What makes this story so special? Mr. Parker has only one leg. The other was amputated during Liberia's 14-year devastating civil war.
Mr. Parker's stride-with metal crutches and arm braces-is a cross between a gallop and a hop, a motion that is both graceful and athletic. It is extraordinary football (or soccer in our translation) to watch, because every player, including the goalie, is an amputee.
(This in not about sympathy. In the land of the one-legged, the rules require that the one-armed man is the goalie. The goal is half as wide as a regulation net. But the goalie can't leave the box and he can touch the ball only with his intact arm, not his stump.)
Here's what impacted me. The people watching no longer see defects. "Now," in the words of one of Mr. Parker's teammates, "people talk to me like I am a human being."
Expecting SportsCenter, I am watching this ESPN Liberian football footage while sitting at a bar. It's not good form to cry at happy hour. I don't really know if that's the rule, but somehow, I've internalized it. So, I pretend I have an allergy. Regardless, I can't get the picture of Mr. Parker and his teammates out of my head.
Mr. Parker likes the way strangers greet him on the street with shouts of "Big Player." Which is a lot better than a year ago, when they used to jeer and call him "Killer." Dennis Parker is not the only casualty of Liberia's war. There are thousands like him. Amputees. And after the war, they became the burden and blemish of Liberian society. "A disabled man is useless here," says one player.
Back then, people would see him--a beggar with one leg--and guess correctly that he had lost the other one fighting in Liberia's civil war. In that conflict, boys were given an AK-47 assault rifle, and sugar-cane alcohol to make him brave enough to use it, and grew up thinking that the unspeakable was acceptable, in a world where boys and young men were routinely raped, robbed and murdered in a drugged-up frenzy.
Now, after the war (former President Mr. Taylor sits in a cell in The Hague, where he's standing trial for atrocities his men committed in neighboring Sierra Leone), the quandary is especially vexing when it comes to amputees. Deeply impoverished, Liberia offers no welfare for the disabled, who find the few jobs that do exist beyond their grasp. "They don't even count you," says one.
In this world, the Amputee Football Federation of Liberia was born, where hopelessness seemed the only option. Enter the Rev. Robert Karloh, one of the soccer league founders, who believes the sport helps make men like Mr. Parker, and Liberia itself, whole again. Unabashedly, the Reverend tells the men, "The amputation does not remove God's purpose for you."
Indeed, amputee soccer in Liberia is as much about reconciliation as it is about competition. Former fighters from enemy militias now wear the same uniform. Mixed among them are civilians who got caught in the shooting and slashing. Together they play, sing victory songs and share pairs of shoes, according to fellow amputees' needs. "This is the time for us to reconcile," says Karloh, "It's not time to look at the past."
You and I can pretend.
We can put on a brave front.
We can try to be someone that we are not.
But the truth is this: we are all broken.
We are all, in some way, amputees.
Somewhere.
Somehow.
In some cases, it is self-inflicted... there are so many ways that we imprison ourselves, or at least are helplessly stalled.
However... in truth, there are some--like Mr. Parker--who have experienced the capriciousness of life. Life wasn't fair, and they (we) wear the scars. Not only the scars, but also the heaviness of being backed into a corner. Hotel Rwanda follows the family of real life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle) as they struggle to survive during the genocide. From the beginning of the genocide Rusesabagina, a Hutu married to a Tustsi woman, protected many at risk Rwandans in the Hotel Mille Collines, which became a major refugee camp in Kigali. He was able to save 1,268 people from the fate they would have suffered outside the walls of the hotel.
There is a scene--where a young and passionate Red Cross worker brings home the magnitude of the situation by highlighting the plight of Tutsi orphans. In one scene she describes a massacre at an orphanage:
"They'd already started killing children. They made me watch. There was one girl...As they started to chop her, she cried out to me 'Please don't let them kill me. I promise I won't be Tutsi anymore.'"
For whatever reason, we believe that in order to live, we must apologize--and feel shame--for who we are.
No, we are not in Rwanda. But in our Western mindset, we exacerbate any conundrum by seeing life as a problem to be solved.
Here's the deal: Once we use the paradigm where we believe we cannot live with our brokenness, it will mean that we spend all of our energy trying to fix it. Or make it right. And...
...we mistrust and apologize for unsettled emotions,
...we believe that life is something to overcome,
...we live stuck, focused only on what we fear.
Lord knows we don't enjoy vulnerability. Security is whole lot easier to swallow. (And a whole lot easier to sell, by the way.) To embrace THIS life, this broken life--fully and freely--requires the price tag of risk. And that's just too much to ask. So. We bring God into the collusion. You know, pray that He will make things better. Smoother.
This is all connected--oddly enough--to Sabbath. Did you know that Sabbath is fundamentally about liberation? In the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, the Jewish people are told to keep Sabbath as a reminder of being freed from slavery in Egypt. Karl Barth said that what the human soul fears most is liberation. No wonder we are so conflicted about Sabbath. Sabbath for us can be a time to break free from our burdens and responsibilities and everything that we may blame, and get our minds and hearts and spirits so far away from them that the child in us can come out to play, to wonder and delight in this day. To see the Kingdom right in front of us. Even with one leg.
Maybe it's only about football. But the trickle down to other part of Mr. Parker's life is evident. He rents a room in a house (for $5 a month) on the outskirts of the city, where he lives with his girlfriend and four of his children.
He is no longer ashamed to ask his family for help.
And. Mr. Parker no longer begs.
Now that... that is freedom.
Don't turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place.
That's where the light enters you. Rumi
