A DIsabled God

At our recent Thursday night mass series during Lent, our guest speaker, Chris Hildebrant reflected on the problematic nature of how our scriptures often portray people with disabilities[1].  He said (and I am paraphrasing) that they often seem as though they are sitting around waiting for someone to cure them (with no agency of their own), are deficient in some way (often framed as “sin”) or are on earth to help others earn points in heaven.

Today’s gospel has a lot of those elements! It is from John 9 and is the story of the “man born blind.” 

Full transparency.  Today’s blog is a little bit longer than usual because I want to linger on this idea of disability justice.  I am routinely embarrassed by my lack of consciousness in this arena, and I have been working to unpack my ableism for some years now. People like Chris have helped me tremendously to notice my ableism and to try to counter it. These days I pause longer at a gospel reading like this one and am learning to ask different questions and reflect on different things (that are not apparent to me due to my experiences and conditioning).

So Jesus and the disciples are walking along.  They encounter a blind man and ask, “”Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answers it straight on and says, “Neither.” He does go on to say that the man is blind “so that the works of God might be made visible through him.”  Jesus then spits on the ground, makes some clay and puts it on the man’s eyes and tells him to “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam.” The man does this and is “cured” of his blindness. The religious leaders then get all bent out of shape as a result of this unsanctioned healing.

Ok, let’s stop right there.

First off, Jesus says that blindness (disability) and “sin” are unrelated.  He counters an old (yet sadly contemporary) idea that somehow disability was related to moral failure – either of the individual or of the family. While we might like to believe that this was “just how the ancients thought,” I am still stunned when I hear stories from people with disabilities talk about what people actually say to them – in 2023!

So far, Jesus seems to be doing OK.

His next statement seems a bit mixed.  He says that this man’s blindness is “so that the works of God might be made visible through him.”  At one level, I could hear this as an affirmation – that Jesus could be affirming that God is visible and present in this man AS HE IS. His being blind is not a sign of deficiency. It is just who he is and how he is in the world, and it is good. Furthermore, the “work of God” is not the healing of the man, per se, so much as the repair of the community relationship to this man (more on this later).

BUT…Jesus could also be leaning towards what Chris mentioned – that somehow this blind man is here so that others might get a chance to help him and that God’s glory can only shine through him when there’s a cure.  In short, the blind man is an object, not a subject.

A contemporary disability-justice activist named Amy Kenny titled her 2022 book My Body is Not a Prayer Request in an effort to counter this very kind of thinking. So often, she says, people frame her disability as the thing that needs healing and not the relationship of people and systems to her disability.  She also goes on to say that – especially in church circles – there are these deep ableist narratives at work that view people with disabilities as being in the world in order to “teach us lessons” or “be inspiring” or to show that “God can work miracles.” 

Last year during Lent, theologian and disability activist, Miriam Spies, joined us to think about disability and faith.  As part of her presentation with us, she introduced the work of Eli Claire.  Miriam shared a book chapter that Eli had written, and it simultaneously moved me and made me uncomfortable (because I saw my ableist self in it).  I would invite all blog readers to check it out: https://www.firstchurchberkeley.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Eli-Clare.pdf

Claire says that strangers routinely offer prayers, crystals, vitamins or advice to “cure” them of their malady (cerebral palsy). They pat Eli on the head, comment on how remarkable they are or how special they are.  And they make Eli into an object of charity or pity – the eternal recipient that other people need to do something for – including curing them.

Eli Claire, in the abovementioned article says, “after five decades of these kinds of interactions, I still don’t know how to rebuff their pity, how to tell them the simple truth that I am not broken…They assume me unnatural, want to make me normal, take for granted the need and desire for a cure.”

Just pause for a moment and take this all in.

That’s also where we might uncomfortably find Jesus today. It is only in recent years that I realized that Jesus did not ask if the blind person wanted to see.  Jesus just did it without their apparent consent.  And while it may have, in fact, been something that the blind man wanted, I think we need to be very cautious with a passage like this. I and we might easily assume that the blind man, or any person with a disability, would want to have it removed.

So often the narrative goes that disability must be overcome somehow – that it has no value or is something to get rid of.  Again, Eli has words for us and says that what needs to be “overcome” are the low expectations placed on people with disabilities, the almost universal lack of access or accommodation and the alarming rate of institutionalization and/or violence against people with disabilities. This is what must be overcome.

Pause again. What do you feel inside your body right now?

As part of today’s gospel story, the blind man’s parents are hauled in for questioning about his condition. Instead of speaking for him, they tell the authorities, “he can speak for himself.” This is, perhaps, one of the most important take aways for me today.  He can speak for himself.

People with disabilities have been speaking for themselves for a long time.  It is the wider community – and the church in particular – that have not listened.  Amy Kenny is clear that her body is made in the image of the Divine and its crookedness isn’t anything to be ashamed of.  She wants her church and the world to witness that too and to care enough to think and grow together in this regard – not trying to eradicate her disability but eradicating the ableism and barriers that get in the way of her full participation in the world.

She is also clear that disabilities are not always visible and speaks, like many in the disability-justice community, of the mind-body – a term that is attempting to undo some of that mind/body dualism and helps us to think how our minds and bodies work together.

Kenny also tries to remind people that, as Christians, we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection. Lent is a time to reflect on such things and is a time to make right what is not right in the world. In this case it is to start treating disabled people as full members of Christ’s body who have lived experiences that we desperately need to learn from and build church around (and not just be “inspired” by them or seek to cure them).

I wonder what an alternative ending to the gospel story could have been if the blind man had not individually been healed, but the community around him had. What kind of world would have privileged his way of being? What attitudes would have supported his full humanity? What structures would have been necessary to help him thrive? What would it look like to put some of the most marginalized at the center and follow their lead?

That’s the world we’re being called into.

---

[1] Some people from the disability community prefer to use disabled person instead – highlighting that there is not “one way” to name this reality.