Framing

I may be the last person in this world to discover what lots of thoughtful folks have known for a long time: framing is where it’s at. How you frame a question. How you frame a photo. How you frame a relationship between two humans. Isn’t it true that in some sense the content of the painting is irrelevant compared to the framing?

A case in point. When I once was a practicing pastor serving an inner city congregation in Hartford, CT, then the fourth poorest city in the U.S., a woman in her middle years once strayed into Sunday worship, and sort of wandered around. The congregation by that time had considerable tolerance for so-called street people who would stray into our Sunday services, perhaps looking for hand-outs, some members thought. I will call her Helwig.

For reasons that I never fully understood at the time, Helwig bonded with my wife, Laurel. That Laurel instinctively knew that this was a soul to be loved, and to be pursued, has always amazed me. Jesus would have been proud.

One day, I received a call from a nearby hospital: Helwig had been hospitalized in their “mental ward,” and had asked to see me (!). I immediately responded. Turns out that Helwig was about to be charged with – child abandonment! She had been apprehended in a nearby department store, since her toddler was observed wandering about somewhere, apparently abandoned. Did anyone ever think that she had been frantically searching for that child? No, she was a bit incoherent and she happened to be Black.

I was asked to sit in on a hospital staff meeting to assess her situation. A great deal of that meeting time was spent considering her mental state and her mental history. She was clearly disturbed, everyone concluded, drawing on the wisdom of their own medical specialties. The term schizophrenic was used more than once.

Enraged at one point, I yelled: “Stop! Don’t you know that her husband beats her?!!” I had visited her in her home, and I knew. Her diagnosis was not psycho-genetic (e.g. had she been rejected as a child?), but psycho-existential. She wasn’t a psychological problem, she was a traumatized victim.

Sometimes framing a question can be a matter of life or death.