  Abraham thought it unjust, but God told him to listen to Sarah’s voice.  He reluctantly sent Hagar with Ishmael with only a skin of water into the wilderness of Beersheba.

            Who is to blame?  Sarah is a bitch.  Abraham considers his responsibilities and may think of Hagar, his other wife, but, more likely, he regrets losing his eldest son, Ishmael.  Women counted for so little: he’d already given Sarai away twice.  But where is God in all of this?  Although he comes to Hagar’s rescue when the water runs out and both she and her son cry out in agony, it was God who allowed her to be exploited for 14 years.  His messenger that told her to return and suffer.  Like Hagar, I made efforts to get away, but I always returned.  Why?  What compelled me? 

            I cannot think about this story without feeling sick.  A Jewish therapist suggested we read the Bible to learn about “us,” and the Bible turned the key of my heart and became the means by which he exploited me, calling me Ruth and demanding I sacrifice all on the altar of Him.  Ultimately, however, he listened to his wife’s voice.  She read a few friendly emails about weekend chores, nesting wrens, and poems.  Picking up on the intimate tones, she became suspicious.  “Send her away.”  He sent back my things without so much as an apology and got on a plane for Israel.  “I’ll walk the via dolorosa thinking of you,” he said.  And I replied, “I no longer want to live in your mind except as a threatening voice.”  In a moment, Ruth became Hagar and Tamar.  I was through playing his games with religion.  At least Abraham, after he banished Hagar, was forced to endure his own version of her trial.  God told him to take Isaac to the top of a mountain and offer him as a burnt offering.  On that three day walk, Abraham must have thought about how Hagar felt walking into the wilderness, preparing to witness the almost certain death of her child once the water ran out.  God created a trial for Abraham that taught him about moral struggle by forcing him to walk in Hagar’s shoes.  My Jewish abuser went on a pleasure tour of Israel to feel blessed, no doubt, by his “chosen” status.

            At this juncture of my life, I am not interested in the male story—Abraham’s or S-----’s.  But I want to understand Hagar’s story because it is now mine.  In the painting by Henry Oliver Walker, Hagar’s eyelids are heavy.  The light gone from her eyes is a sure sign of abuse.  Hers is the face of a woman who has never been seen—a victim of the force that does not kill.  In her agony, however, someone does see her.  “Hagar, slavegirl of Sarai!  Where have you come from and where are you going?” God’s messenger called out when he spotted her pregnant form by a well.  The profundity of the question was lost on a woman who had no where to go and no place.  She was running from slavery.  Egypt was behind her, but the Pharaoh in Sarai and even in Abraham made her into an idol of fertility.  Unable to wait for God, the couple sexually exploited Hagar to build themselves up.  She was on the run from their mess, seeking her own liberation.  And what does God via the messenger tell her to do?  He sends her back to suffer more abuse—14 years more!  But he also makes her a promise: that she will be the mother of a great nation through Ishmael.  And Hagar recognizes the dual gifts of annunciation and covenant, and celebrates the giver by calling the Lord “El-Roi,” which translated means, “God who sees Me.”  At long last: she has been seen!  She is not alone!  She can return to slavery and suffer abuse because she has had the intimate experience that the unseen God sees her, is for her.  She marvels that she has been the recipient of this awesome experience (better than conception):  “did not I go on seeing here after He saw me?”  So close to G—and still alive, more alive perhaps than she had ever been.

            Walker’s painting illustrates Hagar’s response to her second expulsion (after the birth of Isaac).  Because his painted figures regard the spectator directly, I have to question my own response.  Standing before the picture, I occupy the position of either Abraham or El-Roi—a man who refused to see or the God who sees.  It is easiest to imagine Hagar looking, with shocked disbelief, at Abraham sending them off.  But it is also possible to imagine that has Hagar risen at the sound of the messenger’s voice—“Rise, lift up the lad and hold him by the hand”?—and is guiding her son toward the water that has miraculously appeared.  After Hagar gets up, the narrative tells us that “God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water.”  But, as I see it, the eyes of the woman in the painting are not yet opened.  They remain clouded with the bad and dead feelings that prevent my own eye beams from tangling with the rays that stream out of trees and flowers, ponds and faces.  She and I are folded up like flowers at dark, trying to conserve what life is left.  To see again, to live again, I, like Hagar need the experience of being seen.  This is my motive for writing.

            The catalogue of the Flint Institute's American art collection was on sale for $5.00.  I bought it so that I might gaze at my painting whenever I am overcome by loneliness.  But I also revisit the cool museum room to comfort Hagar in her sadness.  I am waiting for God to open my eyes so that I might see a well of water, fresh water, in Flint, Michigan.  That would be a miracle, right?  My sanctuary is the noon mass at St. Matthew’s downtown.  I duck into the cool incense-scented holy place just in time to hear the word of God voiced by prophets.  Ezekiel compares sinners to lost sheep that the lord wants to lead to good pastures on the mountain heights of Israel.  Elijah reassures the widow that the flour pot will not go empty and the cruze of oil not run dry.  But Elijah has moments of dejection, too.  Head between his legs on a mountaintop, he listens for God.  I have been listening hard.  Elijah learned that God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in the still small voice. 

            In the panic of grief and anger, it is hard to listen.  However, when I remember to listen, moments have depth and resonance.  Standing in front of my painting, I hear my daughter speak her interpretation of Hagar’s face, “It’s the look of disapproval you give every boy who tries to flirt with me.”  I smile.  Yes, I see that.  “Don’t you mess with my daughter or you will have to answer to me.”  Two years ago, after I told a friend that this therapist raped me, she urged me to leave, “What would you tell a daughter?,” Amy asked me.”  Back then, I was all for him … under his spell, so it was impossible for me to cultivate a fiduciary relationship with my own self.  But now I am beginning to hear what I would and will say for my own daughter, myself, in a small, barely audible voice, “the word is very near unto thee: even in thy mouth, and in  thine heart, for to do it.”