Several years ago, I participated in a guided dialogue via email with a group of people with disabilities. One of our earliest assignments was to describe ourselves in terms of our limitations. Our facilitator said that typically people have difficulty with this assignment; and throughout the time that I knew him, he maintained that he thought that I ws unaware of how limited I was, how much information was unavailable to me because I could not see. Every time he brought this up, I became angry; and I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to tell him that I did not need to know the precise amount of information that my eyes could not see in order to understand my limitations. In fact, having that much information would probably make me feel useless in society. There is no point, in my opinion, in creating a complete catalog of all the things in the world which I cannot see.
My friend, the facilitator, was a doctor whose experiences were primarily with people who had mobility impairments. He admitted to me that he was not very familiar with blindness at the beginning of our dialogues. I learned much, as I am sure he did, from these dialogues. I went in 2004 to meet some of the participants in person in California–some of us were native English speakers, and others were native Spanish speakers. We all learned, among other things, that community can transcend both disability and language barriers.
My friend is now deceased. I miss him–there is so much I wish that we could still talk about! I still learn from thinking about the things we discussed. He helped to reignite my interest in disability studies and theology when I had begun to lay it down. I have since realized that I have unique things to contribute to this dialogue.
Many disability studies scholars speak from the point of view of how ableist perspectives and body imagery affect people with disabilities. In most of my readings, this literature has concerned people with visible disabilities. I have been able to appreciats their perspectives due to my acquaintance and friendships with people who share those disabilities. However, I do not connect with these things emotionally. I know people who are blind and who feel strongly about the appearance of their eyes–some of them may connect in some way with theology that focuses on the body and redeeming the body image. I, however, need something different. I have finally come to realize why.
What my friend and I never got to talk about was how much of my life has been darkened by the word “can’t”–not because I said it, but because other people presumed it. Like many other people who are blind, I often had to advocate to be allowed to do something after having been prepared for just that thing in advance. It might be taking a state achievement test along with my peers–“It’s timed, and we wouldn’t want her to not be able to finish.” (I finished before anyone else.) It might be living in the same dorm as everyone else on a college campus–“We put all the blind people over here.” “There is no need for all of us to be on one wing.” It might be taking a science lab–“We’ll just excempt you from the physics lab and you can just take the lecture part.” “My graduation requirement is still 8 hours of science, and I do like physics. There must be a way we can do this.” (I took the lab.) Sometimes I did not win. “Will you be all right living so far away from your parents?” asked a person who interviewed me for a job located 100 miles away from my home. Did she think I couldn’t survive life on my own?
Theology and disability, for me, is about much more than what images communicate to the church about bodies and value. It is a very practical theology about how we value each other, how we respond to hardship in life, how we care for our bodies, and in fact what we expect of each other. When Jesus met people with disabilities, he expected impossible things of them. Why do we expect so little of each other? Why are our relationships based on the limitations we assume people have?
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