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Although I could not know the tones of speech and even though the gap of communication was huge, I instinctively knew my parents’ love for me. I could not understand their words but I knew how helpless they felt. I knew how much they wanted to communicate with me and how hard they tried to help me understand them. Even as a child I developed a sensitivity and sympathy for the inadequacy that they felt. It is amazing that their struggle to communicate with me and to cope with my deafness was an example of love and service without words. This, and my parents’ religious practice, had already given me sight of God within them and would later motivate me in service to others. They showed me that there can be communication without words and to me this was something beautiful, like God.
I think I was fortunate. The love I received from my family somehow cushioned the lack of verbal communication between us and made it easier for me years later to forgive my parents for their limitations. Many of my deaf contemporaries never experienced that and grew up to feel resentful and damaged by the difficulties in communication that they had had with their families.
At that time parents were not encouraged to use sign language with their deaf children, as lipreading and speech were the preferred methods. As an adult, my pastoral work would teach me how much some deaf people have suffered as a result of this and many times I have found myself counselling others in forgiveness.
However, as a small child I too had many difficulties. I was a sensitive and nervous child, and at school I was often bullied or picked on by other children. It is difficult to put my finger on the reason for this, but from the beginning, I felt different from other deaf children. I felt clumsy and sometimes isolated in their company. I found it particularly hard to express how I felt, partly because of communication difficulties but partly because my parents could not share their feelings with me either. Instead, I was rather withdrawn. I preferred to watch from the sidelines and because of this other people often considered me a mysterious child. Already as a young boy, I was developing a resilience and a quiet acceptance of adversity that would allow me to face whatever life would throw at me without bitterness or anger. What I did not know then was that there were other things already affecting me - my sight, which must by then have been less than perfect, and my poor balance. It would be almost another thirty years before these things would become clear to me.
My difficulties with communication also came out in my behaviour at home. From time to time I would deliberately break an ornament or tear up papers or even a precious photograph. It was sheer frustration that I felt, rather than defiance or anger. This was the only way I could communicate my distress. My parents would reprimand me with a warning slap on the leg, but I knew that they felt inadequate because they could not reason with me or help me to under stand my behaviour. They would move things out of my reach and, not understanding or being understood, I would stamp my feet in rage.
Once, when I was seven, while my parents were in the kitchen washing up after our Friday night meal, I gazed at the lighted candles left on the sideboard in the dining room and I was entranced by the dancing flames. I took the candlesticks and placed them on the windowsill behind the lace curtains and close to the heavy velvet drapes that hung in front of them. The lace caught fire and I watched with delight the beauty of the flames as the fire took hold. Immediately someone came to the front door and told my parents. They rushed into the room, pulled down the curtains and extinguished the fire.
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