From Cure to Community Biblical Theology Informed by Disability Christine J. Guth Anabaptist Disabilities Network www.adnetonline.org christine@adnetonline.org February 21, 2013 All You Need is Love Conference Mennonite Church USA National Conference Center Leesburg, VA
From Cure to Community: Biblical Theology Informed by Disability Christine J. Guth All You Need is Love Conference Feb 21, 2014 I got shoes, you got shoes, All God's children got shoes. When I get to heaven, gonna put on my shoes, Gonna walk all over God's heaven. 1 I took off my shoes to give you a sign for remembering why I am here. I took off my shoes, because I have lived much of my life without the luxury of things shoes represent. To the barefoot African slaves who sang "I got shoes," shoes represented power, status, wealth, control, protection: blessings they knew they would enjoy when their time came to walk all over God s heaven. My ancestors came from Europe, so that puts me in a privileged class in this country. But another fact about me erodes that privilege. I have lived much of my life occupying a status people look down on with pity and condescension: a status known as mental illness. This status means that I worked for decades earning less than a minimum wage. The depression I have lived with much of my life, in varying degrees of severity, means that I have allowed others to make decisions for me because I have been unable to count on myself. I have been on the receiving end of others' mercy, pity, and disdain. I have struggled for decades to hide my differences and deficits. As a person with a mental illness, I have known the deep anguish of anger at God for all that's wrong with me, and shame for feeling angry. I learned to blame myself for my inabilities 1 African American spiritual, found online: Sweet Chariot: The Story of the Spirituals. The Spirituals Project of the University of Denver, 2004. Web. 10 Feb. 2014. <http://ctl.du.edu/spirituals/freedom/protest.cfm>. Christine Guth: From Cure to Community Page 1
to function. I internalized the stigma modeled in my family and reinforced by my faith communities. Suicidal depression has affected my family for at least four generations. Its presence and persistence in my ten-year-old child rocked my faith. This heritage personal and familial has an indelible impact on how I read the Bible and understand God. Disability, if it enters public theological expression in the Mennonite congregations I have been part of, often appears as a symbol for something else sin or suffering, for example with little attention given to the diverse ways disability profoundly shapes the lives and theological perspectives of a sizeable minority within the church. Inclusive faith communities and the people with disabilities who belong to them need images of God and understandings of God s relationship to the conditions we live with that allow us full access to God s grace and the life of the community. If we are to avoid using scripture and theology as a means to punish vulnerable people in need of God's mercy, we need an awareness of potential interpretive pitfalls and possible alternatives. This paper is a modest attempt to present a few of the theological and biblical pitfalls I have encountered and struggled to resolve as I have sought to integrate my selfunderstanding as a person who lives with mental illness into the Christian and Mennonite faith traditions I have received. Potential pitfalls arise when we use persons with disabilities as objects to make a point, rather than recognizing them as complex human beings with stories of their own. Biblical texts that use disability as an object to make a theological point are a yellow flag to proceed with caution in our interpretation lest we find ourselves using these texts to sanctify stigma against disability. Many of the texts that have created barriers to faith for me as a person with a Christine Guth: From Cure to Community Page 2
mental illness objectify disability at the expense of disconnection from the lives of real, multidimensional people with disabilities. I will talk about two common ways I observe of objectifying disability. One common way disability becomes an object to make a point is when we believe that disability is God s punishment for sin. An example of this shouts at us from the curses in Deuteronomy: If you will not obey the LORD your God then all these curses shall come upon you. The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt, with ulcers, scurvy, and itch, of which you cannot be healed. The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind (Deut. 28:15, 27-28). When we view these communal warnings to ancient Israel through modern culture s lens of individualism, they encourage us to see someone suffering afflictions not as a brother or sister with contributions to offer the faith community, but as an object lesson, announcing to all who can see the consequences of sin and lack of faith. When I am the one so afflicted, this perspective tells me that I deserve to suffer, that the God I am urged to love and worship is the source of my suffering. It is hard to love and worship someone I believe is deliberately causing me pain, though God knows I tried. Belief that my suffering is deserved punishment for sin or lack of faith also makes it hard to receive support from brothers and sisters in the church because I am too ashamed to reveal my inner pain. Another approach to using disability as an object appears in the many gospel healing stories. In these stories, disability is employed, through its miraculous disappearance, to demonstrate that the power of God rests in Jesus. Taking Mark 5 (1-20) as an example, we meet a man living among the tombs, tormented and miserable, defying and bursting chains and shackles. Jesus arrives, speaks a word, and immediately the man is transformed. Jesus disciples Christine Guth: From Cure to Community Page 3
return to find the former madman calm, clothed, and in his right mind. The dramatic transformation of the man from demon-possessed to disciple becomes an object lesson to reinforce the gospel writer s opening claim that Jesus truly is the Son of God (Mark 1:1). This story, as I long understood it, makes people with disabilities outsiders because Jesus does not cure us of our disability. We despair that our faith is inadequate, because our struggles persist despite confiding them to Jesus. In every healing story the outcome is consistent: the sufferer is healed quickly and completely. It is easy to conclude that that cure is required for salvation, and that we who remain uncured harbor some secret deficit, known only to God. How can we escape the pitfalls of disability as object lesson? I am not counseling that we exclude these texts, which are an important part of our sacred scriptures. What I am suggesting is that when we preach and teach from texts that treat disability simplistically, we would gain even more from these texts if we balance our study of them by listening to the stories of the real, complex people living with disabilities in our congregations. Invite a friend with disabilities to share their impressions of the text: What is life-giving? What is troublesome? How has their understanding of the text changed over time? What is happening in their life that this text supports or fails to address? As an additional help in interpreting troublesome texts, we might turn to the rich tradition of biblical voices that clearly speak of liberation and inclusion for people on the margins. These can provide a framework to interpret biblical texts that objectify disability and threaten to create stumbling blocks. Christine Guth: From Cure to Community Page 4
Out of many possibilities, I highlight here a few passages that contribute to the framework I rely on to live with my disability without shame and understand it in light of God s grace. First: The creation stories in Genesis. Humankind is created in the image of God all of humanity, with no exceptions. People with certain disabilities are not singled out as lacking divine image, nor does Genesis blame them for the consequences of sin. Second: Jesus' story of the great banquet (Luke 14:16-24). Here people with disabilities become the honored guests, those who have a privileged place in God's reign. I find it reassuring that at the great banquet, people come as they are, with disability unhealed. 2 Third: Paul s theology of weakness. Paul claims that the treasure of God s transcendent power is found in earthen vessels ordinary, fragile, human bodies (2 Cor. 4:7). Paul further claims that the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable (1 Cor. 12:22). In my personal journey, I have come to embrace images of God that I have found lifegiving as a person living with my particular mental health condition. I reject alienating assertions that God imposes disability as a tool, whether to punish, purify, or edify those God loves. Rather, I believe that God s creation of a finite world has inevitable costs, disability among them. God's created order includes death and is dependent on it. Everyone alive is 2 Numerous authors have observed that the guests attend without any healing of their disability. One of these is David W. Anderson, Reaching Out and Bringing In: Ministry to and with Persons with Disabilities (Bloomington, IN: West Bow Press, 2013), 135. Christine Guth: From Cure to Community Page 5
subject to the eventuality of death. Thus we are also subject to the possibility of near-death, suffering, and disability. 3 To assume that God singled out those of us with mental illness to suffer in this way undermines a loving relationship with God. More helpful to me has been an affirmation that people live with mental illness as a direct consequence of the wondrous complexity God has created in the human brain and its delicate fragility, rather than God s deliberate choice to make me and my family suffer. I believe God bears responsibility for human suffering, as creator of this finite world. Nevertheless, God stands beside us as our companion through our suffering, and is embodied to us in faith communities of compassion. Finding life-giving images of God is a personal journey. The experiences of people with disabilities differ widely. The understandings of God that we find life-giving also differ. Common ground between us emerges when we listen to and honor the lived experience of people with disabilities as real people. If we wish to be spiritual companions of people with disabilities, we must listen with patience to grassroots theologians: our sisters and brothers with intellectual disabilities, homeless folks with mental illness, our friends who see the world from a wheelchair, and we must listen to their families. Returning to the troublesome healing stories I mentioned earlier, I have made my peace with them by letting go of my understanding of healing as identical to cure. Healing more broadly can encompass restoration to community, Kathy Black points out. 4 Jesus healings are concerned always with restoring people to their communities. Healing disabling conditions was 3 I elaborate these conclusions and the sources that have influenced them in an unpublished paper, Suffering Creation, (Elkhart, Ind.: Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, 2005), AMBS library student papers collection. 4 Kathy Black, A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996),53. Christine Guth: From Cure to Community Page 6
the way Jesus restored people to the communities that had ostracized them due to their presumed sin. Forgiving sins was the means to remove the stigma assigned by a culture that associated disabilities with sin. 5 Christ offers us a sacred invitation to create communities of healing, where people with disabilities are valued, contributing members. This wounded human community, redeemed by Christ, is a means of Christ s continuing, imperfect embodiment on earth while humanity awaits its final redemption. Christ is here, among us, human though we are, as we gather. Within this transformed community, the body of Christ, we encounter God with us through our very interdependence on one another. 6 Here in this wounded human community, we are on holy ground. Let's all take off our shoes. 5 Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network (EDAN), A Church of All and for All, in Interpreting Disability: A Church of All and for All,, 74 75, par. 39 40. 6 Black discusses a theology of interdependence, 34-42. Christine Guth: From Cure to Community Page 7