Celebrating Differentness

One of the best chapters in Sam Wells' Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics is about the ethics of chronic disability and illness.  He uses testimonies of two different parents who parent children with profound mental disabilities. This I think is not unrelated, as hopefully will become evident, to the question of the relationship between children and church.

He begins by discussing the 'forming of habits'.  The 'struggles' of parenting a child with disabilities 'must find a place within the central reality of worship' (171).  By this, I think Wells is making the point that act and context of worship must provide meaning or a grounding in the context of  day-to-day act of being a parent.  He quotes Frances Young:  '... Just as male needs female, rich needs poor, white needs black, so intellectuals need the simple ... The church is itself when it bridges all these gaps and tensions between people of different kinds.'  He then writes, 'What she has described here is the way worship forms character, and how a community that worships faithfully together learns to take the right things granted' (172).  That is, I think, the act of worshipping allows or enables parents or members of the church body to be the kind of parents or the kind of members they are: those persons who bridge the gap between people who are different. The church is a celebration of different-ness, where every member is celebrated for the different kinds of people they are.  There is no elite, no normal, no standard: 'all are one and the same in Christ Jesus' (Gal 3:28b). By coming to worship and worshipping week after week we establish habits and develop skills, through the work of the Spirit, which (trans)form us in the image of Christ, in whom humanity is created and reconciled.

In a society that cannot cope with difference, which is only interested in the achiever, or the person who is successful and independent, worship trains us - the church - to be different in that it allows us to cope with difference, and moreover, trains us to celebrate it.  The church accepts difference and does not block it or assume it doesn't exist. Wells writes 'Young goes on to point out that people like Arthur (Frances Young's son) are not failed versions of somebody else: they can be something that no one else can be' (177).  This is a powerful point, which we would do well to learn. Read it again - hear its truth. If only we had the grace to recognise that those with disability are 'not failed versions of somebody else,' but the  unique and particular person God created.  Mike Yaconelli writes in Messy Spirituality that 'Christ doesn;t make us the same. What he does is affirm our differentness' (88). The child or adult with disability is a concrete test of morality of the church: does it accept without reservation and celebrate this different-ness or does it make excuses or try and pretend there is no difference? Do we consider the gift that this person gives to the church - are we capable of receiving something from them? And picking up on my previous post, does the church accept and celebrate all children or do we create ways of keeping them in their own space. Do we allow the child to infringe on our space, to participate in our worship of God?

One of the interesting ideas Wells takes from the practice of theatrical improvisation is that of 'status' and 'assessing status' - are we 'high-status' players or 'low-status' players?  In the context of being a parent of a disabled child, whose story is it? Who is the story about - the parent, the child, the community, the marginalization of the weak and different by the strong and normal? If the story is the parents or of the 'normal', the child is without power, they have no say in how the story is told.   Wells says the Christian community is not about those in the centre assisting those on the margins, but instead, it is about finding itself on the periphery and making friends with those others it finds there (176).  We need to turn status on its head, and look at how the story is being told from the child's perspective, are they passive persons, or active participants, do they have a role in how the story of their life is told? 

Young points out that "there is a sense in which we are all handicapped" (177).  How do we interpret this or perhaps how does Young mean us to interpret it?  I don't think she means we're all sinners, it is more that we are all dependent on others, we are all need to receive care from another, no person is immune.  In this way, those who have any kind of disability have high-status because they teach us that we are not meant to live completely independent lives, but, as those in the church, we are part of a body, which is dependent upon its part to live: 'severly mentally disabled people show the church the character of human neediness; they are "a prophetic sign of our true nature as creatures destined to need God and, thus, one another"' (182).  And so Wells says, 'Thus the most needy have come from the fringes of the story to the centre' (178).  Our children then should not be seen and treated as potential adults, but instead should be seen and treated as children.  We should welcome childhood as being exactly child-hood, to quickly it seems we're in a rush for our children to act and be adults. Rowan Williams argues, according to Mike Higton (in Different Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams), that we should concerned with 'the integrity of childhood - of play, of imagination, of experimentation,' which 'involves our refusal to allow childhood to be 'colonized' by adulthood' (108).

Wells quotes from Young again: "Those of us who are privileged in society think we ought to give to the less privileged, but so easily that becomes charity at arm's length ... What we need to do is receive ... To receive from someone is to accord them a deeper respect, and to do them far more good than to give them our charity" (181).  This takes a renewing of the mind, because we constantly think its about what we can do to make a disabled child's life more 'normal,' rather than developing a reciprocal relationship where both persons give and receive, where we make each other's lives 'normal'.  To receive something from another person, is to give them space and the status as givers.  It is to recognize that God is the ultimate Giver, and he gives us many gifts from people of all different kinds.   So often we  looked for the most 'gifted' or  'able,' rather than allowing  each and every person  to be  someone who brings a gift to share. 

Comments

[Brodie]

Andy - great post. I think that one of the major challenges that faces us in confronting issues like this is how do we transform our churches from places where people go to "get their needs met", to places where the spirit of worship is one of service and giving to each other. I'm not a fan of old St Augustine, but his words that "we love God by loving each other" spring to mind.

I think the other challenge that we face in relation to this is on the level of commitment vs. consumerism. We have become like tumble weeds blown from one place to the next - be that a job place, house or church. If we are to exemplify the community of God where difference is genuinely celebrated then we're going to have to commit to putting down roots - this may mean for some not taking that career move that would involve "leaving" the community, etc.

[Jason]

Andy & Brodie (And Mike, Rowan, Samuel, Frances, et al.):

Great stuff. The quote of Wells (quoting Young) was particularly powerful, as was the notion of reciprocity with others (even children or the disabled, etc.); good stuff to chew on.

Of course, it might be better put that the church "is to be" a celebration of different-ness; I don't think we actually succeed here as we ought to, which you allude to, Andy. (Also, "celebration" grates on me a bit -- maybe it is used too much on this side of the Atlantic in different contexts; I wonder if "we are to love difference (as God loves difference)" might be better? Or maybe it's just me...)

Finally, I have noticed a funny double-bind in our society, I wonder if it's the same in the UK? I agree with Higton/Williams when they critique the ways in which we force children to grow up too quickly, to see "childhood" as some kind of lack or liability. But I have also noticed widespread languishing in adolescence, and a refusal to "grow up" (in some ways) among adults. Perhaps the glorification of "youth culture" has something to do with this. So it seems that we simultaneously push children to grow up too quickly in some ways, and discourage older people from becoming adults in others. A strange bind, no?

[andy goodliff]

Jason - Rowan Williams 2nd point is exactly as you say - we have too many childish adults. See this recent lecture he gave called Formation: Who’s bringing up our children? and his book Lost Icons.