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.