Who am I? I am an old man. I use a wheelchair. I had polio in 1948. I cannot remember a time when I could walk and run like other people, or when I wasn’t obviously and visibly different. I have lived with pain. But I have had a good and conventionally successful life – a long and loving marriage, two wonderful adult children, grandchildren and a rewarding career.
I am a Christian. But there was a time when I left the Church in my early teens for a period of about 15 years. In significant part this was related to the then prevailing attitudes to disability in the Church. Other factors with this disenchantment included my Church’s negative preoccupation with sex and its lack of interest in social justice issues. My Parish was broad church Anglican with great regard for liturgy, but less for theology or the Bible. It was in Brisbane’s then wealthiest suburb.
The prevailing theology in the 1950s and early 1960s saw disability as a consequence of sin and held out the possibility of healing, but only if there were sufficient faith.
For someone with a disability the association of that disability with sin was painful. Even worse was an experience of attending a visiting American healing mission (tent and all – not associated with, but in the wake of the 1959 Billy Graham crusade to Australia) where repudiation of sin and depth of faith were loudly proclaimed as a precondition for healing. “Take up your bed and walk” – but none of us paralytics passed the tests.
Disability and sin
Disability, pain and death were seen as the consequence of a sinful, fallen world. Or sometimes personal sin, or the sin of forebears. This reflected the conventional creation and fall narrative in Genesis, Numbers (14:18) and a narrow interpretation of the healing of the paralysed man (Luke 4: 20-23) or the lame man at the pool at Bethesda (John: 5 14). Seeing disability as a consequence of sin (even corporate sin) is disheartening for the disabled. Imagine someone who is morbidly obese haunted by the lingering worry of the deadly sin of gluttony. Is this a welcoming and hospitable way for the Church to respond to someone with body dysphoria? We know that weight management at the extremes is not a matter of willpower and it is not a sin to be fat.
I thought the Genesis narrative, read literally, obviously wrong. We knew better the age and origin of the world and man. We knew there was no paradisical Garden of Eden. The Church had long accepted the reality of the science, including evolution. Why then did it cling so consistently to the metaphor of the Fallen World as an explanator of human sin and its correlates disability, pain and death?
True, our world wasn’t perfect. It was terrible — red in tooth and claw — but it was also beautiful. Weren’t pain and death essential to evolution which had led to sentient beings and moral consciousness? Weren’t they inherent to what it means to be human? Wasn’t evolution part of God the Creator’s plan? Why couldn’t the Church accept the idea of a God with self-imposed limitations? After all, wasn’t this consistent with the granting of free will which means that not all that happens is God’s will? And wasn’t free will a necessary correlate of sin – a choice to not act in accordance with the two great commandments?1 Wasn’t a God with self-imposed limitations preferable to one who intervened whimsically to cure or not cure, to kill or save?
It was only by answering all these questions with a heartfelt “Yes!” that I felt able to come back to the Church, even though I knew that my views would be regarded as heretical by many. But why come back at all? Because I craved a loving empathetic God who could share my life in all its dimensions and give me the opportunity for spiritual renewal in life, spiritual resurrection in life, and refresh my desire to live according to the two great commandments.
Imago Dei – created in the image of God
Genesis 1:27 tells us we are created in the image of God. But is that all of us? How do we imagine God? Do we depart from that image? Is God preternaturally beautiful and perfect – omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent? Are we, the disabled, really in the image of God or are we flawed products, seconds as it were?
But once you admit the possibility of a God with limitations, it becomes possible to imagine a God like one, and indeed all, of us. A “sip pull” God as envisaged by Nancy Eiesland – a quadriplegic God who moves his wheelchair by sucking or blowing on a tube. This not so much a fractal God as a mosaic one who is a composite of the whole human condition – so all of us can see ourselves in the image of God. For us and our salvation he became truly human.
This is easy to do for bodily disabilities, but more challenging for psycho-social ones. Can we construct a God with cognitive disabilities, schizophrenia or dementia, a neuro-divergent God?
The radically empathetic God and the suffering of the disabled
A complement, or alternative, to the mosaic God is the radically empathetic God. Jurgen Moltmann wrote: “A God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either.” Where was God in the Concentration Camps, he asked, “God was present and suffered with the victims. Their death cries were his”.
For me, this is an intensely powerful image – God might not be able to reverse suffering, but he can envelop us with his full understanding of us, suffer with us and grant us the grace to live with what can’t be changed. And in the words of Ecclesiastes “enjoy our work” here on earth.
A (very) personal eschatology and resurrection
We know that Christ will come again.
But will that be a physical return? Will the physical world be returned to a prelapsarian (non-evolutionary) state – innocent and unspoiled where the wolf will lie down with the lamb, the leopard with the kid, the lion with the calf (Isiah 11 6) and where none will starve or die? Will this all happen at moment in time — the last trump — following Armageddon?
Does this mean that the disabled will be “restored” on Resurrection to perfection, even if their disability has been life-long? Some people with disabilities, and their loved ones, would live in that hope and find intense comfort in it. But what does this say to those who feel that their disability is essential to their individual essence?
Are there other ways of viewing end times and resurrection? One way that I have found helpful is to think of the end times, and Resurrection, as continuous and personal. By following the Lord we can experience rebirth in life. As we die our physical world ends. But with the Grace of God we enter his presence and the most deep and intense relationship, oneness, with him, our loved ones and the whole Creation. That is my hoped for Resurrection.
Roger was the longest-serving disabled Departmental Secretary (of Environment and Heritage) in the history of the APS – there have only been two since 1901. He contracted polio in 1948 and uses a wheelchair, leg braces and crutches.
Contributions to Pearls and Irritations
Your contribution will fund quality independent comment and analysis in Pearls and Irritations
Contribute
