A church of all and for all
Disabled People: Disturbing People? By Erik Cramb, January 2004
"Just as the body is one and has many members so it is with Christ"
1 Corinthians 12,12
"Responding to and fully including people with disabilities is not
an option for the churches of Christ. It is the church's defining characteristic.
Even though the secular world stresses independence, we are called to live
as a community dependent on God and on one another. No one of us should
be considered a burden for the rest; and no one of us is simply a burden
bearer."
A Church of All and for All. Paras 87 & 88
"We all bear one another's burdens in order to fulfil the law of Christ."
Galatians 6.2
I was speaking at a business leaders' dinner in Edinburgh earlier this year. In introducing me the chairman said, "I despise disability, therefore I admire the way Rev Cramb has overcome his to such an extent that we know him, not as a disabled person, but as a person of great abilities, even if he does support Partick Thistle … de dah, de dah de dah"
I was faintly disturbed by the introduction, not about the Thistle bit, you'll understand, absorbing such patronising nonsense goes with the territory. It was something else, something I couldn't quite put my finger on.
The introduction did in fact represent where I was at the time in my understanding of my disability, i.e., yes, I am a person with a disability, but please look at my abilities which are far more important and much more defining of who I am.
That understanding represented quite a journey from denial to acceptance.
It is possible to be a 'closet cripple', at least to yourself. You can - at the level of my disability - live as though it did not exist and drive on to compete with everybody else. It was the way I had been brought up by loving parents and with the benefit of a good education, reduced my disability to more of an inconvenience' than a 'handicap'. It was only much later I was to learn of the battle my parents had to fight to get me into an ordinary Glasgow primary school because the education authority wanted to send me to the perversely named "Normal School", a special school where 'crippled' and 'daft' children were sent for their 'education'. Normal was exactly what I strived to be, but not that kind of 'normal'. Believing you were 'normal', just like everyone else is one way of coping with the difficult days - the dark nights of asking "Why me? Why should I be different?"
I was over 40 years old, married, with five children, with a career before I began in any real way to acknowledge I was a person with a disability.
On Tuesday nights, summer and winter, the evening service in lona Abbey is described as a 'healing service'. It contains prayers for the sick by name and the opportunity for anyone present to come forward for the laying on of hands. I had been conducting the service in September 1984, a few months after returning to Scotland from Jamaica. Despite it being a cold night there was a good attendance at the service and about a dozen or so folk came forward for the laying on of hands - including one guy whose hair was full of a gooey gel - sticky hands quickly lowers the tone of your piety! As soon as the service ended I went to the Sacristy to pick up my anorak and, after wiping my hands as best I could on my hankie, made my way through the church to the refectory where a warming cup of tea awaited. I was stopped by a woman.
"1 saw the topsy-turvey kingdom of God tonight" she said.
"Oh aye," I replied warily, "how was that?"
"Your hand as the healing hand" she said and scuttled off
That was that. I thought about it of course. I thought it was a profound observation. I've told the story from time to time as a story of a wee kind of 'extra' ability I have that my colleagues don't have. It became a part of 'don't look at my disability, look at my many abilities' approach to life which was a big step beyond denial. In acknowledging my 'disability' to be a part of me, I had 'overcome' my 'handicap', I had come to terms with my body, I had reached what I believed to be a 'mature', and for the best part of 20 years, a 'satisfying' understanding of who I am But as St Paul irritatingly reminds us, "Our knowledge now is partial".
I received a document entitled, "A Church of All and for All - an interim statement" published in August 2003 by the disability network of the World Council of Churches that is a challenge to move from the traditional social and theological view of disability as loss, as something that illustrates the human tragedy, to disability as a gift of God. One of the principal authors turned out to be an old friend of mine, the Rev'd Graham Monteith a Church of Scotland minister who has cerebral palsy.
A church of all and for all
Here are some of the questions that are posed.
Is disability really something that shows weakness in human life? Is that in itself a limiting and oppressive interpretation? Do we not have to lake another, more radical, step?
Is disability really something that is limiting? All human beings have limitations Is not disability a gift from God rather than a limiting condition with which some persons have to live?
Disability as gift? is that really possible? It is certainly not an easy conclusion to imagine for any who have endured the dark night of 'Why me?' Am I now expected, or am I being challenged to take this 'disabled' part of me, this withered arm and weakened leg and say this is a special gift of God? No, its not that, for it would be just as unbalanced or false to put what was once denied or resented or loathed upon a pedestal in life. No, this is about recognising 'all of me' as gift.
This WCC document begins with the quotation "Christ came to tear down walls". (Eph 2.14) and then reminds us that until relatively recent times people with disabilities (especially mental disabilities) were actually kept behind walls, in institutions. Although now out in the community, many people with disabilities still find themselves isolated. "There are walls of shame; walls of prejudice; walls of hatred; walls of competition; walls of fear; walls of ignorance; walls of theological prejudice and cultural misunderstanding."
Most of us have been, to varying extents, marginalised by the attitudes and actions of society. Most disabled people have experienced some deprivation in their standards of living and employment opportunities. We can quickly become victim to discrimatory social trends. Market economies, for example encourage abortion.
All of that is self evident to any person with a disability or to anyone close to them. It is a straightforward record of our experience.
"We have come to an acceptance of our disabilities by diverse routes," say the document writers, "and have found that we have been assisted or hindered in our acceptance by the quality of medical care or education we have received." I have often thought that had it not been for our National Health Service that, as a matter of right, without question of cost, gave me in my infancy the best possible available treatment, and our education system that saw me through school and university, instead of being a net contributer to the economy for over 40 years, I would have, had I lived this long, been a continual cost upon the economy. Maybe at every 'healing service' prayers of thanksgiving should be offered for the social foresight of the post war Attlee government, together with prayers that such foresight be recaptured in our day.
A church of all and for all
The churches have not been a prophetic voice against the oppression and exclusion of people with disabilities. At 'healing services' it is often perceived that it is our 'lack of faith' that prevents God performing a healing miracle.
The challenge to the churches comes in acknowledging that people with disabilities who share the Christian faith "are united by their awareness of God's love and Jesus' compassion for sick and disabled people" but many have found that the churches' teaching on this truth is too limited and have looked for their own understanding." The 'why me' questions are a wrestling with God. "If so many disabled people have the ability to wrestle with God and to come to terms with God, the church must surely find ways of accepting the gifts we have to offer."
"It is not a question of meeting halfway, but of full acceptance."
People with disabilities disturb .- particularly people with learning difficulties. We disturb human notions of perfection, purpose, reward, success and status; we disturb notions of a God who rewards faith and virtue with health and prosperity. We can be slow, noisy, messy. The responses to this disturbance can be pity or disgust or banishment or fear. In any event, disabled people are rarely given any meaningful place in society.
"The way we respond to persons with disabilities" say the writers, "is essential to the message of the Cross."
"As Christians" they say, "we worship a God who became flesh and hung motionless and utterly incapacitated on the Cross. Ours is a God of vulnerability and woundedness." The church must also wrestle with God's choice of Moses with his speech impediment as the great leader of his people; of Naaman the mighty commander suffering from leprosy; of the Christ who rose with his wounds. Todays church might usefully reflect upon the fact that the Roman Catholic Church has had as its human head a Pope who, for more than a decade, has been severely disabled. If the church is to be for all and of all we need more examples of people with disabilities in leadership positions.
This is an interim statement, we are reminded, because all theology is theologia viatorurn., a theology of the road. It is written in the context of the unfinished history of God's salvation.
Traditionally the notion that humanity is made in the image of God has been that it is the mind and soul which is in God's image since the bodily can hardly represent the spiritual reality of a transcendent God. More recently the notion that humanity is made in the image of God is taken to mean that each of us is made in God's image and therefore each of us deserves to be equally respected. This has had the positive impact in encouraging respect for those who are not white, male, able - bodied and intelligent. But it has also exacerbated the prejudice that we should all be perfect (or strive to be perfect) since we are made in God's image. Glib theological talk about being made in the image of God 'needs to be countered with a sensitivity to the corporate nature of that image and that we have all fallen short of the glory (image) of God' (Rom.3.23)
We are in God's image because we are in Christ. With the breath of life, God imbued each person with dignity and worth. Humanity is created in the image and likeness of God with each human (black, white, brown, yellow; male, female; straight, gay, mean, generous; athletic, arthritic; young, old; fearful, hopeful,) bearing aspects of that divine nature. No one of us, nor group of us, reflects God frilly. Thus without the frill incorporation of persons who can contribute from the experience of disability, the Church falls short of the glory of God, and cannot claim to be in the image of God.
Full incorporation in the churches means we are not just there 'to be healed'. For people with disabilities the relationship between healing and disability is both ambiguous and ambivalent.
"For other theologians there is an obvious definition of healing evident in the Bible, for persons with disability healing is tentative, relative, ambivalent, ambiguous and ongoing." A theological statement about healing with respect to disability needs to be made with reference to salvation history. Healing can bring joy and relief It can also bring pain, frustration and serious theological questions. As we understand it now, "God wills the acceptance and inclusion of each in a community of interdependence where each supports and builds up the other, and where each lives life according to their circumstances and to the glory of God."
At the beginning of the 21 century sectors of the population who are unable to compete or to perform at the levels that society demands are diminished, resented, ridiculed, despised or, in truth, discarded. "Among them we find a high proportion of people with sensorial, motor and mental disabilities. We find them living in any of the great cities of the world; men and women of all backgrounds, colours, cultures and religions, who because they have a disability,live in abject poverty, hunger, dependence, preventable disease and maltreatment by those who are 'able'."
It is the role of the Church in this new century to face the reality of humanity in the image of a disabled Jesus, the reality of people with disabilities who are rejected and abandoned.
It will be in the embracing of that role the Church will find new life, new unity.