Learning to Echolocate
In the fall of 2021, when my family was staying in St. Louis for the night on the way to a family funeral, my sister suggested that we visit City Museum to entertain my nieces before another long day in the car. I didn’t even Google the museum before we headed over after breakfast. In my very misguided imagination, it was like children’s museums I’d visited before: a bright, open, colorful, interactive space, possibly featuring the history of St. Louis. I was looking forward to meandering through the exhibits with the girls, asking questions and sharing in wonder with them. I wore my cutest and most comfortable red patent leather flats, jeans, and a striped long-sleeved knit top – if I did say so myself, I was the image of a pretty artsy, cool aunt.
Had I bothered to visit the City Museum website, I would have found a description of a place very much the opposite of what I had envisioned. It reads: “Explore the unexpected. City Museum is a hundred-year-old warehouse in downtown St. Louis in which artists have repurposed the pieces of old cities to build miles of tunnels, slides, climbers, bridges, and castles."
The website claims that the structure contains a circus, a rooftop school bus, and a Ferris wheel, along with multiple ball pits, but the space is so complex that I never saw any one of those things. (I did come across an aquarium, a pipe organ, and a train.) As we walked through the front doors, I spied at least half a dozen spiral staircases stretching all the way up to the ceiling of the ten-story building. The interior space is a dimly lit multi-level maze constructed mostly of vast amounts of concrete and rebar, manipulated to look like dinosaur fossils or ancient Egyptian friezes or the belly of a whale.
Children at City Museum have to be accompanied by an adult at all times. Millie, my 6-year-old niece, chose me as her companion, “so I can get to know you better.” (I live in California, she in Tennessee.) Which is how I came to be chasing one of the most active individuals I know through the most byzantine space I have ever entered, in totally inappropriate footwear.
I should mention that navigation is not one of my spiritual gifts. I have long known this about myself, which is why I’m a big believer in maps. City Museum proudly proclaims that its ever-changing space doesn’t have a map, but even if one had been provided, Millie’s pace wouldn’t have given me much time to consult it. Fortunately for me, my niece is energetic but not obstinate – when she outpaced me, she slowed down for her 43-year-old aunt to catch up, and she willingly backed out of many tunnels that were too small for me. Had she been any more headstrong, I would have lost her within the first two minutes. But even with an obedient charge, being the assigned adult of a child in City Museum is no easy feat. I ducked through narrow passageways, crawled on my hands and knees through rebar tunnels (I learned on our way out that the gift shop sells knee pads), and scraped my adorable stupid treadless shoes while careening backward down a slide on Millie’s orders. As hard as I tried to keep Millie in view as we twisted our way through the bowels of the museum, over and over I had to call out to her to try to get a read on how far ahead she had gotten or which direction she had turned. It was basically an extended game of Marco Polo, minus the swimming pool.
I should also mention that in addition to being middle-aged, slightly out of shape, and a poor navigator, I am deaf in one ear. At the time of our visit, I had been living with this condition for a little over a year. The hearing in my right ear disappeared overnight, a condition called sudden sensorineural hearing loss. I didn’t know it existed until it happened to me, but it affects more than a million and a half people every year. About half of them recover at least some of their hearing, but I didn’t. I was fortunate to deal with most of the immediate effects – vertigo, nausea, irritability – during a year spent in varying levels of pandemic isolation, but as life had started to creep back to normal, I was re-entering the world with one of my senses severely compromised.
One thing I had been learning the hard way was that I can no longer accurately tell where sounds are coming from. In my new world, everything is like a car stereo with the balance knob panned all the way to the left – because that is the ear that can hear, my brain reflexively assumes that everything comes from that direction, and if noises occur on my right side I often don’t register them at all. All of this is to say that I was particularly unqualified to be tracking a small, speedy person in a dark urban jungle maze, something I probably should have anticipated as soon as we arrived. However, I was still learning to preemptively recognize situations that would bring extra challenges, so we were well into this exhausting adventure by the time Millie stopped in her tracks, turned to me and loudly whispered: “Stop! Listen! Use echolocation!”
I tried to explain, while jogging to catch up, that echolocation was definitely not on Auntie Rebbles’s list of strengths.
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Millie’s directive continued to resonate after we left the museum. Initially, I had been struck by her impressively advanced vocabulary for a six-year-old, and later I asked where she had learned about echolocation. She just shrugged. Had there been a special unit in kindergarten about bats? Favorite movies or books about dolphins? More shrugs. It seemed to be something that spontaneously popped out of a hidden crevice of her young brain where interesting information was stored.
As I continued to reflect on my niece’s ironic advice to attempt the one thing I was distinctly unequipped for – locating objects by how they reflect sound – I realized that City Museum was an extreme metaphor for how it felt to adapt to life as a partially deaf person. By design, the museum is something of an obstacle course, and my everyday environments had started to take on some of the same qualities, especially during the pandemic when all conversations were held through layers of masks and plexiglass. I had started to dread many places that used to be familiar – grocery stores, restaurants, the dentist’s office, airports – because I worried that I would miss information that seems mundane until it is missed – which checkout line is open, choices of salad dressings, when to open my mouth wider, whether a plane is delayed. I had also discovered that almost all of these places had ambient (or not-so-ambient) music playing, adding extra layers of frequencies for my one hearing ear to decipher.
While none of those situations involved mortal peril, I had also become hypervigilant during my daily walks to work, knowing I couldn’t trust my one ear to alert me reliably as to the exact whereabouts of honks, shouts, other pedestrians, or cars. And as evidence started to grow of hearing loss as a side effect of COVID, I had doubled down on preventative measures, not wanting anything to further diminish my hearing. Overall, I was coming to terms with the ways being hearing impaired had made life irrevocably different, more difficult, and sometimes even dangerous.
All things considered, my disability is quite minor, but it made me much more sympathetic and admiring of those who have experienced more significant losses. I found myself listening to interviews with Christine Ha, a blind woman who won Master Chef in 2012, watching the Paralympics instead of the Olympics, and revisiting my childhood fascination with Helen Keller. In my research about resilient humans, I learned about a man named Daniel Kish, who was born with an aggressive eye cancer that caused both of his eyes to be removed when he was just an infant. As a result, he learned to navigate the world by making clicking sounds with his tongue that bounce off objects to help him determine their density and proximity – in other words, he taught himself to echolocate. Mr. Kish founded an organization called World Access for the Blind and has made it his life’s work to pass on what he has learned. The nonprofit’s website shows pictures of blind people hiking up steep mountainsides, riding bikes, and crossing busy streets.
In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Mr. Kish credits the development of his unique echolocation abilities to his parents, who gave him space to explore his surroundings as a blind toddler. “They didn’t get hung up about the blindness,” he says. In his TED Talk, he goes on to say: “Fear immobilizes us in the face of challenge. [My parents] knew that blindness would pose a significant challenge. I was not raised with fear. They put my freedom first before all else, because that is what love does.”
Because his echolocation abilities are so advanced, Mr. Kish has been nicknamed “The Remarkable Batman,” but he doesn’t like being compared to a superhero. “I have always regarded myself much like anyone else who navigates the dark unknowns of their own challenges,” he says in his TED Talk. “Is that so remarkable?”
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The eyes of the blind shall be opened
The ears of the deaf shall hear
The chains of the lame shall be broken
Rivers shall flow in deserts of fear
Your kingdom come, your will be done
Now that we have become your sons
Let the prayer of our hearts daily be
God, make us your family
These are the opening lyrics to a favorite song from my early years at church camp. Drawing heavily from Isaiah 35, they are sung to a repetitive dirge-like melody in a minor key. Thanks to Google, I discovered that “God, Make Us Your Family” was the title song on an album put out by a group called The Fisherfolk in 1979. (Unfortunately, the recording on YouTube has been removed.) Why this tune so appealed to my 10-year-old self should probably be the subject of its own essay, but it rings differently to an adult who only has one ear to hear the Good News. My ENT told me in no uncertain terms that nothing can bring hearing back to my “dead” right ear, but I was raised on stories and songs about Jesus going around miraculously healing people like me.
Even though Isaiah and other prophets promised that the Messiah would cure the blind, the lame, and the deaf, there is actually only one Biblical account of Jesus healing a deaf person. It is found in the seventh chapter of Mark, an account that one of my favorite Biblical scholars Raymond Brown describes as “an unusual amount of contact between Jesus and the afflicted” – the afflicted being a man who has a speech impediment in addition to his deafness. First, Jesus takes the man aside, away from the crowd, rightly thinking that everyone doesn’t need to watch what he is about to do next, which is boldly sticking his fingers into the man’s ears. As if that isn’t enough awkwardness for one Bible story, he then spits and touches the man’s tongue. Next, he looks up to heaven and sighs, a term from the Greek word stenos, meaning “to groan, expressing grief, anger, or desire." (Strong's Concordance, 4727) Finally, he hollers “Ephphatha,” a mouthful of Aramaic that means “Be opened!” Immediately the man can hear and enunciate again.
There are some linguistic flags in the original Greek of this passage urging us to pay attention, because something unique is happening. For example, this is the only time any of the Gospels uses the term for prayerful groaning, and only one of two times Mark’s Gospel shows Jesus speaking in his native Aramaic other than when he is dying on the cross. In addition, it is rare for these Biblical accounts of Jesus to delineate his step-by-step healing process, or to reveal his precise words or actions. In other stories, he heals people who aren’t even present, simply declaring their wellness from afar, or he receives people in droves, implying that none of them has such an involved, individualized encounter. In describing this particular act of healing, Mark asks us to see precisely what it elicits from Jesus: his emotions, words, and actions. I’m not sure whether to feel honored or offended: Is healing deafness particularly strenuous or frustrating, such that it requires extra focus and assistance from heaven?
When it comes to Jesus healing blind people, there are a few more stories to choose from. The longest and most theological account occurs in John’s Gospel and begins this way: “As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” (NRSV John 9) Once again, Jesus uses his favorite elixir – his own saliva – this time mixing it with dirt from the ground to make some mud, which he rubs on the man’s eyes. When the man washes off the mud, he can see for the first time in his life, and we learn that his neighbors no longer recognize him as the man who used to sit and beg for his sustenance.
In John’s account, this fairly straightforward story turns into a whole complicated ordeal. The Pharisees are trying to catch Jesus in the act of sinning because he healed the man on the Sabbath. In an attempt to persuade the formerly blind man and his parents to pile onto these accusations, they continue to interrogate them for almost an entire chapter. The man’s parents, fearing being excommunicated, refuse to opine on whether or not Jesus is a sinner or the Messiah. As for the healed man, he just keeps repeating the gist of his story: “I was blind but now I see.”
The Pharisees eventually send the healed man away in frustration, but their parting comment reveals an ugly prejudice: “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” In addition to having lived his entire life without sight, this poor man had also carried the burden of his religious community’s perception that his disability was a result of sin, perhaps an inherited sin over which he had no control. And because of this disability, he was overlooked and relegated to a lifetime of begging by the side of the road.
Today we have modern advances that would have eased life for some of the people Jesus healed: Braille, sign language, surgeries and devices, the blessed gift of closed captioning. These days we are hopefully less likely to attribute physical disabilities to a person’s sinful nature. It never occurred to me to think of my hearing loss as an incidence of divine smiting or bad karma – it was just an unfortunate combination of stress and bad luck. But I’m not sure we have made much progress over the last 2,000 years in our overall perceptions of people with disabilities or in the barriers we construct to keep them from becoming full members of society. Recent estimates show that up to 70% of blind people are unemployed, as are more than 40% of deaf people, compared with 20% of the general population.
When Jesus reached out to those who were blind, lame, or deaf, it wasn’t just so that they could finally see the leaves on trees, dance at weddings, and hear birds singing. It was because their physical disabilities meant they were misunderstood and cast out from society. By healing their infirmities, he drew them back into community, because that is what love does. But at the risk of blasphemy, I would argue that – in the grand scheme of things – this was a band-aid more than a cure. Jesus made life better for these folks in the quickest and most effective way possible, by erasing their physical impediments altogether so that society would accept them, rather than shifting the world around them to love and accept them as they were.
What would it have been like if Jesus had taken an approach more like Mr. Kish’s, teaching this man a skill that would compensate for what was different about him, that would open up the world so less of it was off-limits, like teaching him to read lips or helping the village develop sign language? Or what if he had empowered this man’s neighbors to expand their capacity not to get hung up on the blindness, to give this beloved man the freedom to navigate the world more effectively?
Don’t get me wrong: if Jesus walked up to me right now and offered to give me a divine ‘wet willie’ in my right ear, I would gladly accept. I appreciate the appeal of a quick fix. Maybe I’m just bitter because I’m not among the tiny fraction of people who were in the right place at the right time to get onto Jesus’s healing schedule. But I also recognize that Jesus didn’t teach these people how to navigate the dark unknowns of their challenges. He just turned on the lights. As for me, I’m left with a broken ear in a broken world, still fumbling in the darkness.
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One recent night as I lay in bed reading, I heard a high-pitched droning hum that oscillated every few seconds to a tone a half step above. Tinnitus has rung in my damaged ear for many months now, ever since the fateful morning I woke up with my hearing gone. (My doctor told me that my brain would eventually get accustomed to it and I will no longer notice it, but I am still waiting for that day.) However, this was a different and brand new annoyance that seemed to be coming from outside my head but inside my house. I called my husband, Josh, to help me identify this noise and its source.
After several sustained seconds of holding-our-breath silence, he finally heard the electronic hum too, but neither of us could determine its cause. A few nights later, it happened again, and the noise was even louder. Again I called Josh in to help locate the noise, but this time he couldn’t hear it at all, even when I helpfully screeched an imitation of the tone. I swiveled my head like an owl in hopes that my good ear could identify the direction the sound was coming from, with no success. It was just mysteriously invading the room, and only one of us could hear it.
In an interesting counterpoint to my situation, my husband is legally blind in one eye. This has been the case for almost his entire life, since a playground accident when he was a toddler. His pediatrician advised his parents to cover his good eye with a patch in hopes of strengthening the damaged one. Eventually, his poor mother couldn’t stand seeing him bump into everything and removed the patch, so he didn’t learn to echolocate, but over the course of his childhood he adapted in other ways and was able to play multiple sports, get his driver’s license, and generally go through life as if he had two perfectly functioning eyes. That night as I sat in bed, frustrated by not being able to pinpoint this strange sound, Josh said: “All I can tell you is that sometimes I can see things that other people don’t see.”
This doesn’t make any sense. He is supposed to be worse at seeing, and I am supposed to be worse at hearing – in fact, scientific research has shown that when we lose a sense like sight or hearing, we repurpose those parts of our brain to enhance the senses that remain. This neuroplasticity leads to what some have called “super powers” for blind and deaf people as their other senses expand.
Mr. Kish has said that he has learned to “see through his blindness.” Maybe I am learning to hear through my deafness. Or maybe everything is just turned upside down. After Jesus healed the blind man and all the hubbub died down, he returned for a visit, just to check in and see how things were going. But he also revealed the deeper meaning of what he was there to do: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”
When John Newton wrote the lyrics to “Amazing Grace” in 1872, he borrowed the words of the healed man from John’s Gospel (“‘Twas blind but now I see”). The first line of this treasured hymn is: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.” Despite having sung these words hundreds of times over the years, I have never stopped to consider what the particular tone and timbre of grace might be. Perhaps it arrives at a frequency that is only accessible when others are closed off.
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In the three years that I’ve been adjusting to life with hearing loss, the trip to City Museum is when I have felt the most frustrated. This experience came at a time when my list of challenges was getting longer by the day, and those challenges were leading to fears: of being disoriented, of missing all the details, of feeling left out. If Jesus had returned right then (and not a moment too soon), he would have found me with both a closed ear and a closed heart.
Jesus prioritized pulling people into the center so they were restored to community, and before he died he gave final instructions for how to go about this after he was gone. At his last meal with his disciples, he left them with a commandment to love one another. He then offered a demonstration of that love, washing their feet and breaking bread with them, cleaning and feeding their bodies, even as he prepared for his own body to be broken. Jesus also promised to dispatch the Holy Spirit, who would remind them of these teachings and regularly nudge them in the right direction.
I imagine these instructions may have sounded, in the midst of the disciples’ grief, about as preposterous as Millie’s echolocation order. In part because it was delivered exactly as I was feeling the most exhausted and overwhelmed, her directive caught my attention, and ultimately it led me to find the stories of Mr. Kish and others who have navigated challenges with bravery and grace and discovered abilities they never would have imagined. Their stories help me remember that adjusting to a new version of my own broken body is not instantaneous but, rather, a process that will require bumping into some walls. Their stories illustrate healing that is less instantaneous than that in the Bible stories, but perhaps no less miraculous. Their stories have become the river that flows through my desert of fear.
Millie didn’t let me stay close to the edges of the museum where I could easily find my way and retrace familiar paths. She led me deeper into the heart of my confusion, where I would have to trust that I wasn’t alone and practice relying on that companionship. For one long hour that day I was at the mercy of my feisty and fast-moving guide, who kept me on the run but was as scared of losing me as I was of losing her, who repeatedly called out my name and reached back with her small hand to find mine. If that isn’t a description of the Holy Spirit, I don’t know what is.
Much as I love my maps and my plans, I am discovering that life is richer when I accept the invitation to explore the unexpected, to enter into dark, uncharted spaces full of twists and turns, trusting in my spiritual sonar as my heart learns to listen.