by Amy Barnes

I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind but now I see
“Amazing Grace”

I didn’t want to fail my mom again. Or fail the pastor. I pushed down harder on my eyelids. I had already failed at speaking in tongues. I needed to see the red healing light with my eyes closed. The hymn playing in the background was Amazing Grace. And yet, I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see red. Or light. Or a reason for why I was standing on an altar pushing on my eyelids as hard as my eight-year-old fingers could push.

Church is supposed to be a safe place for kids. I have carried around the vivid memory of pushing on my eyelids for forty years as a not-so-safe moment. It has been so long now I don’t remember the church or the denomination. I am also still not clear on the origin of the eyelid pushing connection to healing. I just knew my mother was happy when I followed directions and the idea of me being a healer seemed to make her smile. I do remember thinking that speaking in tongues and being a healer was important. It was a lot of pressure on a little girl. I felt like a messiah child designated to save the word. I was only trying to save my mother who was somehow broken in an adult way I couldn’t understand. Heal my mother. Heal a fellow classmate with childhood leukemia. Those were the goals. And yet, I was just little girl in a pink church dress with a matching pink coat, white ruffled socks and white shoes that smelled like shoe polish.

The church was eighth in a long line of hopping from Baptist to Mennonite to Charismatic Catholic. I had no idea what any of those denomination names meant anymore than I understood the healing guidance service. I knew it meant that pretty pink dress made by my mother and white leather church shoes. The dress was to make me feel pretty. The eye-lid pushing was apparently to make me a healer. In retrospect, only the pink dress made sense. I know now the healer rhetoric was a farce designed to prey on my mother’s faith; and by association, my own. In response, I found myself needing to be a healer. I pushed on my eyelids harder to no avail. I knew the pastor was watching. The congregation was watching. It felt as if they were all depending on me to become what the pastor dictated. My mother had me try again when we got home that night, at my bedside where we usually prayed.

I knew even as a child my mother was searching for something. She took us from church to church as one of those searches. At some point, she let my sister and I know she was adopted. As painful as I knew that was to her, it seemed as if she couldn’t find her way to adopt a church. She also couldn’t heal herself. There was a pain behind her eyes that I couldn’t erase even by pushing on my own eyes. In a time when childhood leukemia was a veritable death sentence, one of my best little girlfriends had been diagnosed. She couldn’t heal herself either. There were wigs and vomiting on the playground and things I didn’t understand at eight.

I wanted so desperately to heal my mother, heal my friend. It was the beginning of me needing to heal myself. It is hard when the pain of adults is pinned on children even unintentionally. It is hard to know a childhood friend won’t outlive their mother.. I think I guessed as I watched my friend shrink away into a fragile shadow. I watched her eyes deepen into her face with dark chemotherapy circles replacing pink cheeks. My eyes were healthy and young and I needed them to heal my mother and my friend. I pushed even harder until I felt pain myself. I had heard the stories of how Jesus took on our pain when he hung on the cross. The truth was I really needed my mother to be a true healer for me. She wielded the Mercurochrome, Vick’s Vapo-rub, and cartoon-covered Band-aids with the hands of a mom. Those were the easy visual representations of healing. Fluorescent range knees with Scooby Doo Band-aids. had only the stark moment of standing on a stage looking for healing powers behind my eyelids. The truth was there was no Band-aid big enough to heal my mother.

The pressure to become a healer was greater for me as a child because it came from people I trusted: my mother, the pastor, the church and by definition, God himself. As an adult, I have spent the last 40 years figuratively pushing trying in vain to heal people. My mother. My grandparents. My mother-in-law. On a smaller scale, my own children when they have even simple childhood illnesses. I didn’t know as a child that the eyelid pushing meant nothing. There was something in my childhood faith that drove me to that concept in a way that I would categorically dismiss now. I would also never expose my own children to that setting. However, that same childlike faith drove me to try to heal with a desperation that I still sometimes feel as an adult. However, unrealistic the process was, it was in the same line of thought as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. It warped my idea of faith into corresponding with that kind of magic. It would be a decade before I put the experience behind me as a childhood misstep. It didn’t matter how hard I pushed, I wasn’t going to heal anyone. I needed it to work so badly at eight. I need it to mean something now at nearly 48.

The childhood friend didn’t reach adulthood. My mother still struggles with her identity and looks for faith in tangible ways. I think she needs that faith Band-aid that she can see. A tangible fix. My parents continued to move from church to church before settling on a mega church associated with the queen of big, dramatic eyes: Tammy Faye Baker.

When I became an adult, I struggled with healing, seeing, believing, wondering. My mother is still looking for her birth parents and family. I know she sees herself in random people. I used to look at strangers to see if maybe they were related to me. I don’t that anymore now I have my own kids. Even with two daughters, my mother still searches for that face that mirrors hers even though my face has always been right there. I also see the survival rate for childhood leukemia has reversed with survival rates that mirror the death rates of the 70’s.

And yet, I felt as I had failed at being good at faith. Failed at being a daughter. I failed at bringing peace to my mother. And I failed at healing my childhood friend. If you push on your eyeballs long enough, it begins to hurt. You do eventually see red and flashes of light. I still have no true idea why that particular pastor choose to hold the healing red light sessions. As an adult, I went to Google to try and get some answers that eluded my childhood self. I found many medically-supported entries of red light therapy being used to heal wounds and even to heal eyesight. And then, I started finding personal examples of people seeing flashes of lights as examples of angels and of healing auras being red. There were examples of Irish faith healing that closely resembled the mysterious eye-lid pushing process. The stark contrast between medical intervention with red light and the more hocus-pocus healing process had me seeing red again. While medical intervention with red lights may work, pushing on my eyelids wasn’t going to make me a healer. The pastor’s spiritual manipulation drove my mother to send me into the land of spiritual healing as if I were a biblical prophet or messiah in a pink ruffled dress. While I didn’t get instant healing powers, the pastor had enough intuition to know the idea of that happening was enough to compel my mother. I’ll ever know the true motivation or inspiration of the pastor. It wasn’t the last time I would witness attempts at healing though. In rapid succession, we attended megachurch after megachurch, all with crutches on their walls and forehead-pushing “you are healed” sessions.

When I had kids, I found myself trying to heal scraped knees and hurt feelings. My son had jaundice shortly after being born. As I looked down at him bathed in the bilirubin light, I was instantly transported back to that childhood church stage. I didn’t need to push on my eyelids or push a child forward to become a great healing hope. I had my tangible light-driven healing device. There was a lot of praying as well because I still have faith in that as well as science. And yet when I pray as a mom, it has often been with at least one eye open to keep an eye on my own children. I pray as hard as my eyes are closed. I pray for my mother to find peace. I pray for my 8-year-old self to open her eyes. I pray for the family of my childhood friend that was left behind. And I pray now for the faces that look like mine. The faces I see every day. The faces that have eyes like mine. Ordinary eyes. I pray for them. For healing. And for peace.

Amy Barnes is a writer with words at publications including McSweeney’s, Parabola, The Higgs Weldon, The New Southern Fugitives, Stone Soup Magazine, Crixeo and many others. She lives in the south with one husband, two kids and two dogs who both inspire and hinder her writing.