Seaside
Mark 1: 21-28
A Communion Meditation by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
 

**= projected image change - pictures of Seaside and Capernaum

**Seaside. Seaside Hospital was abandoned in 1996.**  From 1961 to 1996, it was known as Seaside Regional Center for the Mentally Retarded, a Connecticut state facility.  Before that, beginning in 1958, it was Seaside Geriatric Hospital. ** Before that, between 1919 and 1934, it was Seaside Sanatorium, a residential hospital for children with tuberculosis of the bone.

I located and visited Seaside two years ago and took these pictures because Seaside is where my mom, Maria Yolanda Wilgochewicz Lockwood, Mary, spent ten years of her childhood. **

My mom died three years ago at 89 years of age but only really talked about Seaside in the last few years of her life.  She was a private person and had even been instructed not to talk about her history there.  But I know she will forgive me now because her story is a witness to what it takes to heal and to the meaning in miracles.

She lived at Seaside Sanitorium from age 5 to age 15.  

Born the only daughter of poor Polish immigrants, her father was taken to another sanitorium, and he died soon after from Tuberculosis of the lung. Her mother was a domestic worker. During those ten years she could only visit her daughter once each year.

Maria, along with hundreds of children with TB of the bone, wore full body casts for months at a time, endured painful sustained traction to try to arrest the disease growing in her bones, went to school outside and even slept outside each night, to receive the healing properties of fresh air.

Before I went to Seaside, I went to the State Archives in Hartford and found medical records, photos, correspondence and information about my mother that none of us in her family had seen or known.

I also found bound copies of the hospital’s yearly reports. It was recorded --which dates which clergy visited, each time sunshine ladies brought books, or treats, which choirs would come and what they would sing, who donated shoes, the dates of children’s deaths and the dates children were well enough to be discharged. I found copies of speeches given by people who wanted to close the hospital because there would be no payback to the state, and speeches given by those who wanted laws to isolate children even when they were no longer contagious.

The state of Connecticut recognized the scale of the Tuberculosis public health crisis and set up a Commission to oversee hospitals, clinics, agencies, preventive programs, education, social support, networks of individuals, faith and charitable and health care organizations that formed a web of care. They took in children from other states.  Emma Ford’s Aunt from Arkansas was sent to seaside! Home towns, businessmen, federal government, family, churches, all were asked to take responsibility and to do the things they could best do to care for all the children, including the poorest.

After my mother left Seaside at age 15, they also recorded her foster homes including one where she lived for three years with six other foster children. It in that home that she had her first memory of sitting around a family table and saying grace. The miracle and meaning of her story is what it takes for healing, wholeness, and restoration to community.

**Jesus entered Capernaum with four men he had just called from the Sea of Galilee to become fishers of people.  Capernaum was on the North Shore of the Sea.  It was a small territorial seaside city near the road to Damascus. Now there are only ruins.**

On the Sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue.** People were amazed by his teaching.  From the middle of that sacred place and sacred time a man had an unclean spirit who cried out defiantly, questioning Jesus.  Jesus rebuked the spirit and called it out of the man, healing him, restoring him to community.  
In Mark’s gospel, this miracle is the inauguration of Jesus’ public ministry. It is a demonstration of transformation.  Jesus entered the lives of four fishermen, Jesus entered the city, Jesus entered the synagogue and it was clear right from the start that the way of Jesus challenged powers and perception.

Biblical scholar Dr. Howard Clark Kee, one of my seminary professors, said that the meaning of miracle is “not concerned with the specifics of the cure, but with the manifestations of the struggle...a wider conflict of which this is but a single phase...”

The way of Jesus, taught by action, rebukes and disrupts the demons and dis-ease and authorities that bind people.  Following Christ means liberation and restoration to all who are isolated and marginalized by pain, including ourselves.

Whether suffering was physical ailment, occupation, ritual impurity, temptation, injustice, or status, Jesus’ healing transformed the whole person in community.

As Jesus entered the city, entered the synagogue, engaged the spirits and unmasked the powers, we are called to enter the places where people suffer in isolation – which is everywhere. ** As Jesus healed at the seaside, we are called to heal --children, elders, those who are dis-abled and dis-eased –which is everyone.  
Hopefully very soon, 4 million additional children in the U.S. will have health insurance coverage when the CHIP is passed and signed into law.  Even then another 6 million children will be without any insurance and millions more will remain underinsured. Together with people of faith around the nation, together with economists such as Paul Krugman, we call for “Health Care Now” for all children, for all children of God, and for the health of the body politic, especially in times of economic crisis. Together with the World Council of Churches and the One Campaign we pray, speak, act to eliminate diseases of poverty throughout the world.

**Followers of Christ cast out spirits and unmask systems, ideologies, and priorities, that isolate, exclude and bind the children of God. And when unclean spirits question, “What does the Holy One of God have to do with us?” We will rebuke, call out these spirits, and the body politic, the Body of Christ will convulse with cries of liberation.

What does it take to heal?  Everything and everyone. There is nothing and no one outside the love of God.  

Neither my four sisters nor I would be alive without the spiritual and physical resources within that 5 year old child and within the community that insisted on her healing and her right to live a full and free life.  

Look what it takes to heal....