“Teach Me, and I Will Be Silent; Make Me Understand How I Have Erred.” (Job 6:24)

I would find him sitting in my examination room doing crossword puzzles, book after book of crossword puzzles. There he would be, a tall black man hunched over a difficult clue, gripping a dirty pencil, the nib worn. His face was scarred, as if someone had taken a woodcutter's tool and chiseled away at his skin—tunneling, excavating, and then discarding. Under the heavy-lidded eyes, which he would raise periodically with a “Do you really think so?” look, he would talk to me about his life. He reported his arguments with a neighboring tenant, his despair when the pain would recur, his weariness with poverty, and his despondency over being unemployable. “I don't know what I did wrong in life,” he would say with a smile.

“When I was 16,” he said one day without looking up, “my face started breaking out. ‘Bad thoughts,’ my mother would say. And I thought that was the worst. That was called cystic acne. Have you ever heard of it?” He shook his head, and looked up at me. “My mother would scrub my face with coarse soap until it bled, and then one day, she stopped. ‘You're doing something wrong,’ she said.” He left his home in the South several years later. He didn't remember …