The Christ Within Us - The Rev. Joanna Leiserson

Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

In September, after I'd been here at Redeemer for only one month, I had to have cataract surgery. Never mind that I had decided when I was young that I would never need cataract surgery. Apparently it wasn't my decision. But people told me that cataract surgery is no big deal. That's true about the surgery. It's a simple procedure. What WAS a big deal was the instructions the doctor gave me. He said that I could not wear eye makeup for a week after surgery. And I panicked. It sounds funny when I tell you how devastating this was for me, but here's why. When I was in seventh grade, my social studies teacher read aloud from our world history book a passage about the history of China. The book went into detail about the Chinese people--their weird singsong language, their strange habits, their yellow skin, and especially, their grotesque slanted eyes. As he read, my schoolmates turned around and made slanted-eye faces at me, laughing. It was humiliating to my core. I felt deep, deep shame at myself, and deep, deep fear of the world that suddenly made itself known to me. At that moment, I was exposed as an unacceptable human being--not truly human, but rather, Chinese. Lowly. Mostly, it was the eyes. So from that time on, for the next sixty-plus years, I began wearing eye makeup--not to look better, but to hide who I really was--a person of Chinese descent with those strange habits and the grotesque slanted eyes. I put on eye makeup every single day, no matter what--even when I was sick, in the hospital, in the middle of the pandemic when I knew I would not be seen by anyone. I wore it to hide who I was from myself as well as from the world--lowly.