The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
March 5th, 2006
Answer “yes” to life, even as memory fades and the names of family become forgotten.
Answer “yes” to truth, even when they say you can’t sing in the choir because it wouldn’t look right.
Answer “yes” to love, even when God doesn’t seem to inhabit God’s house.
Easier said than done. In the midst of bodies not able to do what they once did and minds not able to remember what they once knew; in the midst of exclusion; in the midst of intolerance, it is hard to answer, as the hymn suggests, “yes” to life, truth and love. Often it is easier for people with disabilities to embrace bitterness. Often it is easier to not come back. And for those of us who don’t live with disabilities, often it is easier to not see, hear or comprehend what is happening.
I confess, as a so-called “temporarily able-bodied person” I find it hard to stay focused on the challenges people with disabilities face in a society that was not designed for them. As a Unitarian Universalist minister I find it hard to stay focused on the challenges people with disabilities face amidst a way of “doing church” that was not designed for them. I have come to perceive illiteracy in these hands that cannot communicate in sign language. I perceive a kind of blindness in these eyes and deafness in these ears that mistakenly assume they see and hear everything. I perceive a lack of comprehension in this educated mind. I perceive privilege in this body that stands erect and walks, runs and jumps so easily through this world, at least for now.
I don’t want people with disabilities to feel out of place here. I don’t want the words I speak to be irrelevant to them. I don’t want to say the wrong thing and offend someone. I don’t want people with disabilities to feel they have to yell, again and again, to be heard and understood. I am saddened by the experience of one of our beloved elders whose hearing is waning, who cannot find a solution, and who struggles with whether or not to be with us on Sunday mornings. It caught my attention this week when I learned that, similar to the national average, 20% of the children in our congregation have some kind of disability or special need. I was only aware of four such children. How did I not know there were many more than four? All week I’ve been asking the question, what can we do for the families of children with special needs? And there are many other questions to ask. The task of making a congregation and its culture accessible seems enormous. How do we answer “yes” to life and truth and love when this task seems so daunting?
I turn to liberation theology. I turn there to keep grounded and committed. I want to introduce you to liberation theology. I want to tell you how one Christian theologian has adapted it to address the concerns of people with disabilities in congregations. I want to tell you about her concept of a disabled god. And then I want to articulate a place for liberation theology within Unitarian Universalism .
Though its roots are old in the Christian tradition, liberation theology is a recent movement. It emerged in response to overwhelming poverty in Latin America in the 1950s and 60s. Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian liberation theologian, tells the following story: “A woman of forty, but who looked as old as seventy, went up to the priest after Mass and said sorrowfully: ‘Father, I went to communion without going to confession first.’ ‘How come, my daughter?’ asked the priest. ‘Father,’ she replied, ‘I arrived rather late, after you had begun the offertory. For three days I have had only water and nothing to eat; I’m dying of hunger. When I saw you handing out the hosts, those little pieces of white bread, I went to communion just out of hunger for that little bit of bread.’ The priest’s eyes filled with tears.”
Priests and ministers throughout Latin America found they knew thousands of such stories. Liberation theology began as theologians, priests, ministers, and lay-people began articulating a vision of a God who has a preference for the poor. Such a God is not concerned with the fervor of our faith or the drama of our spiritual rebirth. Such a God is concerned with our capacity to suffer with the poor for the sake of the poor; our capacity for compassion and generosity no matter what our economic class; our capacity, as Boff says, to “struggle along side [the poor] against the poverty that has been unjustly created and forced upon them.” Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” has always been one of the central Biblical texts for liberation theology: “Blessed are your poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
Liberation theology seeks to inspire specific political, social, and economic changes. Boff says “In liberation, the oppressed come together, come to understand their situation. . . discover the causes of their oppression, organize themselves into movements and act in coordinated fashion. First, they claim everything that the existing system can give: better wages, working conditions, health care, education, housing, and so forth; then they work toward the transformation of the present society in the direction of a new [order] characterized by widespread participation, a better and more just balance among social classes and more worthy ways of life.” Liberation theology does not present a vision for the next world, but rather for this world, a vision of a more just and equitable society. It is still moving throughout Latin America and, indeed, throughout the world. It is certainly, for example, the theology at the core of the Greater Hartford Interfaith Coalition for Equity and Justice. It resides at the spiritual core of many social change movements, and it has been present in the justice struggles of people with disabilities. It can inform our conversations about disability here at UUS:E.
In preparation for this service, Rev. Jeanne suggested I read Nancy Eiesland’s, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Eiesland talks about the experience of people with disabilities in congregations, contending that “the church has often been a ‘city on a hill’—physically inaccessible and socially inhospitable.” She believes this situation is the legacy of Biblical passages that exclude people with disabilities or equate disability with sin and evil. She says we’ve inherited a “disabling theology.” She sites a passage from Leviticus 21 where God tells Moses no one “who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a [little person], or a man with a blemish in his eye”—none of these people may bring offerings to God or enter the holy places of the temple. God tells Moses, such people “profane my sanctuaries.”
She sites the Book of John, Chapter 5, where Jesus heals a man who had been unable to walk, then says to him: “Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you,” implying his disability was punishment for his sins. These kinds of statements pervade the Bible, both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Among the communities for whom these books were originally written many centuries ago, we can see overt fear of non-perfect bodies, a supposition of sinfulness, and an ethic of exclusion. Some will say, “well, you know, it was ancient times, and there were good reasons for these fears.” I’m not so sure. I’m not sure the kinds of religious exclusion of people with disabilities back then was all that different than it is today. There are still people who believe mental illness is a sign of demonic possession and pray for the devil to be gone. There are still barriers, even in our own congregation, to people who want to participate fully in its life, to enter the holy places of the temple, as it were, to answer “yes” to life, truth, and love.
A theology of liberation for people with disabilities is necessary. Eiesland, working within Christianity, proclaims a God who has a preference not only for the poor, but for people with disabilities as well. In fact, she proclaims a disabled God. (I should point out here that this book was written in 1994. Since that time, the more preferred language is what we call “person-first language.” Instead of saying “disabled person,” we say “person with a disability.” I’m not sure if Eiesland still refers to a disabled god today, but for the purposes of this sermon, I’m using the language of her 1994 work.) Picasso’s “La Crucifixion,” which is also the cover art for Eiesland’s book, is reproduced on the cover of your order of service. It’s a striking painting of a disfigured Jesus. For Eiesland the most significant image of Jesus is his body, broken and pierced on the cross, and then resurrected, with these crucifixion wounds still apparent. He is not broken by sin. He is not wounded by his own moral imperfection. His impairments do not profane the holy sanctuaries. He is broken by the injustice of the crucifixion. He is wounded by the abuse of power of the Roman authorities. In his brokenness he is not to be shunned and isolated. He is rather to be touched and embraced. Eiesland writes that the “resurrected Jesus Christ in presenting impaired hands and feet and side to be touched by frightened friends alters the taboo of physical avoidance of disability and calls for followers to recognize their connection and equality at the point of Jesus’ physical impairment.”
There is much to learn from Eiesland’s liberation theology. For now I want to emphasize that a Christian theologian with a disability has taken a common image of God in her tradition, and renamed and reframed it in an effort to make Christianity fully accessible to people with disabilities. She calls on Christians to embrace a new understanding of God, one that does not prefer some arbitrary standard of the perfect, sin-free body, but one that is itself broken and blemished and suffering injustice. In doing so she proclaims God’s preference for broken and blemished humanity, and thus calls on Christians who do not live with disabilities to align themselves with the struggles and the suffering of all those who do.
I’m not suggesting that we adopt this theology. I do, however, believe it is important for Unitarian Universalists to be aware of and in dialogue with Christian liberation theology. In fact, Unitarian Universalism has learned much from liberation theology over the years, and I sense that we are moving in the direction of framing Unitarian Universalism in liberation terms.
When I think of the origins of Unitarianism in New England 200 years ago, I see a young religious movement born of resistance to the strict doctrines of the old Puritan church. It affirmed the goodness and potential in humanity and refused to preach human depravity. It sought to liberate the human mind from the shackles of a bleak and damning theology. In the words of the Rev. William Ellery Channing, one of the first to articulate Unitarian theology, “We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically…. We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the goodness and equity in which it is established.” This was radical. It was not liberation theology as we understand it today. But let us not forget Unitarianism was born out of a will to resist religious structures of domination and tyranny. When we encounter structures of exclusion and discrimination within our own congregation and in society, we can appeal to our history and tradition of resistance to ground ourselves in our efforts to change.
When I think of the origins of American Universalism 200 years ago, I see a young religious movement that was likewise born of resistance to the strict doctrines of the old Puritan Church. Universalists proclaimed that an all-loving God was too good to consign anyone to eternal damnation, hence universal salvation: all are saved. All are reconciled with the sacred. “Give them not hell, but hope” was their rallying cry. In this old Universalist theology we find today the courage to say that all are welcome. We find the courage to say that every person matters, that every person has inherent worth and dignity, that every person is a child of the divine, that every person contains within a spark of the divine whether or not they measure up to society’s arbitrary standards of perfection, beauty, intelligence, normalcy.
There is much in our Unitarian and Universalist origins that lends itself to our own theologies of liberation: resistance, critique, freedom of thought and inquiry, welcome and hospitality, and a vision of a church where no one is excluded.
And what about a God with disabilities? For the early Unitarians and Universalists, God was perfection. I suspect they could not have conceived of a God whose body walks with a cane or a guide dog, or rides in a wheelchair, or speaks with his or her hands, or suffers the loss of memory, or bounces off the walls in fits of hyper-activity, or cannot lift, or is plagued with allergies or diabetes or congestive heart failure, or is prone to bouts of depression and mania. Is there room for such a God in Unitarian Universalism today? Is there room for a God who suffers and struggles for justice and inclusion with people with disabilities? I believe there is. And I believe our ability to contemplate such a God will serve us well as we seek to make good on our promise that all are welcome.
Let me share with you one final story from the Rev. Bill Gaventa. A young man with Down Syndrome is invited and trained to be a[n] usher in his [church] on the Jersey shore. Who comes to church on one of his first Sundays of service? A young couple, coming back to the church for the first time in a long time, just after the birth of their baby with Down Syndrome, coming to seek sanctuary, solace, and understanding for the questions that were reverberating in their lives and souls. Think of what it meant to be a greeter, and be greeted, on that morning.
Why not a God with disabilities? Why not a God broken and blemished? Why not answer “yes” to all life, to all truth, to all love?
Amen and Blessed Be.
Adapted with permission from Mariposa Ministry
Blessed are you who take time to listen when communication is difficult, for your possess an understanding heart.
Blessed are you who walk unembarrassed with those of us who are "different," for you possess self-acceptance.
Blessed are you who wait with those of us who struggle to do things you can do readily, and blessed are you who do not snatch our tasks from our hands to do them for us, for you possess patience.
Blessed are you who encourage and support persons with disabilities in new and uncertain ventures, for you possess the courage to dream and to dare.
Blessed are you who can recognize the gifts and seek the help of those whose bodies are weak and dependent, for you possess wisdom.
Blessed are you who freely offer yourselves as eyes for those who are blind and as hands and legs for those who are paralyzed, for you shall receive their help.
Blessed are you who see past our physical or mental limits and affirm our beautiful, sacred personhood, for you possess knowledge of the true beauty and sacredness of your own personhood.
Rejoice and be exceedingly glad for you will encounter the sacred again and again throughout your life.
Amen and Blessed Be.
“Where’ve You Been?” By Kathy Mattea, performed by Deb Walker
Clair had all but given up, when she and Edwin fell in love
She touched his face, and shook her head,
and distantly she sighed and said
In many dreams I’ve held you near
Now at lat your really here
Where’ve you been?
I’ve looked for you forever and a day
Where’ve you been?
I’m just not myself when you away
He asked her for her hand for life
And she became a salesman’s wife
He was home each night by eight
But one stormy evening he was late
Her frightened tears fell to the floor
Until his key turned in the door
Where’ve you been?
I’ve looked for you forever and a day
Where’ve you been?
I’m just not myself when you away
They’d never spent a night apart
For 60 years she heard him snore
Now their in a hospital
In separate beds on different floors
Clair soon lost her memory
Forgot the names of family
She never spoke a word again
Then one day they wheeled him in
He held her hand and stroked her hair
And in a fragile voice she said
Where’ve you been?
I’ve looked for you forever and a day
Where’ve you been?
I’m just not myself when you away
No I’m just not myself when your away
Excerpt from The Disabled God by Nancy L. Eiesland
The pastor said, “Well, Diane, you can’t get in the choir”
And I said, “Why not?”
And she said, “Well, for one, there’s no step going up to the choir.”
“Yeah,” I said, “You could make a ramp. Or, I could be up there already when the choir marches on.” There’s a lady who’s real big…and she has a hard time walking up steps, too. She’s up there, before the choir gets there. And I said, “Carl, he’s in the choir, and a couple of other people—they, my friends, think it’s really bad…Carl would make sure I got up there. People would make sure I got up there.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “And plus that, when we all stand up and you’re sitting there, that would look so awful. It would look so uneven. And what about your role? You can’t wear a big old robe.”
I said, “I could get one made for me.”
She said, “Oh, it just wouldn’t look right.”
Excerpt from “Pastoral Care with Persons with Disabilities and Their Families” by the Rev. Bill Gaventa
A mother came up to me, talking about the move of their family from one state to another. In their previous home, their daughter (labeled “micro-cephalic and moderately retarded”) had been in a supported employment job at McDonalds. After the move, their new community did not have that kind of program, and she ended up back at a sheltered workshop, where, with the power of peer expectations, she began to act “more retarded.”
They started looking for a church to attend, and, after a number of tries, found one where they tried to involve the daughter in the youth group. But there had not been any preparation or guidance for the youth group, and as might be imagined, something happened or was said that was hurtful.
The daughter came home and told her mother, “I am not going back there anymore.”
The mother confessed to me that she got into the role of being a “Mom,” and she replied, “But you have to go. We have to go. We are part of God’s family. That is God’s house. We need to be there as well.”
To which the daughter simply said, “Well, it may be God’s house, but God’s not home.”
Hymn #6 “Just As Long As I have Breath, I Must Answer ‘Yes’ to Life”
Boff, Leonardo & Boff, Clodovis, Introducing Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996) p.1.
Eiesland, Nancy, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) p.20.
Eiesland, The Disabled God, p. 101.
Channing, William Ellery, “Unitarian Christianity” in Wright, Conrad, ed., Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism (Boston: UUA, 1986) p. 70.
Gaventa, Rev. Bill, excerpt from “New Era, Ancient Traditions: The Meaning of Inclusive Ministries and Religious Supports.”
