Lenten Devotional by Amy Plackowski
March 23, 2016
Well into my adolescence, I looked up at the stained-glass image on the windows of my hometown church and imagined that the genderless, disembodied, slightly scowling face I saw was the face of God.
I was probably in high school when I realized it was an unintentional optical illusion, like those black-and-white figures that could be a vase or two people in profile. It wasn’t an abstract face at all, but some kind of plant; the bottom leaves curled up into a smile or maybe a moustache, and the bud on top was arranged in the shape of two eyes, two eyebrows, and a nose. What I had mistaken for the cheeks was just a pretty background offsetting the leaves.
When I finally reflected on why I’d seen God in that window for all those years, I conjured up a vague memory of my first Sunday school teacher, Wanda, gesturing upward toward the window when she talked about God. In my literal four-year-old brain, I must have thought she was pointing at the picture in the stained glass, which looked very much like a face.
Wanda gave me my first literal image of the face of God, but she was also one of my first metaphorical faces of God. Tiny and soft-spoken but a force to be reckoned with, she was a pillar of my home church for decades. She taught Sunday school and baked cookies for coffee hour and served the church and community without fanfare or a desire for recognition. In the middle of a hard-fought and exhausting campaign when my dad ran for elected office, she and her husband worked into the night to assemble oddly-proportioned yard signs and helped stake them around town. Understanding the stress of a political family with young children, and believing strongly in my dad’s candidacy, she cooked an elegant dinner for us one night, with a chocolate cherry torte for dessert. Even as cancer ravaged her body years later, she made a Christmas wreath and left it on my parents’ door.
I visited her with my family this past summer, a few months before she died. In spite of her weakness, she sat up on her couch, a pink cap perched on her head, and talked to my three-year-olds like she had talked to me thirty years before.
Wanda wasn’t the only adult in the little white church near Lake Michigan who created a safe space for me to grow, question, and learn. There is a litany of others: Marv, who brought fresh-picked blueberries to our house and made me laugh; his wife Vi, who told stories that were a mixture of Garrison Keillor and Rose from The Golden Girls; Pam, who arranged mission trips to homeless shelters and Habitat for Humanity builds; and Betty, who taught confirmation and sang next to me in the choir and had scholarly conversations with me about Shakespeare when I was only fourteen.
They were, and are, my village. They took their responsibility as a community of God seriously, and created that safe, brave space that nurtured me. May we have the grit and compassion to be that safe space, brave space for all the children of our community.