The following is commentary from my wife and I on John Hull’s essay A Spirituality of Disability: The Christian Heritage as both Problem and Potential.
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Whistler:
Some long, but worthwhile quotes:
Quote
One of the most important aspects of the spirituality of disability lies in the challenge which it offers to hegemony. The world of the able-bodied usually conceives of itself as the only world. Those whose bodies are not able are excluded. As an example, let us take the situation of sighted people. Although sighted people know, with varying degrees, that they are sighted, it is unusual to find a sighted person who knows that he or she lives within a world which is a projection of the sighted body. In other words, although sighted people know that they know through sight, they seldom realise the epistemic implications of vision. Sight projects a world and sighted people are embodied within that world. They know that there are others but they seldom know that there are other worlds. Therefore they think of others as being excluded from their own world. Thus they unconsciously create a discourse of dominance.
When this ideology of domination is internalised by disabled people, as is almost inevitable in the first instance, the result is a loss of self-esteem, a loss of soul which is the accompaniment of identification with the marginalised and the excluded. In this way, the power of the present absolute world is acknowledged.
There can be no dialogue between the disabled and the non-disabled until the plurality of human worlds is recognised. As long as the non-disabled world retains its hegemony, the relations which it has with the world of disability will be those of care for the helpless, and of patronisation. The relationship will be that of charity, of condescension, and not that of mutual respect based upon acknowledgement of otherness.Quote
What are the implications of this approach for the education of disabled children and adults? One of the controversies within special education is the question of whether disabled children should be educated for successful life in the larger society or whether they should be educated for successful life within the world they already live in. This controversy was particularly sharp in the case of those with profound hearing loss, and has only gradually been partially resolved in a deeper respect for the integrity of the deaf condition and the recognition that the culture of the visual has its own characteristics. In the history of the education of people with a visual loss, there has been a similar conflict. The predominance of embossed, punctilinear script over embossed shapes of the letters of the Latin alphabet is a case in point. Punctilinear script, the most widespread example of which is the type devised by Louis Braille, is recognisable by touch more easily than the embossed forms of printed letters, but is less convenient for sighted people. Braille only won the struggle when blind people got control of the agencies. The approach of this present study is a contribution to the growing tendency to recognise the integrity and distinctive nature of each form of disability, and lays emphasis upon the need to help each disabled child to achieve wholeness within the characteristics of that particular disabled state. The approach of this present study is a contribution to the growing tendency to recognise the integrity and distinctive nature of each form of disability, and lays emphasis upon the need to help each disabled child to achieve wholeness within the characteristics of that particular disabled state. For social and economic reasons, disabled people must also live in the greater world, but this can be achieved most successfully if the adaption to the larger society springs not from a sense of deficiency and loss but from a position that has come to realise the intrinsic character of the world in which one lives in the body.
I realised this in the course of preparing my project ‘Cathedrals through Touch and Hearing’, that set out to equip the English cathedrals with facilities for blind and partially sighted visitors. I found that most of the cathedral guides wanted to show the sighted person’s cathedral to the blind person, and did not understand that such knowledge must necessarily remain in words only. How can a blind person be interested in stained glass? Only by way of general information about the cathedral. Sighted guides would place the tip of my finger on a tiny rose bud, cleverly carved amongst the intricate shapes of the leaves and branches of a chair leg, something that would take the blind hand a long time to appreciate, while the loveliness to the hand of the cold brass of the smooth communion rail would not be mentioned. Gradually my project team realised that blind people must be taught to acquire first hand knowledge of the cathedral, and this meant teaching them to use their bodies in contact with the fabric in order to construct a distinctive blind cathedral. We realised that there are at least two cathedrals – one for sighted and the other for blind people. Each has its beauties and its needs.
My thoughts on this essay.
In a sense, this one had more that I felt was useful than the previous one. Often, I found myself nodding my head and thinking, “I hope that non-disabled people read this, really read it.” All the stuff about the sighted living in a single world that assumes anyone outside of that world is merely lacking is so true that I wanted to jump to my feet and shout “Preach it!”
At the same time, I think the verbiage used can so easily be misinterpreted as to obscure the entire point that Hull is making, quite excellently, I might add. The trouble with the “plurality of worlds” as Hull readily admits, is the Christian notion of singularity, and the danger of the pluralism to fall off the cliff into relativism and mushiness. I don’t think that is at all what Hull intends. I would humbly attempt to clarify his verbiage by replacing “world” with “lived experience” or “perception.” Hull is not advocating for relative Truth, but differences in perception, differences in lived experience, differences in conclusion based on differences in culture. Just as different races experience different cultures based on geography, tradition, language, food, socio-economic status, appearance or clothing, so a marginalized people group like people with a certain disability might also experience an alternate culture even while residing within a non-disabled community. This difference is what Hull seems to be saying by “world” and my own experience supports such a notion. Both the experience of a parallel, rich, beautiful, but alternate culture, and the disempowering rejection by the mainstream sighted world of the validity or existence of that culture. Because of the widespread prevalence of the insistence that the sighted experience is the only valid experience, I have struggled for years with defining my own experience only in terms of lack, which led to intense depression and problems with self-identity and self-esteem.
I loved the description of the journey that Hull and his colleagues took when deciding how best to present a tour of a cathedral to blind guests. Instead of presenting the aspects of a cathedral that sighted guests find most stimulating and trying to awkwardly translate it for blind guests, to instead present a different but equally valid set of experiences.
I also sympathized with Hull’s conclusionary statement that our culture, so long entrenched in ableism (disablism in the UK) has so far to travel before any significant change is effected that to view such a wold seems merely like foolish idealism. Yet, I still hope, and dialogue about this because I believe that words and ideas have power. Doing nothing will bring nothing. Doing something as small as joining in these discussions and dialogues may someday bring society shuffling closer to this kind of respectful thinking that we today can only dream of enjoying.
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Minus 5 points for the phrase “phenomenological epistemology”.
I like that he begins with a difficult abstract concept (The transfiguration of the body and the transcendence of the body) and then goes onto to give good tangible examples of what his actually means.
In particular, the fact that technology transcends our bodies and extends our reach beyond ourselves and draws distant information to us. This is just as true of a blind person using a GPS device as it is of a sighted person chatting with someone on the internet, or either of them reading a book.
The body is transfigured by the loss of a sense. But in doing so, it is opened to the possibility of other worlds when before it seemed that there were only one. It is a powerful kind of “forced empathy” you could say. Once you realize there are at least 2 worlds (seeing and unseeing, it is much easier to make the jump to their being 3, 4, 5, 500). At the same time, there is still only one world. Hyper-individuality is no good either.
I enjoyed his account of the blind person regaining their place in a new world, “gradually built up, put into place with innumerable fits and starts”. To the degree that we “deny citizenship” to this person in their world, we are not loving them. As Christians we have historically done this unwittingly by treating people as charity cases or sinners.
The blind person is, (hopefully I might add!) “No longer confined through the deception of everyday experience within an absolute world”. This is a good thing and another way to say that throw a particular narrowing of their senses or reach (in the case of, for example, a wheelchair-bound person) they are no longer so narrow minded. Their disability has transfigured their body and now they are aware of a wider world.
His point about how Christian tradition treats blindness in 2 ways was interesting to me and something I hadn’t considered. That it was a negative thing, yes, but I had forgotten about how it was sometimes used as a metaphor for faith (positive).
His line of reasoning about how there were no disable people among the disciples was really quite interesting to me. It seems that it would be very helpful if there were. That the early apostles were accompanied by signs of healing seems to aggravate this problem. I think that one problem for this is that Acts records only the really cool stuff that happened in the first few years after Jesus ascended. There were likely tons of people with disabilities (major and minor) that were part of the Christian community but that did not get healed in any sort of miraculous sense. When one considers how many people probably had fairly severe myopia in antiquity with no vision correction, this has to be the case. Then again, that was the norm, so not worth mentioning. Only fancy stuff made it into the written account.
It’s a really challenging passage, but it’s also a case where I think we need to not be so much of a biblical literalist that we don’t consider other sources. That there were people of all social standing and economic class among the early Christians is clear from lots of 2nd century accounts. I think disabled people were definitely in there too, whether they were written about a lot or not. Also, as he mentions in several cases, Paul definitely had something going on which he alludes to on a couple occasions.
Finally, at the end, his example of the Cathedral made me think of the last time I was in a Cathedral. I noticed the stained glass and the high arches, and even the roughness of the stone, but didn’t think about the ornate carvings on the legs of the pews. I realized, in a bit of shock, that if I were building a Cathedral, I might have left that detail out! Terrible idea.
He ends on a downer. Can Christianity be rescued from us always considering blind people as alien? Oh ye of little faith. Yes, I believe so. Always reforming.
Oh, and this quote is good:
“It is the very provinciality of disability which enables it to grasp the territory of the human, while the city, looking out upon the provinces, thinks that it itself is everything. So a spirituality of disability not only pluralises the human world, it extends it.”
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Whistler:
As Walt Whitman says, that I may contribute a verse.
O ME! O life!… of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; 5
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.