What an interesting semester it has been! With all the craziness of running between the seminary and the music school, sometimes I feel dizzy with the multiple fields of study I have to hold in my head at the same time: organ performance, service playing, organ literature, academic theology, liturgy and liturgical theology, much less taking care of my husband and our home..."overwhelmed" often feels too soft of a word for the daily realities of life.
One significant development this semester is my choice to embrace disability and caregiver theology as a life work. My final project in Intro to Theology is a paper outlining current work in disability theology, which I will use as a launching off point later on in my studies to develop a whole theology of caregiving in relationship to disability theology. I find this work incredibly fulfilling and meaningful, and taking in the information and processing is a joy. However, on days like today, the caregiving catches up to me and I encounter one of my own disabilities: a lack of courage to speak.
In Intro to Theology, we are currently reading Places of Redemption by Mary McClintock Fulkerson. One of the central issues Fulkerson's text raises is how bodies in a church function based on the expectations of "normalcy" between different races and bodily abilities (able-bodied/disabled). Portions of this text speak profoundly to me as she discusses a church that commits to minister to local group homes and "special needs" individuals. Justin decided to come to class with me yesterday morning because he knew this was a topic we would be discussing and he was interested to hear what the professor had to say and give his own unique point of view.
I loved what Justin had to say during class, and I think it brought to the foreground issues that churches do not always think about unless those with disabilities are a constant voice of criticism, such as "This is a very poor place to put someone in a wheelchair because every time people stand up, I'm cut off from the actions of worship." However, I caught myself wanting to temper what Justin said several times because I felt like people would listen better to him if he was more gracious with the able-bodied approach. But then, when I thought that way, the part of me that realizes the need for the disabled to have a voice would fight back and say, "No! Let them deal with the honesty Justin is offering--the honesty he expresses is your daily reality, and you trying to protect them from your reality does no one any good!"
But, being honest with people in a class about the real-ness of life with a disabled man is an overwhelming and draining experience. When the sucking sound of stress and busyness is already close at hand, trying to explain and justify my life experience is a disabling experience. My classmates get to leave class and walk away from how the church should respond to the disabled and come back to it another time. I don't. How church and society respond to the disabled shapes how my husband and I function to such an extent that on the best days I have intense energy to bring change and on the worst days, despair seeps in through the seams of my exterior able-bodied armor.
I am disabled--I lack courage at times when courage is most necessary, and my words are crippled when I most need them.
Praise to the abundant God who injects life in our weakest places!
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