Saved in Los Angeles
Aside from Monday, when the kids go back to school after a usually frenzied weekend of sports and church and wild careening around the house, Saturday is my favorite day of the week. And lest you think I'm one of those mothers who relishes the constant company of her children, the reason I love Saturdays is because I have a babysitter who comes at 9 am and leaves at 5 pm. She is a wonderful woman whose job is to mainly watch my daughter Sophie who, while fourteen years old, is severely disabled with seizures and developmental disabilities. Having a babysitter all day enables me to not only take the boys to their various sports activities but to go to the grocery store, run errands and even get away by myself for a bit.
So, when M called me this afternoon and haltingly started to say, Um, Elizabeth, I was wondering if..., my heart sank because I knew what was coming. I have tickets tomorrow to see a show in and it's the first time I can go and I've always wanted to go and everyone in my family is going and I just wondered if you would mind if I went and didn't come to work, she said all in one breath. What kind of show? I wondered aloud, even though I knew that of course, I'd say it was all right that I would be fine and to have a good time.
Benny Hinn, she said. I'm so excited!
It was all I could do not to hang up on her in disgust. Benny Hinn is a televangelist who, I believe, preys on the most vulnerable, economically disadvantaged people in southern California, if not everywhere else. He gets a huge crowd every year in Anaheim, a stadium size venue where he and his posse claim to heal the sick and save the soul, all while collecting money dressed in slick suits and cowboy hats. And despite a lifelong aversion to televangelists, born of a childhood in the south where they were a dime a dozen, I have actually BEEN to a Benny Hinn spectacle. About a dozen years ago, my babysitter at the time begged me to go with her to see Benny Hinn with the expectation that he would heal Sophie of her seizures. My son Henry was a newborn and Sophie was going through a particularly rough period, screaming most of the day and night for no known reason. She was just over three years old at the time, and I was willing to try anything. Besides, I truly loved L, the babysitter, whose care and love for my children was immense and whose deep spirituality was the real thing. I thought, then, how could it hurt? The trip to see Benny Hinn is an essay unto itself, one that is now a chapter in the book I'm writing about raising a child with a disability, so I won't belabor it here, but it was one of the worst experiences of my spiritual life, where despite being one in a crowd of at least 10,000 people, I felt entirely alone, devoid of even a speck of their strange and frenzied faith.
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