Ephphatha, Be Opened
Ephphatha, Be Opened
Emily Hargitai
"And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him,
Ephaphatha, that is, Be opened." — Mark 7:34
"What is a child?
A quiet between two bombardments." — Ilya Kaminsky
At age four or five I experienced an anxiety-induced disintegration of my verbal communication faculties and for a period of about nine months I would not speak in social situations except with great difficulty. Outside of my immediate family, I had exactly one friend I felt comfortable talking to—a spunky extrovert named Becca who would grow up to become a musical theater actress—and so during the school day I relied on her heavily to relay my messages, if I needed my shoes tied, a push on the swing, emergency assistance in dealing with the aftermath of a ruptured applesauce container, etcetera. But even with Becca acting as my mouthpiece, my father didn't want me to spend the entire day in a state of high anxiety, so instead of taking my little brother and me straight to school in the morning, he would take us on various time-killing excursions. Sometimes we'd go to the local amusement park—Playland—and walk along the beach in those blustery early hours before the park officially opened, looking at all the rides with nobody on them. Other times we'd collect our favorite color paint chip samples from the revolving display rack at the hardware store or ride the train to a little town about an hour north up the Hudson to eat danishes at his favorite bakery. Usually by the time we got to school the other kids were almost through with lunch—and I remember one such morning, seeing all my classmates sitting around the rectangular table, waiting in silence for me to respond (or rather, waiting for me to whisper my answer to Becca so she could respond) to the teacher's inquiries. How was your morning, Miss Emily? the teacher was asking. Would you like to tell everyone where you went today?
*
Years later, as a college student in a different classroom, I would find myself again in the face of unbearable silence, this time during the question-and-answer segment following a reading delivered by a visiting writer. That writer was Ilya Kaminsky, the hard-of-hearing, USSR-born poet best known for his critically-acclaimed poetry collection Deaf Republic, as well as for his lively, evocative, even musical style of recitation. This was 2019, not long after Deaf Republic first debuted, and Kaminsky's performance had knocked the wind out of everyone present for the reading. I was a senior at the time, enrolled in the Creative Writing program, regularly consuming obscene amounts of study drugs and so spiritually hungry I didn't know what it was. Though I identified as a Christian during this period, I still clung to the false belief that affirmation of one's lifestyle and artistic choices—no matter how depraved or soul-disfiguring—was the ultimate display of godly love. I clung to this attitude and the sins that fueled it at the cost of invaluable fellowship with my Bible-believing peers. It was easier for me to think of them as haughty and judgmental than to admit to myself and to God the severity of my backsliding.
I don't remember what question I asked Ilya Kaminsky after his reading, or if the words that tumbled out of my mouth even bothered to take on the shape of a question. But based on the horrified silence of my classmates and the rolling eyes that followed, I can infer that whatever I said reflected my internal spiritual anguish and feelings of rejection with perfect, cringe-inducing accuracy. My classmates were embarrassed by my tactless display of vulnerability toward the renowned poet, but Ilya was not embarrassed. He just listened, reading my lips—and after a moment's quiet consideration—he left his podium at the head of the classroom and navigated his way through a maze of desks before taking a seat at the empty one beside me. I don't remember his entire answer but I will never forget how he prefaced it. I think it's a testament to God's poetic sensibilities that He chose a physically deaf man to speak the words that would pierce through my spiritual deafness.
I'm going to answer your question, the poet said. But I'm not going to answer it as a person in authority. I'm going to answer it as the person sitting in the chair next to you.
Throughout the four gospels, there are countless moments where—through His words and acts of servitude—Jesus Christ expresses this same sentiment to the lost, hungry and afflicted masses, a sentiment which can be best summed by the Lord's own words: A servant is not greater than his master. In St. Mark's account of the healing of the deaf and speech-impaired man, the apostle recalls how Jesus—perhaps out of compassion and respect for the sufferer's dignity—takes the deaf man out of the crowd in order to heal his affliction in private. Moreover, that He puts his fingers in the deaf man's ears before wetting his tongue with His own saliva. I often wonder why Jesus takes extra care to interact with His children on such physically intimate and visually striking terms—i.e., touching the deaf man's tongue with His spit, rubbing the blind man's eyes with mud. In his sermon on Mark 7:31, the 19th century poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins offers up this explanation: "He puts his fingers into the man's ears—as if to break down the hindrance which barred up his hearing and deafened him; but gently, with the fingertips, as if it were some delicate operation the heavenly physician had in hand, not a work of mighty power."
We see Jesus single out and deal gently with another one of His lost children in John chapter 4, the story of the Samaritan woman, although I suppose it would be more accurate to say that Jesus found her after she had already taken pains to single herself out. Of all the men and women Jesus encounters during his earthly ministry, there is no one I relate to more deeply than the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, who is so heavy with shame that she would rather traverse the desert at the hottest hour of the day to fill her water pot than have to endure the ridicule of her peers. I can imagine how the Samaritan woman must have felt when Jesus—seated on the well's edge and weary from his own traveling—spoke to her the way the Ilya Kaminsky spoke to me, not as one of authority, but as a friend. I can imagine the relief and confusion that must have enveloped her when she anticipated further humiliation but was met instead with complete understanding. I wonder if there was more enthusiasm or terror behind the words she subsequently spoke to her fellow villagers: Come, see a man which told me all things that ever I did.
*
Before Christ pulled me back into the flock, writing poetry was easy. I could simply flood my system with abusive amounts of Adderall and watch the words explode out of my fingertips onto the laptop screen. The amphetamine rush obliterated whatever doubts I had about the quality of my work, about the point of putting words to the page to begin with. It made it easy to tune out any spirits of mutism that still lingered inside my head from early childhood. It also made it easy—dangerously easy—to tune out any sense of conviction over my ungodly lifestyle choices or the poems they inspired.
I would be lying if I said that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit made me a more prolific poet. On the contrary, in my new life in Christ, my writing process can be excruciatingly slow, now that I actually have to face all the doubts and fears I used to anesthetize. However—to quote songwriter Brian Fallon—"I don't mind the empty hours. I'm learning to sit with my demons." I have no bestselling novel or full-length publication, not even a chapbook with my name on the cover to show for my years of study. But I have an entire closet of composition notebooks full of prayers and letters to God that no human being will ever read. These are the only pages that fill themselves up effortlessly, the ones that begin Dear Jesus Christ.
*
How was your morning, Miss Emily? I remember my pre-school teacher asking me. Would you like to tell everyone where you went today? And I remember in that moment, I actually did want to tell them because the morning adventure had been a particularly riveting one. So riveting that the thought of keeping it to myself was almost as frightening as the thought of sharing it: how the train had made such a loud noise coming in that my brother cried and I had to cover his ears. How the conductor had punched a smiley face in the ticket. How I'd hurdled the gap between the train and the platform by myself. I was in no way ready to speak all this to a room full of people, but the words themselves were ready to be spoken. And I couldn't risk going through Becca and having the preciousness of the details lost in translation. So I decided I would make my way around the table to each of my pre-school classmates, one at a time, and whisper the story into each of their ears from the very beginning. I jumped over the gap to the train, I would say. I jumped over the gap to the train, I jumped over the gap...
Emily Hargitai
Writer & MFA
Emily is a fiery new Christian convert with an MFA in Creative Writing. She enjoys writing essays about writing essays and currently has about twelve gray hairs. She spends her free time wondering who put them there and strongly suspects it was you. Yes, you.
Photography by Ralph Kayden