A Spirituality
of Disability: The Christian Heritage as both Problem and Potential
By
Studies in Christian Ethics,
vol.16 no. 2, 2003, pp. 21-35
On
the basis of a phenomenological epistemology, according to which human
knowledge is projected from the human body, spiritual development is here
regarded as the transcendence and transfiguration of the body as a biological
organism. The transfiguration and resurrection of Jesus Christ authorises and
illustrates this view of spiritual development within the Christian tradition.
This view of knowledge as embodied enables us to interpret disability as
epistemologically creative. The blind body knows and lives in a blind world; the
deaf body a deaf world. Each human world has its own distinctive
characteristics and its own limited autonomy. The human worlds relate to each
other along a continuum because although different bodies generate different
worlds, there is only one human species.
The
criteria of transcendence and transfiguration also apply to the spiritual
development of disabled people, although in each case relative to the
characteristics of the body which is disabled, transcended, and transfigured.
This enables us to conceive of a multiplicity of known and lived human worlds.
This
has two advantages. First, the plurality of the human worlds enables us to
construct a spirituality of disability which is not based upon a theory of
deficiency. As long as the disabilities are mainly understood as lacking
something, their intrinsic character as worlds will be overlooked, and they
will be understood as mere exclusions from the big world. This view of
disability challenges the unconscious hegemony of the average, the majority,
and thus opposes all ideologies of domination, whether they are aware or not of
their power.
Second,
this view of the spirituality of disability extends our understanding of
humanity itself by denying exclusive humanity to the majority and insisting
upon the genuinely human character of the disabled worlds. In this way,
humanity is enriched through variety. Plurality is richer than uniformity, and
the different human worlds need each other to achieve full humanness.
Although
the Christian tradition may be thought of as supporting this view of
spirituality, the Bible does not endorse a plurality of human worlds but
depicts a single ideal humanity which fell away into various kinds of alleged
imperfection and abnormality. The Bible story tells us that these will be overcome when the perfectly
human is restored. Jesus, who according to this world history is perfect
humanity, is hailed as the messianic
agent for the restoration of perfect and uniform humanity.
Thus
the question arises as to whether we should look upon the Christian tradition
as a problem rather than a potential. The truth is that elements of both
problem and potential may be found in the Bible and in the various theological
doctrines. A first attempt to explore this ambiguity may be to list the
elements on one side and on the other.
Human
spirituality is that which transfigures and transcends the biology of the
human. When we speak of transcending the biological, we refer to those potentials
of the human being which enable him or her to make the biological organism
instrumental to non-biological purposes. These potentials include abstract
thought, imagination, empathy, the ability to represent biological experiences
symbolically, and the capacity to integrate experience and knowledge around a
significance or a meaning which goes beyond the pleasure and pain of the
individual. Language and money are the two finest achievements of the human
tendency towards the spiritual, because being relational in their character,
they articulate and facilitate the experience of solidarity with other
people. The capacity of the human will
to become integrated with others, or to dominate others, as the case may be, is
incarnate in money and in language.
When
we speak of spirituality as transfiguring the biological, we refer to the fact
that the biological is never left behind by transcendence. The body is not the
antithesis of the spiritual but its organ. We should not contrast the spiritual
with the material, nor should we regard the spiritual and the biological as
being on altogether different levels. Rather, we should speak of
transfiguration: the material infused with the spiritual, the body becoming the
form of inter-subjectivity.
In
Christian faith, the typical representation of spirituality is to be found in
the story of the transfiguration of Jesus (Mk 9:2-8). The body was not left
behind but shone with radiance. This could not occur to an isolated body, but
only in the context of others, and of the speech which links person to person.
This is why Jesus is seen on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses and
Elijah, and they are speaking with each other (v.4). Even the resurrection does
not leave his body behind (Lk 24:39, Jn 20:6f), and with the ascension, the
transfigured body is raised to universality (Acts 1:9). The ascension into
heaven of the prophet Elijah (2 Kgs 2:11), the figure of the resurrected Christ
(Jn 20:27) and the bodily assumption of Mary all indicate that Christian faith
confesses a biological spirituality, and believes in the resurrection of the
body as the fulfilment of human potential (Ro 8:23, 1 Cor 15:42, Phil 3:21) .
Nevertheless,
the body is transcended as well as transfigured. This takes place when the body
of the other person is valued like my own body, felt like my own body, and even
loved as my own body (Eph 5:28). The body which is not transcended remains
encircled within the membrane of the skin. Egocentricity is the enclosed body.
The senses, although they appear to open the body out upon the world, do not do
so unless they are met by the answering sense of the other. In the reciprocity
of eye contact, or skin contact, or conversational contact, we transcend the
biological nature which is transfigured in the process.
If we agree
that spirituality should be regarded as that which transfigures and transcends
the body, the way is open for a consideration of the epistemological
implications of such an embodied spirituality. Recent work in the philosophy of
phenomenology and in the philosophical implications of brain research have illuminated the body as the origin and
main determinate of our knowledge. The world we know is the world as projected by
our bodies.
If someone is
born into a disabled condition, the world generated by that state is formed
from the earliest days. One is, so to speak, born a citizen of that world. On
the other hand, if one becomes disabled at a later stage, whether during
childhood or in adult life, one experiences the shock of losing one’s world.
The tendency is for resistance, and then for a terrible sense of loss, and then
the disabled body shrinks back into itself. One becomes extremely conscious of
having an impaired body, whether it is merely a broken arm or leg, or losing
the power of speech following a stroke, or loss of mobility after an accident.
It is then true that whereas most people live in the world, disabled people
live in their bodies. Not only is this the result of the shock of losing the
native world, but it may be particularly acute following sensory deprivation,
because the normal knowledge which one had of the world has now shrunk into the
body itself. The person recently blinded becomes very aware of internal body
sensations.
It is at this
point that the recently disabled person either renounces the old world and
accepts the new, now disabled body, or on the other hand refuses to let the old
world go, insists on continuing to try to live within it, and perhaps longs and
prays for the miracle which will restore not just the former body but the
former world. The painful choice is made more poignant by the fact that since
the everyday world of the average person is not conscious of its distinctive
character as a world but imagines
itself to be the only reality, the
newly disabled person cannot imagine any other world than the one he or she has
now left. The normal world regards the disabled person as banished, excluded,
deprived, as it were, of citizenship rights, and as therefore to be pitied and
helped.
As the
recently disabled person recovers from the shock of the fractured and now lost
world, a new world gradually begins to dawn. In the case of a blind person,
this is the world of touch, smell and hearing, which although at first
disintegrated by the loss of the unifying power of sight, gradually link up
with each other again. The body regroups, consciousness reforms itself, and a
new world appears. In the case of the
person who has lost hearing, a new experience of living within vision
appears, and communication becomes focused on the hands. The body builds up its
new world, relating to it with new powers and functions for different parts of
the body. In the case of the blind person, the hands are no longer mainly used
to do things, but now to know things and finally to appreciate beauty.
As the new
world is gradually built up, put into place with innumerable fits and starts,
the disabled person is no longer confined to the broken body, but begins again
to inhabit a world. No longer merely an exile, he or she applies for and is
granted citizenship of a new place. The body is again integrated within its
world and the former world remains as a dream, an occasional flash of regret, a
pang, perhaps, only to be overtaken by the intrinsic meaning of the new world
within which one must not only exist but must live.
The process of
world formation may be thought of as transfiguring the body, since the person
now extends from the body into which life had at first shrunk, and feels its
way out again. Under certain circumstances, and for certain persons, the
disabled body may be not only transfigured but transcended. One sometimes finds
oneself forgetting that one is, in the opinion of the old world, disabled.
Needless to say, access to the new information technology is an enormous boon
to many disabled people, opening up for them again a world of knowledge and
communication which transcends the limits of their disabled bodies, just as it
transcends the limits of any body.
In this way,
we may begin to speak of a spirituality of disability, the spirituality which
transfigures and then transcends the body, whilst springing from it and remaining united with it, a spirituality made all the
more powerful, in some cases, by the fact that it is created as an achievement
whereas the world into which one was originally born was always taken for
granted. The spiritualised disabled person has been born again, with fresh
awareness of the world, and of the plurality of worlds. No longer confined
through the deception of everyday experience within an absolute world, the
spiritualised disabled person finds, often to his or her surprise, that life is
enjoyed at a deeper level.
The transfiguration of disability reveals
itself as global. This means that the disabled body projects a world which is
as distinctive and as autonomous as other worlds, although perhaps not as
independent, in view of the fact that the world of the normal or average is by
far the most powerful.
One of the
most important aspects of the spirituality of disability lies in the challenge
which it offers to hegemony. The world of the able-bodied usually conceives of
itself as the only world. Those whose bodies are not able are excluded. As an
example, let us take the situation of sighted people. Although sighted people
know, with varying degrees, that they are sighted, it is unusual to find a
sighted person who knows that he or she lives within a world which is a
projection of the sighted body. In other words, although sighted people know
that they know through sight, they seldom realise the epistemic implications of
vision. Sight projects a world and
sighted people are embodied within that world. They know that there are others
but they seldom know that there are other worlds. Therefore they think of
others as being excluded from their own world. Thus they unconsciously create a
discourse of dominance.
When
this ideology of domination is internalised by disabled people, as is almost
inevitable in the first instance, the result is a loss of self-esteem, a loss
of soul which is the accompaniment of identification with the marginalised and
the excluded. In this way, the power of the present absolute world is
acknowledged.
There can be
no dialogue between the disabled and the non-disabled until the plurality of
human worlds is recognised. As long as the non-disabled world retains its
hegemony, the relations which it has with the world of disability will be those
of care for the helpless, and of patronisation. The relationship will be that
of charity, of condescension, and not that of mutual respect based upon
acknowledgement of otherness.
However, once
it is recognised that the apparently single world must be pluralised, then the relative
breaks down the absolute. The absolute is incapable of dialogue. In the
relations between able and disabled people, that is significant but perhaps not
central for the future of our species. However, once the hegemony of the single
world in the relation between able and disabled people is broken, a challenge
is mounted against all other human worlds which claim to be absolute. The world
of the globalised market which claims to be the only way forward for the world
is challenged by other possible human futures. The world of absolute religious
truth is likewise challenged to give way to multiplicity. Disability offers us
a way of dialogue, and so the
spirituality of disability becomes politically significant. Inside the money-curtain, the communities of
disability have the potential to become subversive elements, while outside the
money-curtain disabled communities bear witness to the sufferings of a
dehumanised humanity, colonies within colonies, the marginalised within the
marginalised, the frontier of the human, where Christ dwells.
We have seen
that a spirituality of disability makes a contribution to the wider
spirituality of the human by breaking down the absolute world of the powerful.
There is a second aspect to this: a spirituality of disability helps us to gain
a wider concept of the human itself.
If the body were to be thought of as having
an immediate capacity to represent and symbolise the mind, the spirit, or the
character, then the disabled body would indicate a disabled mind, a tortured
face would indicate a tortured spirit, a blind body would indicate spiritual
blindness. Any spirituality which the
disabled body might have would be but a remnant, a fractured representation of
a higher and more perfect spirituality, but now the transfigured body is no
longer only the body of the athlete transfigured through motion and skill, or
only the body of the dancer, transfigured through the beauty of rhythm and
form, but includes the broken body transfigured towards otherness and
self-transcendence. This is because the pain of the body and the social
marginalisation of the body which is different from that of others, can lead
the transfigured disabled body into an identification with a more comprehensive
bodily range, whereas the body of the athlete or the dancer is caught up into
the transfiguring beauty of skill and motion but does not in itself imply or
demand sympathetic identification with a range of bodily experiences. If the
variety of human bodies is thought of as being arranged in the form of a
pyramid, social values would place the beautiful, skilful body at the apex but
it is at the base that most area is covered, where the most comprehensive
variety of bodies is understood. The transfigured disabled person knows the
variety of human conditions and thus has an opening into other worlds.
Emptiness understands fullness in a way that fullness cannot understand
emptiness. It is true that the empty desires the full, and the full fears the empty
but in its transfigured state, the broken body may learn to be beyond desire
and fear.
Because
disabled people are socially defined as those who are not average, not normal,
but are disabled, no longer abled, they are necessarily side-lined, marginalised,
pigeon-holed, stereotyped. They themselves, however, have the capacity to
transfigure the broken body, the marginalised body, into a symbol of inclusion
through sacralising the extremities of humanity. It is the very provinciality
of disability which enables it to grasp the territory of the human, while the
city, looking out upon the provinces, thinks that it itself is everything.
So a
spirituality of disability not only pluralises the human world, it extends it.
Although
the Christian tradition faces both ways in the struggle between the rich and
the poor, the powerful and the powerless, it certainly does not face both ways
in the struggle between the hegemony of the single world and the plurality of
the human worlds. On the contrary, the Bible is almost unequivocal in
expressing the point of view of the able world. God is portrayed as an
able-bodied God. God has powers of sight beyond the normal, powers of knowledge
beyond the average. God is super-abled. It is inconceivable that God should be
a disabled God. ‘Surely the arm of the
Lord is not too short to save, nor God’s ear too dull to hear’ (Is 59:1). The
result is a humanity of convergence, where the signs of redemption are to be
found in the recall of the peripheries to the centre. ‘Then will the lame leap
like the deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy’ (Is 35:6). This convergent
humanisation is modelled upon the perfection of the creation, in which
everything reproduces according to its kind (Gen 1:24f) so assuring the stability
and the continuation of the characteristics of normality. The convergence is
rooted in the domination of the majority and returns in eschatological visions
toward the singularity of the average.
Jesus is the
archetype of this normality, without spot or blemish (1 Pe 1:19) and without
deviation from the image of God which is the normal (Heb1:3). He takes little
children in his arms (Mk10:16), accepts the caresses of working women (Lk
7:38), and touches the outcast (Mk 1:41). He recognises the spiritual
authenticity of those who lie outside the orthodoxies of Judaism (Lk 7:9) and
recognises that those who do the will of God in all nations are his brothers
and sisters (Mk 3:35). Only the disabled seem incapable of inclusion within
this universal realm of accepting love. We see the force of this if we ask the
naïve question why there were not disabled people among the group of close
disciples of Jesus. There were none, and it would have been impossible that
there should have been any, for the simple reason that Jesus would have
restored such people to full health. Indeed, such restoration becomes in itself
symbolic of the experience of becoming a disciple. The blind Bartimaeus sits
beside the road begging but the sighted Bartimaeus follows Jesus in the way (Mk
10:52). The struggle of Jesus against disability is his contest with the powers
of Satan (Lk 13:16). As eschatological Son of Man he actualises the convergence
of which the prophets spoke (Matt 8:17), and as magical healer he brings the
disabled out of the power of darkness (Lk 11:20).
Yet he himself becomes blinded (Mk 14:65, Lk
22:64), immobilised (Mk 15:24), and marginalised (Gal 3:13, Heb 13:12). At
first he accepts the infirmities of humanity by healing them, but finally he
accepts the infirmities of humanity by participating in them, by becoming one
of them. ‘He was despised, shunned by all, pain-racked and afflicted by
disease’ (Is 53:3).
Jesus
the miracle worker, the one who did not have disabled people among his
disciples, is the Jesus who has lived on most powerfully in the church. Since
blindness was a symbol of sin and unbelief, it has continued to represent
stubbornness, ignorance and insensitivity. The charismatic healers down the
centuries have had the satisfaction of knowing that whenever they tried to heal
blind people they were involved in the mission against Satan, and Jesus who
exorcised the powers of evil was seen as blessing the work of every evangelist
who tried to drive out the blind demons.
This
has had consequences for both good and evil as far as disabled people are
concerned. In the first place, it has meant that blind people have been cared
for by those who believed that they were imitating Christ in doing so. The
literal nature of this imitation of Christ can be seen in the fact that
Christian missions tended to be more active towards the various diseases and
infirmities which were the object of the healing of Jesus. To heal the blind,
the deaf, and those who had leprosy was obviously to imitate Christ; Christian
missions towards those who have diseases not mentioned in the gospels have not
been quite so prolific. On the other hand, granted the social conditions, it
was better that blind people should receive compassion and care than that they
should starve. However, there was an alternative policy which depended upon
making a distinction between disease and disability, between those who were
sick within a certain world and those who lived in other human worlds. This
would have meant accepting plural forms
of humanity, and this would have meant
qualifying or abandoning the biblical discourse of exclusion, in which the myth
of a
perfect creation leading to a perfect restoration would have been
abandoned. It would have meant accepting disabled people into ordinary
congregational life, and this would not have found an ideal model in the
gospels unless Jesus had had disabled people among his disciples, and given the
conditions of that day and the symbolic meaning of disability to which the
gospel writers were committed, that would have been impossible. I must refer to
my experience with a church for disabled people to which I was invited. They
told me that they found it necessary to meet together because the people in the
ordinary churches felt uncomfortable in their presence.
There
were two alternatives confronting the Christian movement. One option was
represented by the healing of blind Bartimaeus, and the other by the
blindfolded Christ. In one tradition the removal of blindness becomes an
allegory of entering into the Christian life; in the other tradition blindness
itself is made sacred by the presence of Christ within it. In the first
tradition a rhetoric which disparages blind people becomes essential to the
discourse of salvation; in the other possibility the treasure of redemption is
carried around in ‘jars of clay’ (2 Cor 4:7). In one tradition the glory of God
is seen when a blind person becomes a sighted person (Jn 9:3); in the other
possibility, the grace of God is experienced in weakness (2 Cor 12:9).
Paul
saw it all very clearly. The way of love is preferable to the way of miracles
(1 Cor 12:31). The plurality of bodily parts is preferable to the domination of
the uniform (1 Cor 12:12). The thorn in the flesh is a greater witness to the
grace of God than the heavenly religious experience (2 Cor 12:1-9). In the four
gospels, blindness is symbolic of lack of faith but in the letters of Paul and
in Hebrews, it is faith that is blind (Ro 8:24, 2 Cor 5:7, Heb 11:1).
The
ambiguity of the rhetoric in which blindness may sometimes stand for sin and
sometimes for the achievement of faith, is not of mere literary or even
theological interest. It is a question of the identity of blind people and of
how the church is to regard them. This itself is indicative of the wider issue
of disability: how disabled people are to achieve identity and how society is
to grant them an accepted and honoured place. At an earlier point in our
discussion, the rhetoric of wholeness which drew its strength from the
disparagement of disability seemed to be so overwhelming in the pages of the
Bible that it was unclear how the Bible could even be thought of as being on
both sides of this conundrum. All the power seemed to lie on the able side. Now
that we have considered the matter more deeply, it is clear that there is
ambiguity, but it has been suppressed beneath the power of uniformity. Why did
it take two thousand years for the Bible to be identified as a book written by
sighted people? Why did it take so long to recognise that the sighted people’s
Bible has excluded blind people? It is because uniformity goes with centrality,
with authority, and with power. The anti-disabilist rhetoric of the powerful
church grew side by side with, and for the same reasons as, the anti-semitic
discourse. Disabled people and Gypsies participated with Jews in the Holocaust.
In the dichotomised world-view of the seventeenth century, of which the
twentieth century was the inheritor, the world was divided between white people
and the others, Christians and others, the male and the female, the body and
the deviant body.
One
of the problems for a theology of disability, which would speak in a Christian
way about the spirituality of disability, lies in the fact that almost all
theological authors, being themselves sighted people, write unconsciously from
a sighted perspective which has the effect of emotionally and symbolically
excluding blind people. I think that the same is true of other disabilities,
particularly those who do not have normal hearing, but blindness is the only
example of which I have intimate knowledge. An example would be the continued
use of the symbol of the face to represent human relationships, and to represent
the presence of God. Theologians and philosophers who do this, whether Jewish
or Christian, are guided by the Biblical imagery of the face of God, which
represents the presence of God. However, in writing like this it is all too
easy to overlook the fact that the human experience of the face differs widely.
Not only are there faces which are conventionally beautiful or ugly, but there
are many diseases of the face, people unable to move the facial muscles, people
who have suffered terrible deformations of the face due to injuries and
accidents, and there are mental conditions which make it impossible for people
to recognise the human face, and there are blind people, who can touch the face
but cannot see it and for whom the experience of the face is profoundly
different. To touch a pair of smiling lips is not the same as being smiled at.
This unconscious hegemony of the sighted is an instance of an ideology of
dominance, and it must be questioned, if Christian faith is to be genuinely
open to all sorts and conditions of people.
The
Christian tradition also includes positive elements which could be developed
into a theology of disability. These include
1
The blindfolded Christ.
2
The general picture of Christ as suffering and as being immobilised and identified
with the abnormal, the cursed.
3
The theology of incarnation in which God accepts a body, leading us to
believe that it is through the body that our faith should be matured.
4
The incarnation as an indication of emptying, of God’s acceptance of
vulnerability, of the abandonment of the divine perfection (Phil 2:5-8).
5
The theology of the Heavenly Session in which Christ shows his wounds to
the Father in intercession for humanity. This indicates that the body of the
ascended Christ is not a perfect body, but a body of scars (Heb 7:25).
6
The theology of St Paul and the letter to the Hebrews in which
sightlessness becomes a symbol of faith.
7
The experience of Paul in discovering that the strength of God was
perfect in his own experience of disability.
8
The varieties of gifts which are given to the church which suggest a
rejection of the monolithic body in favour of the variegated body.
9
The plural theology in which many worlds are recognised, God being the
Lord of all worlds.
The
concept of spirituality as being an inter-subjective elevation of the
biological leading a person beyond self-centredness into solidarity with others
when applied to disabled people suggests a spirituality of various human
worlds. The advantage of this is that it enables us to take each other
seriously in whatsoever state or condition we may be, and prevents us from
looking upon any member of the human family as worthless or as a human deviant.
The educational significance of this is that to understand disability does not
require compassion, let alone pity, but it does demand that one should be able
to enter into a world very different from one’s own. One must learn to see the
way the other worlds look from within the world which one has entered. This
might be done through studying the poetry written by quadriplegics, attending
the Para-Olympics, reading the literature of pathography. Another educational
approach would be by means of denunciation. One could gather examples of the
use of expressions like blind and dumb to indicate a state of sin in, for
example, a typical hymn book. Examples of the use of disparaging metaphors
based upon various disabilities could be gathered from the newspapers. Yet
another approach might be to heighten awareness of the senses through the
temporary elimination of one sense. The easiest sense to suspend is sight, but
the experience of being forbidden to speak for a day or spending a day in a
wheelchair can be just as enlightening.
What are the
implications of this approach for the education of disabled children and
adults? One of the controversies within special education is the question of
whether disabled children should be educated for successful life in the larger
society or whether they should be educated for successful life within the world
they already live in. This controversy was particularly sharp in the
case of those with profound hearing loss, and has only gradually been partially
resolved in a deeper respect for the integrity of the deaf condition and the
recognition that the culture of the visual has its own characteristics. In
the history of the education of people with a visual loss, there has been a similar conflict. The predominance of
embossed, punctilinear script over embossed shapes of the letters of the Latin
alphabet is a case in point. Punctilinear script, the most widespread example
of which is the type devised by Louis Braille, is recognisable by touch more
easily than the embossed forms of printed letters, but is less convenient for
sighted people. Braille only won the struggle when blind people got control of
the agencies. The approach of this
present study is a contribution to the growing tendency to recognise the
integrity and distinctive nature of each form of disability, and lays emphasis
upon the need to help each disabled child to achieve wholeness within the
characteristics of that particular disabled state. The approach
of this present study is a contribution to the growing tendency to recognise
the integrity and distinctive nature of each form of disability, and lays
emphasis upon the need to help each disabled child to achieve wholeness within
the characteristics of that particular disabled state. For social and economic
reasons, disabled people must also live in the greater world, but this can be achieved
most successfully if the adaption to the larger society springs not from a
sense of deficiency and loss but from a position that has come to realise the
intrinsic character of the world in which one lives in the body.
I realised
this in the course of preparing my project ‘Cathedrals through Touch and
Hearing’, that set out to equip the English cathedrals with facilities for
blind and partially sighted visitors. I found that most of the cathedral guides
wanted to show the sighted person’s cathedral to the blind person, and did not
understand that such knowledge must necessarily remain in words only. How
can a blind person be interested in stained glass? Only by way of general
information about the cathedral. Sighted guides would place the tip of my
finger on a tiny rose bud, cleverly carved amongst the intricate shapes of the
leaves and branches of a chair leg, something that would take the blind hand a
long time to appreciate, while the loveliness to the hand of the cold brass of
the smooth communion rail would not be mentioned. Gradually my project team
realised that blind people must be taught to acquire first hand knowledge of
the cathedral, and this meant teaching them to use their bodies in contact with
the fabric in order to construct a distinctive blind cathedral. We realised
that there are at least two cathedrals - one for sighted and the other for
blind people. Each has its beauties and its needs.
This approach
is also significant for Christian education within the churches. Not only is it
a step towards a more inclusive congregation, but the challenge to the
able-bodied hegemony requires a new way of interpreting the Bible and the hymn
books, and this in turn suggests new directions for Christian spirituality. The
restrictions placed on personal development when people remain in a literal,
one dimensional stage is removed when the unacceptable consequences of biblical
literalism are exposed. The problem of the relation between the first chapter
of Genesis and contemporary science can perhaps be resolved without abandoning
literalism, but how can the biblical negativity towards disabled people be
maintained? The challenge to the moral authority of the Bible suggested by a
theology of disability is more difficult to resolve, and new understandings of
the spirituality of the Bible are demanded.
Is there any
hope of the success of this enterprise? Is not the prejudice against disabled
people so ingrained in our religious tradition and so unconsciously reinforced week by week by readings from
scripture and in the singing of many traditional hymns that there
can be little chance of new attitudes emerging? Perhaps this is so, but
attitudes do change, and the unconscious prejudice of today may become the deliberate bias of tomorrow, and with
this greater awareness, there is hope of reform. Change is taking place more
rapidly in the world than in the church, so once again let the world write the agenda, and life inside the churches may
also change.
We
have seen that there is a natural spirituality of disability which points to
the variety of human bodies and of human experiences as making up the whole
human world, and that this poses a challenge to the structures of unequivocal
power which rule our world. We have also seen that to some extent the Christian
faith produces and collaborates with this hegemony of power. We have also seen
from the rich variety of its ambiguity that the disabilist theologian may be
able to recover elements which may form the basis for a theology of disability.
Such a theology will link with a spirituality of disability in the sense that
it will give specific religious articulation to the natural, experienced
spirituality of the various conditions of disabled people, as each learns how
to transfigure and transcend the limits of his or her biology. The position
outlined in this article is not without its own ambiguity. One would not expect
doctors to give up the fight against disease on the grounds that it is good to
encourage a variety of human worlds, nor would we expect an ophthalmologist not
to do his or her best to save someone’s sight because of his respect for the
blind world. The concept of an epistemological world is not intended to avoid
the varieties of human suffering, but to honour the distinctiveness of the
experience of those who permanently reside in various states. Let us hope that
the Christian faith which has always motivated its adherents towards the
alleviation of suffering will prove equally effective in motivating Christians
to recognise variety and to challenge the concentrations of exclusive power.
© John M Hull 2002