The heresy of wholeness

 

Some approaches to Christian healing might be saying to some disabled people ‘God prefers another version of you’.  But God was subject to our bodily limitations in the incarnation, and still bore the scars of them in the resurrection, so we might better be looking for things to be transfigured rather than ignored or erased. 

This was one of the striking things said at Lincoln Cathedral yesterday by Canon Timothy Goode from York Minster, speaking as a disabled person himself.

Another was his reminder that everything from our church buildings to our forms of church leadership are shaped by ‘ableism’ – one can see around which idealised forms of human being they were designed or developed.

The only depressing thing was that his insights were greeted as innovative.  I’ve reflected here before about being taught theology in Birmingham in the early 1980s where John Hull’s understanding of his blindness, Stephen Pattison’s analysis of what structures reveal about those who create or accept them, Frances Young’s relationship to her son’s disability, and invitations to observe radical care taken with the design of the Balsall Heath Church Centre, led us to think the church would always think this way.

If wounded grace was more central to our theology and lives, Goode said, we would be less fearful people, because we would not have to feel we needed to prove ourselves against a perfect ideal.

Not dissimilar things were being said by Dr Graham Daniels of Christians in Sport on Radio 4’s Sunday Worship today, responding to sporting success and failure rather than to disability.

Our achievements matter, but we cannot always win.  His most careful thought was that successes and failures are expressions of our identity but not the sources of our identity; we are not ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ but human beings who experience successes and failures.  Peter failed, but he was not 'a failure'.

Thinking this way, he said, means excellence cannot enslave, we can lose without being destroyed, and we can celebrate success without worshipping it. 

Meanwhile, the photo is taken from the Shepherds Law hermitage in Northumberland, the home of Franciscan Friar Brother Harold for many years, now redeveloped but as yet untenanted.  A few days in the north-east brought me there and, nearby, to Josephine Butlers grave, Anglican contemplative and active traditions at their most rigorous.

And I’ve had the news of the widow of a cousin of my father’s aged 98.  She must have been the last survivor among the guests at my parents’ wedding just over seventy years ago.

Day Two

And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters,

and let it separate the waters from the waters.’

So God made the dome and separated the waters under the dome

from the waters that were above the dome.

And God called the dome Sky.

And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.

 

Two sets of Jacqui Parkinson’s mammoth biblical tapestries arrived in the Cathedral this week.  The boxes in which her Threads Through Creation arrived were labelled in a way which made me smile.

I’ve been particularly taken by her representation of the snake in the garden of Eden, which looks like a snake, a falling angel and (to my mind) a missile.  She cites Isaiah 14.12-15 (the fall of an over mighty Day Star and Son of the Dawn), which patristic writers (and then Paradise Lost) interweaved with Genesis 2 to make it look as if it was Lucifer who tempted Eve.

In my mind the bible-tradition-reason trio comes out nearer to paying close attention to the bible as text, as interpreted in the past, and as interpreted in our context.  The snake (all that Genesis 2 says is that it was more crafty than other creatures), the Lucifer interpretation (not actually part of the Genesis 2 story), and deep awareness of the damage contemporary knowledge can do, each felt to me to be there.

But it was the second day of creation in Genesis 1 which came into particular focus for me too.  She has ‘God spoke light’ for day one, which I’m told is exactly the sharp way the Hebrew puts it.  But she has ‘God spoke water’ for day two, which isn’t; the chaos of water over, which God’s breath and spirit moves, is there before day one.

And, although I’m not sure what this points towards, day two is also one of the days on which the writer does not say ‘and God saw that it was good’.

Saying ‘Light’ on day one was about separating light and darkness.  Now, on day two, it is saying sky which separates the waters still perceived to be above the heavens and the waters below.  What is it is the act of separation, of making space, of opening up, which is the fundamentally creative act? 

It continues on day three when the waters below are gathered into one place, separating out dry land (which God saw to be good) and then vegetation followed (which she has as ‘God spoke a green earth’, and which God again saw to be good, the only day this is said twice).

The Cathedral’s new Chancellor gave his first lecture to mark the arrival of the art work, although he didn’t seek to respond to any of it. 

He highlighted the chaos and dangers of darkness and of water being contained, and I pressed him a little to emphasise the spaces the separating out created.

He noted that God saying light (making spaces which are not dark), saying dome (making spaces which are not water) and saying green (making spaces which are not barren) over three days allowed the spaces to be populated on the next three days in turn with sun, moon and stars, with birds and fish, and with land animals including human beings.

He also hinted forward to Revelation where there will be no need of light (God will be the light), the sea will be no more, and death (animal mortality) will be no more.  Jacqui Parkinson's work on Revelation is also with us, so that is where I'll need to look next.