Happy May Day Play Day—The Day the World Changed
The first Saturday in May is Derby Day in Kentucky where I was bishop. When I was a student at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, it was called May Day Play Day, kind of an end-of-the-year celebration of friendships formed through Furman’s volunteer student service program, Service Corps. The Furman campus, renowned for being beautiful, was transformed for a day into a playground with games and rides and entertainment and dancing and pontoon rides on the lake for hundreds of visitors.
May Day Play Day is where I met Diane. We never saw each other again. Nor did we ever once communicate with words (at least not mutually). Diane had a mental disability that kept her from being able say a word to me.
Diane and I were about the same age when we met, I think. I was a sophomore at an academically rigorous university. She lived at a place called Whitten Village, a large state institution for people with disabilities like hers. She entered my life because Ginger, now my wife and also a Furman student at the time, knew Diane through her weekly visits to Whitten Village as a Service Corps volunteer. Ginger was bringing a group of Whitten residents to May Day Play Day and asked me to escort Diane, who needed one-on-one supervision, for the day. Now Ginger was someone I happened to be trying to impress. I reluctantly agreed.
During our day together we did not discuss any of the great ideas I had come to think were so very important to leading a good life. These were things of words, books I had read or that some professor was telling me about. I was learning in college, a church college in fact, that it was words that mattered most, that words were about the life of the mind and the life of the mind was at the core of being human, and perhaps most importantly, that words were the key to success. The message was both explicit and implicit. The entrance to the college library was under the giant seal of the university with its motto: Cristo et Doctrinae. The message was unmistakable: Christ, learning, books, words, mostly the written words of dead people.
Diane and I did not discuss anything at all, let alone any great ideas from a book. Words were not part of how Diane communicated. What we did do was hold hands and walk around the lake.
I remember lunch by the Furman Bell Tower most vividly. I remember it vividly because of Diane and her bologna sandwich. A lack of words notwithstanding, Diane came up with some interesting things to do with a bologna sandwich other than eat it. In all my sophomoric sophistication, I was totally grossed out. At the end of lunch, which seemed to go on forever, I put my hand back in Diane’s now slobbery hand, and off we went, which goes to show you just how much I was trying to impress Ginger.
I don’t know if this was Ginger’s purpose, although I suspect it might have been, but Diane had a bigger impact on my life than teaching me some new things to do with a bologna sandwich. Much bigger.
Diane called words themselves into question. I thought she and I were different when we met. We were not. Either I had been right that the meaning of life had to do with words, in which case Diane did not have much value at all, or I had been getting things very badly wrong. It was, of course, the latter.
What was happening, although it took me some time to realize it, was the Word had become flesh and was dwelling near me. That’s what I learned from Diane. It is no doubt for that reason that I proposed to Ginger at the site of the bologna sandwich lunch on May Day Play Day two years later.
Thank you, Diane. And Happy May Day Play Day.
Agape,
Bishop Stacy Sauls
Founder and President