Disability

Mindful to not attract the attention of my family, I go off to a quiet corner of my house, carefully shut the door—and cry.

This time, my cascade of tears began with a song on social media of a mother singing to her grown child of her heartfelt love, and of her delight in the wonderful person they grew up to be. With joy, she sings of her pride in her child’s life choices and the good life they built for themself. 

In this blog, I’ve written a great deal about the embodiment of equity within the Church for believers with disabilities. I’ve written about some of my experiences of physical and intellectual disability, my relationships to work and housing, healing, oppression, and inclusive language, and how Scripture can help us relate as a community to all those topics. These are good things!

It’s eviction day, and the neighbours are celebrating. 

For months, a derelict house at the end of our block has been rented by a struggling group of people for whom one glance reveals lives characterized by hardship. Their arrival shepherded a spirit of underlying unease into our normally peaceful street, through loud nighttime arguing, ongoing substance abuse, and suspected petty criminality. When a sheriff arrived this morning to force their departure and board up the house, abundant relief flowed from home to home.

In the summer of 2015, as I was walking out of the subway station at Bloor and Dufferin in Toronto, and about to get groceries for dinner, I heard a soft voice behind me. A young woman with dusty blonde hair called out to me; I thought she had an Australian accent but couldn’t be certain. She had noticed that I had cerebral palsy, and asked if she could pray for my “difficulty.” I told her that I was a systematic theologian, and didn’t really need prayer, but she was welcome to pray anyway. She did so passionately for a few moments, and graciously asked if I’d felt anything.

It was a happy, ordinary morning. 

As I readied the kids for school, the sun was shining and I was smiling: a good friend and I were meeting for coffee at a newly opened café that looked really nice. It had taken a month for us to align our schedules to make this visit happen.

My friend arrived at the café first—and this was when things went awry. On entering, she discovered the doorway was not only tight but also had a tiny step of about two inches. 

The other week, when I took my young sons to a children’s festival at a local church, it was joyous mayhem of the best kind. 

Throngs of youngsters jumped up and slid down the most enormous bouncy slide I’ve ever seen; bopped to a band playing at full volume in the sanctuary; ate a million sugar cookies; and raced between fun activity stations.

As I’ve said before on this blog, I’m a person with spastic cerebral palsy and other disabilities. That means that – like all people, let alone other folks with disabilities! – I require access to affordable housing. On one hand, I can happily report that as I write these words, I sit at my own kitchen table, in an apartment where I live by myself. Sometimes, I need a little help getting my groceries, but I can come and go when I please, and I don’t live with too many insects!

I’m both a person with multiple disabilities, and a good worker. The problem with holding those two concepts in tension is my distinct lack of efficiency. I can do the things I’m skilled at regularly – in church contexts, I can pray, preach, receive and count offering, sing, and not only assist in but help to celebrate the Eucharist – but, when I do them, all those tasks are slower and more deliberate than they would be when done by able-bodied people. Moreover, all those tasks may have small pieces missing.

I am both a person with multiple disabilities, and a faithful servant of Christ. I’ve been trying my entire adult life to be paid something like equity for the accessibility-advocacy work that I do in the church…and happily, sometimes I’ve succeeded! I have a few thoughts about economic equity for believers with disabilities. So, in this short post, I want to connect part of Paul’s “household code” in Ephesians 6:5-8 to the need for believers with disabilities to experience economic even-handedness. We need to be paid properly for our work!

Bartimaeus and Actively Listening to People with Disabilities in Churches

In my previous blog-post, “Embodying Equity,” I asserted that disability is a theological, political, and personal issue, and explained several strategies that believers of varied abilities can use to create access and equity within our churches. Let’s go one step further by examining Jesus’ encounter with Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46-52 as an example of fulsome, embodied equity.