What? You didn't know? Well, that'll be because I stupidly forgot to say anything about it on my blog until now. Oops. I will be reading some poems from my pamphlet, along with Andrew McMillan and Ira Lightman, at a lovely bookshop-cum-coffee shop in my hometown of Boscombe, Dorset. It's guaranteed to be small-ish, intimate, casual, and hopefully other things that poetry readings should be as well (provide your own adjectives!). Ira and Andrew are two poets whose work I admire completely, and this will be the first time we've performed together (the first I've seen them perform at all, actually, though I've heard great things).
Wednesday 23rd November, 7.30pm
@ The Crooked Book
725 Christchurch Road
Boscombe, Dorset, BH7 6AQ
See you there, perhaps?
Tuesday, 22 November 2011
Saturday, 19 November 2011
'Beauty is a Verb' in the Post
I'm suitably chuffed that my copy of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability arrived in the post this morning. I've been reading it on and off all day, trying to absorb the poems and get my thoughts together about the thing in its entirety (and also trying to resist the wish to be in it by reminding myself that it's American, and I'm not). I hope to review it properly soon. In the meantime, though, the first thought I had was that even before reading the poems, the essays which begin each chapter are fascinating enough for their own review. In a review of the poetry, I'm simply not going to have enough room to shoehorn them in. But any anthology of this type (whatever 'type' that is; 'anthology under a theme' doesn't seem to cut it) will need to define itself, declare as precisely as it can what it's trying to do, and frame the poems in some kind of context. These accessible, short essays do the trick with style.
Indeed, I would guess that this book's context will be unfamiliar to some, whether we are 'able-bodied' or 'disabled'. In my own poetry, I've been quietly plugging away (as we all do) writing on my own interests and concerns; and without wanting to be pigeon-holed, disability is one of them. But until several months ago, I certainly didn't know there was any such thing as a 'disability poetry' or a 'crip poetics' movement. Since finding out, I've been thinking quite carefully about the extent to which I would, or wouldn't, identify (and whether I could find others who did on my side of the pond). Anyway, that's the kind of territory the anthology seeks to explore, so this book is an exciting discovery for me, and a welcome and vital addition to poetry and poetics in general. Before getting to a proper review later, I hope it's alright to include here the first paragraph of the preface, by Jennifer Bartlett. It excitingly sets the scene, with hints that we're going to be looking at both subjects and aesthetics, and how those will sometimes be intertwined:
Indeed, I would guess that this book's context will be unfamiliar to some, whether we are 'able-bodied' or 'disabled'. In my own poetry, I've been quietly plugging away (as we all do) writing on my own interests and concerns; and without wanting to be pigeon-holed, disability is one of them. But until several months ago, I certainly didn't know there was any such thing as a 'disability poetry' or a 'crip poetics' movement. Since finding out, I've been thinking quite carefully about the extent to which I would, or wouldn't, identify (and whether I could find others who did on my side of the pond). Anyway, that's the kind of territory the anthology seeks to explore, so this book is an exciting discovery for me, and a welcome and vital addition to poetry and poetics in general. Before getting to a proper review later, I hope it's alright to include here the first paragraph of the preface, by Jennifer Bartlett. It excitingly sets the scene, with hints that we're going to be looking at both subjects and aesthetics, and how those will sometimes be intertwined:
For me, the idea for Beauty is a Verb can be pinpointed to one single moment, December 10, 2005, the day Norma Cole read at the Bowery Poetry Club for the Segue Reading Series. A few years earlier, after a stroke, Cole lost and regained her ability to speak. Now, she used her temporary aphasia and slurred speech to compose a poem that noted a list of words she could no longer enunciate. The result of her reading this work was alternately hilarious and devastating. Cole laughed at the ridiculous, yet utterly wrenching, situation of a poet losing words, and the audience laughed with her. Yet, it wasn't as simple as that. Although the audience laughed, they were also visibly uncomfortable. From the sophistication of Cole's work and her genius as a person, one can guess that this was no accident. Can an entire anthology be sparked by one reading of one poet? I am sure stranger things have happened in this world we called poetry.
Thursday, 17 November 2011
What do you think?
I have been experimenting with funky (and not so funky) blog design templates. What do you think of this one? Shall I keep it, at least for the Winter? Yay or nay?
Friday, 11 November 2011
My Colours in a Series
I was invited to turn my piece, 'Nailing My Colours to the Mast', into a series. Everything I wrote in the original piece has been expanded and made more detailed, so that each colour is its own blog post. That series has been very kindly posted -- all at once -- to Faith and Stuff. There's quite a bit to read, then, but feel free to have a look, and please comment and give your thoughts on any / all of the posts. It's all about explorative conversation, not dogma and prescription.
I also got to review Simon Barraclough's marvellous Penned in the Margins pamphlet Bonjour Tetris for Sabotage Reviews. Read that too, if you have the time.
I also got to review Simon Barraclough's marvellous Penned in the Margins pamphlet Bonjour Tetris for Sabotage Reviews. Read that too, if you have the time.
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Nailing My Colours to the Mast
For a long time I’ve felt the need to write something which might bring this blog out of the current standstill / self-promotional mire that it is in. Personally, I’ve felt the need to write something long, rambling, blatantly honest, and cathartic. So here it goes: a statement of faith, a response in part to Robert Peake’s poignant (and brief) piece On Being Straight (A Thought Experiment). If you’re allergic to religion (and / or long and potentially repetitive pieces of writing), feel free to ignore this. But if, like me, you’ve ever felt the pang of disappointment and frustration which trying to live with a Christian faith sometimes brings, you might want to read on. To make it slightly easier, I’ve separated the sections under the colours of the rainbow (including indigo, even though it's probably not a colour, because as The Pixies once sang, ‘If the devil is six, then God is seven.’)
There may well be errors, and / or further areas for debate (I haven't discussed the hotly-contested sins of Sodom, for example). Feel free to let me know of any, and let’s carry on the conversation.
Red
I am a Christian who affirms and accepts the LGBT community.
Why? Because I'm a cripple.
In case the connection is less than obvious, here’s the crux of it: queer and cripple, we are both condemned under Levitical law.
Since the first century, for various (and good) reasons, the Church has softened in its fear and vehement loathing of the grotesque, unclean, disabled body. Therefore, I find it more than confusing that we have stubbornly held onto a negative attitude towards homosexual love (and by extension, alternative genders). Why one, and not the other?
Orange
Let’s look at a book: William J. Webb’s Slaves, Women and Homosexuals (2001) uses what he calls a ‘redemptive-movement hermeneutic’ to say that women are no longer of lower status than men (cool), slavery is now unacceptable – even evil (cool), but… wait for it… homosexual acts are still wrong (as if you could separate them from orientation, and Jesus' words about lust (adultery) indicate that you can't; strangely enough, we've also distanced ourselves from Paul's* words to do with the fact that 'marriage' is more about the intention to have sexual union than ceremony, but I won't go into that). There are several arguments Webb gives to back that up, but the main one is that over the course of the Bible’s pages, there is a gradual shift, a liberalisation, of attitudes towards women and slaves. Therefore, we cannot justify a staunchly conservative view on either issue today. But, he says, the same cannot be said of Judao-Christian views on homosexuality: while they don’t get harsher as the Bible progresses (how could they get harsher than in the Old Testament? Death penalty?), they certainly don’t get any better. In fact, they stay pretty much the same, indicating that Christians today shouldn’t differ too much, or at all, from biblical cultures on this issue (he hints that we should drop the death penalty for homosexuality -- that we should be slightly more nice and welcoming -- but only, it seems, because it's an obviously good idea*).
I probably don’t need to tell you that I don’t buy Webb’s ‘redemptive-movement hermeneutic’: it’s a needlessly complex system for developing a moral stance (eighteen steps, I think, to apply to every issue before constructing conclusions) and relies on the fallacy that there are reliable trajectories in cultural attitudes from one point of the Bible to another, when in reality the Bible reads, more often than not, like a heart monitor of high and low points. But even if you do buy Webb’s arguments (and I wouldn’t shoot you), there is no change in attitude towards disabled people from the Old to New Testaments. There is no reason to think we are any less despised in the NT than we always were. Sure, Jesus healed some of us, but that isn’t the same as accepting us as we are (we have to look elsewhere for that). No, his healings make a related, but different, point: that of the spiritual Kingdom of God being ushered into the physical kingdoms of this world. So, by Webb’s hermeneutic, shouldn’t disability still be considered deplorable / abominable, etc.? Funnily enough, he doesn’t say. There’s only so much room in a book about hermeneutics, and you can’t please everyone.
Yellow
Christ’s stance on disability is revolutionary – off the top of my head – in two ways. The first is demonstrated in John 9:3: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” What a beautiful revision of an old theological idea! The other is in what Jesus said when a blind man approached him in Mark 10:51: “What do you want me to do for you?” There were no assumptions. Blindness is so often physically obvious that it’s perfectly reasonable to think that this man’s would have been. But Jesus offered him a choice: stay as you are, because you are accepted anyway, or have your faith honoured by my healing of your suffering. This was all about the alleviation of personal suffering and the confession of faith, not about physical improvement so as to conform to some societal or religious norm. (And I say ‘religious norm’ because, let’s be honest, the Levitical law prohibiting cripples from becoming priests did so on theological grounds: physical imperfections and blemishes are unclean in the sight of God, even for commoners; the idea that this fact was relevant only for priests is another fallacy – it is simply that commoners aren’t mentioned in sections relevant to the Temple priesthood. Indeed, priests aren’t mentioned where commoners are either.)
Jesus said virtually nothing about disability itself. What he did was talk around the subject of the body, and demonstrate his acceptance of it, in the same way that he said a lot about love (and the sin of unfaithfulness), but nothing about homosexuality: the Samaritan woman at the well was ‘called out’ and forgiven for her infidelity. Mary Magdalene was forgiven for her sexual promiscuity (if you acccept the idea, given to us by religious tradition, that she was a prostitute at all*) because of her recognition of, and adoration for, Christ. There is also a reasonable possibility that the centurion that Jesus met and blessed in Matthew 8 and Luke 7 was partnered with a man, and that the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8 may well have been a gay man (who was not told by Philip to change his ‘affliction’ at his conversion). Is this all speculation and conjecture? Of course it is. But not without reason, and the evidence is only as scant as that on which some of us are leaning for our theology of disability. Here’s the rub: we have based that on only two things we know well: 1) that as Romans 8:1 says, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”, and 2) we are no longer living under The Law; Christ fulfils it, refines it, and redefines it.
The fact is, whilst in the New Testament we cripples are certainly not condemned anymore (as we were under Levitical law), neither are we fully definitely accepted and affirmed as a fully-redeemed part of the Church. That’s why some people still believe that if you’re crippled it must be because you’re enslaved to sin and need to confess. Thankfully, the rest of us have dropped these old cultural and religious ideas which were based on ignorance and prejudice. But why: because that was simply a good idea if we were to carry on loving our neighbour into another year, decade, and century. Because those old stereotypes were condemning, and they just didn’t hold water anymore. Because disability just happens. It’s not detestable, it’s a neutral reality. I can no more choose to be disabled than I could choose to be homosexual.
Green
All of which brings me quite neatly to another leader who disliked the idea of homosexual love in the Bible (1 Corinthians 6:9-10, and 1 Timothy 1:9-10), and argued against it on theological grounds: Paul. He is where we get this old chestnut (hideously paraphrased): it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. We were designed male and female because those are the puzzle-pieces that make the prettiest picture. Anything else is a deviation from a physical norm and thus, Leviticus tells us (Paul is loathe to revise Leviticus here) a religious one, and thus (God said) an abomination. But here’s the fascinating thing: isn’t the disabled body a ‘deviation’ from God’s intended ‘image’ (if you will) on a much more inherent, basic, fundamental level? Isn’t it a much more theologically-explicit deviation than a slightly awry sexuality? I would say so. Before humans were paired up and told to multiply, we were ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. God stood back, looked at us, and said we were good: one at a time, as individuals. Can we imagine Adam having Muscular Dystrophy? Eve crawling around with Spina bifida? I’d be surprised to find out they did; and if they did, we’d have to revise thousands of years of religious tradition. I think you get my point: it doesn’t bode well for God’s eye for detail. Plus, disability is a more pervasive problem than any sexuality: having sex (if we choose to, and that’s been talked to death) can be controlled, or prevented; but people just keep being born disabled – keep acting disabled! – and won’t abstain, no matter how hard we try to make them.
This condemnation of the cripple (for the priesthood or not, it makes no difference) is important because if we’re victim to The Fall by simply existing, we all fail when put under God’s holy microscope. There is no physical perfection anymore. BUT: if we have all fallen short of God’s exacting standards, we are also, all of us, beneficiaries of God’s grace. Somehow, most of us have decided that God’s grace renders my guilty-by-being-disabled status obsolete. I am a Christian, despite my body not being what God apparently intended. But have we decided this from Biblical evidence?
I’m not sure we have. It seems to me that we’ve decided it based on the fact it just makes sense: our culture views disability differently than an ancient Jewish one did, differently even than a 1st Century Christian one did. Under the social model of disability, we now understand that bodies are simply made differently; there isn’t a ‘wrong’ body, and there should never be a despised or unwanted body. The disabled have achieved in the same ways the able-bodied have, and are just as deserving of its rights and benefits. These are our culture’s findings, and many of us in the Church have allowed them to shape our theology about the body, despite what we find (or don’t find) in the Bible, and despite Jesus’ or Paul’s relative silence on (or indirect addressing of) disability.
Oh, except this: Paul said a lot about suffering (especially persecution), and he did talk about the ‘thorn in the flesh’ thing. God gave him a thorn in the flesh, a ‘messenger from Satan’ to torment him, and didn’t take it away, despite Paul’s appeals to God to reverse his plight (‘My grace is sufficient for you’ was his response). Is Paul referring to his blindness following his conversion on the road to Damascus? Possibly. Indeed, many scholars have said that this passage speaks to disability: it’s true that God can work in and through the disabled body, and it’s also true that God might choose not to heal us for that reason. This says nothing about a person’s spiritual status or favour under God. But we have little idea what this passage really refers to; there’s some idea that this ‘thorn in the flesh’ might’ve been a stalker, sent (in Paul’s mind) to make him veer from his mission. For all we know, it could speak to homosexuality; indeed, it could even refer to latent homosexuality on Paul’s part. Maybe the ‘thorn in the flesh’ is a phallic euphemism. Maybe Paul, just for a short time, ‘struggled’ with gay leanings. It’s as good a theory as any, because the fact is, there’s quite a few, and they’re all speculative. Let’s be honest about that.
Blue
All of this, and more, is why I choose to be a Christian who affirms and accepts the LGBT community: because I am a cripple, and because most of you (if we’re friends) have affirmed and accepted me. I do not live under Levitical Law. The Law is written on my heart, thanks to the blood of Christ. I am ‘disabled’ because of society’s unwillingness to see me as equal, not because I am cursed by God (neither I nor my parents sinned!). I can’t ‘abstain’ from being a cripple. Neither should I have to. God accepts me as I am, and Jesus demonstrated that in what he said, as well as what he didn’t say.
Paul, in Galatians 3:28, said: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (that is, not under The Law). Many of us, whether consciously or unconsciously, have added “neither disabled nor able-bodied” to this list of defunct separations, without asking why, or even whether it was OK to do so. We just did it. Why do we struggle so hard to add “neither gay nor straight”? Especially when “gay / straight” is maybe the greatest divorce the Church has suffered since the first century’s “Jew or Gentile”. Why do we not see the full implications of “neither male nor female”? Especially when LGBT Christians (because that isn’t an oxymoron: ‘straightening out’ our sexuality or gender has never been a prerequisite of believing) are being mentally and physically persecuted, pushed to suicide, rejected and abused by the Church itself?
I’ve heard most of the objections to adding ‘gay / straight’ to Paul’s list, but while we keep adding other divisions to it simply because it makes sense to, I don’t buy them.
Because I'm a cripple. And because I don’t live under Levitical law.
Indigo
The law, and its theological underpinnings, served a purpose in its day. This purpose was to separate the people of Israel – a brand-new, specific, chosen nation – from the people of Canaan, a theme which follows through the Old Testament: Israel must appear different, in every way, from surrounding pagan nations (especially when it comes to those behaviours associated with the Canaanite temple ceremonies, where children were sacrificed to Molech – I’m talking about sodomy!). But in Christ there are no longer any boundaries – physical or geographical – that define who is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of God’s favour. People of every sexual orientation simply want to love one another. Some of us are Christians, and ours is a global faith.
Violet
For me, all of that puts paid to any arbitrary ‘rules’ about who we are, or aren’t, allowed to love.
Because I'm a cripple. Because I was once condemned under Levitical law. And because I'm not condemned anymore. The curtain has been torn. "It is finished."
*amendments made thanks to feedback
There may well be errors, and / or further areas for debate (I haven't discussed the hotly-contested sins of Sodom, for example). Feel free to let me know of any, and let’s carry on the conversation.
Red
I am a Christian who affirms and accepts the LGBT community.
Why? Because I'm a cripple.
In case the connection is less than obvious, here’s the crux of it: queer and cripple, we are both condemned under Levitical law.
Since the first century, for various (and good) reasons, the Church has softened in its fear and vehement loathing of the grotesque, unclean, disabled body. Therefore, I find it more than confusing that we have stubbornly held onto a negative attitude towards homosexual love (and by extension, alternative genders). Why one, and not the other?
Orange
Let’s look at a book: William J. Webb’s Slaves, Women and Homosexuals (2001) uses what he calls a ‘redemptive-movement hermeneutic’ to say that women are no longer of lower status than men (cool), slavery is now unacceptable – even evil (cool), but… wait for it… homosexual acts are still wrong (as if you could separate them from orientation, and Jesus' words about lust (adultery) indicate that you can't; strangely enough, we've also distanced ourselves from Paul's* words to do with the fact that 'marriage' is more about the intention to have sexual union than ceremony, but I won't go into that). There are several arguments Webb gives to back that up, but the main one is that over the course of the Bible’s pages, there is a gradual shift, a liberalisation, of attitudes towards women and slaves. Therefore, we cannot justify a staunchly conservative view on either issue today. But, he says, the same cannot be said of Judao-Christian views on homosexuality: while they don’t get harsher as the Bible progresses (how could they get harsher than in the Old Testament? Death penalty?), they certainly don’t get any better. In fact, they stay pretty much the same, indicating that Christians today shouldn’t differ too much, or at all, from biblical cultures on this issue (he hints that we should drop the death penalty for homosexuality -- that we should be slightly more nice and welcoming -- but only, it seems, because it's an obviously good idea*).
I probably don’t need to tell you that I don’t buy Webb’s ‘redemptive-movement hermeneutic’: it’s a needlessly complex system for developing a moral stance (eighteen steps, I think, to apply to every issue before constructing conclusions) and relies on the fallacy that there are reliable trajectories in cultural attitudes from one point of the Bible to another, when in reality the Bible reads, more often than not, like a heart monitor of high and low points. But even if you do buy Webb’s arguments (and I wouldn’t shoot you), there is no change in attitude towards disabled people from the Old to New Testaments. There is no reason to think we are any less despised in the NT than we always were. Sure, Jesus healed some of us, but that isn’t the same as accepting us as we are (we have to look elsewhere for that). No, his healings make a related, but different, point: that of the spiritual Kingdom of God being ushered into the physical kingdoms of this world. So, by Webb’s hermeneutic, shouldn’t disability still be considered deplorable / abominable, etc.? Funnily enough, he doesn’t say. There’s only so much room in a book about hermeneutics, and you can’t please everyone.
Yellow
Christ’s stance on disability is revolutionary – off the top of my head – in two ways. The first is demonstrated in John 9:3: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” What a beautiful revision of an old theological idea! The other is in what Jesus said when a blind man approached him in Mark 10:51: “What do you want me to do for you?” There were no assumptions. Blindness is so often physically obvious that it’s perfectly reasonable to think that this man’s would have been. But Jesus offered him a choice: stay as you are, because you are accepted anyway, or have your faith honoured by my healing of your suffering. This was all about the alleviation of personal suffering and the confession of faith, not about physical improvement so as to conform to some societal or religious norm. (And I say ‘religious norm’ because, let’s be honest, the Levitical law prohibiting cripples from becoming priests did so on theological grounds: physical imperfections and blemishes are unclean in the sight of God, even for commoners; the idea that this fact was relevant only for priests is another fallacy – it is simply that commoners aren’t mentioned in sections relevant to the Temple priesthood. Indeed, priests aren’t mentioned where commoners are either.)
Jesus said virtually nothing about disability itself. What he did was talk around the subject of the body, and demonstrate his acceptance of it, in the same way that he said a lot about love (and the sin of unfaithfulness), but nothing about homosexuality: the Samaritan woman at the well was ‘called out’ and forgiven for her infidelity. Mary Magdalene was forgiven for her sexual promiscuity (if you acccept the idea, given to us by religious tradition, that she was a prostitute at all*) because of her recognition of, and adoration for, Christ. There is also a reasonable possibility that the centurion that Jesus met and blessed in Matthew 8 and Luke 7 was partnered with a man, and that the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8 may well have been a gay man (who was not told by Philip to change his ‘affliction’ at his conversion). Is this all speculation and conjecture? Of course it is. But not without reason, and the evidence is only as scant as that on which some of us are leaning for our theology of disability. Here’s the rub: we have based that on only two things we know well: 1) that as Romans 8:1 says, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”, and 2) we are no longer living under The Law; Christ fulfils it, refines it, and redefines it.
The fact is, whilst in the New Testament we cripples are certainly not condemned anymore (as we were under Levitical law), neither are we fully definitely accepted and affirmed as a fully-redeemed part of the Church. That’s why some people still believe that if you’re crippled it must be because you’re enslaved to sin and need to confess. Thankfully, the rest of us have dropped these old cultural and religious ideas which were based on ignorance and prejudice. But why: because that was simply a good idea if we were to carry on loving our neighbour into another year, decade, and century. Because those old stereotypes were condemning, and they just didn’t hold water anymore. Because disability just happens. It’s not detestable, it’s a neutral reality. I can no more choose to be disabled than I could choose to be homosexual.
Green
All of which brings me quite neatly to another leader who disliked the idea of homosexual love in the Bible (1 Corinthians 6:9-10, and 1 Timothy 1:9-10), and argued against it on theological grounds: Paul. He is where we get this old chestnut (hideously paraphrased): it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. We were designed male and female because those are the puzzle-pieces that make the prettiest picture. Anything else is a deviation from a physical norm and thus, Leviticus tells us (Paul is loathe to revise Leviticus here) a religious one, and thus (God said) an abomination. But here’s the fascinating thing: isn’t the disabled body a ‘deviation’ from God’s intended ‘image’ (if you will) on a much more inherent, basic, fundamental level? Isn’t it a much more theologically-explicit deviation than a slightly awry sexuality? I would say so. Before humans were paired up and told to multiply, we were ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. God stood back, looked at us, and said we were good: one at a time, as individuals. Can we imagine Adam having Muscular Dystrophy? Eve crawling around with Spina bifida? I’d be surprised to find out they did; and if they did, we’d have to revise thousands of years of religious tradition. I think you get my point: it doesn’t bode well for God’s eye for detail. Plus, disability is a more pervasive problem than any sexuality: having sex (if we choose to, and that’s been talked to death) can be controlled, or prevented; but people just keep being born disabled – keep acting disabled! – and won’t abstain, no matter how hard we try to make them.
This condemnation of the cripple (for the priesthood or not, it makes no difference) is important because if we’re victim to The Fall by simply existing, we all fail when put under God’s holy microscope. There is no physical perfection anymore. BUT: if we have all fallen short of God’s exacting standards, we are also, all of us, beneficiaries of God’s grace. Somehow, most of us have decided that God’s grace renders my guilty-by-being-disabled status obsolete. I am a Christian, despite my body not being what God apparently intended. But have we decided this from Biblical evidence?
I’m not sure we have. It seems to me that we’ve decided it based on the fact it just makes sense: our culture views disability differently than an ancient Jewish one did, differently even than a 1st Century Christian one did. Under the social model of disability, we now understand that bodies are simply made differently; there isn’t a ‘wrong’ body, and there should never be a despised or unwanted body. The disabled have achieved in the same ways the able-bodied have, and are just as deserving of its rights and benefits. These are our culture’s findings, and many of us in the Church have allowed them to shape our theology about the body, despite what we find (or don’t find) in the Bible, and despite Jesus’ or Paul’s relative silence on (or indirect addressing of) disability.
Oh, except this: Paul said a lot about suffering (especially persecution), and he did talk about the ‘thorn in the flesh’ thing. God gave him a thorn in the flesh, a ‘messenger from Satan’ to torment him, and didn’t take it away, despite Paul’s appeals to God to reverse his plight (‘My grace is sufficient for you’ was his response). Is Paul referring to his blindness following his conversion on the road to Damascus? Possibly. Indeed, many scholars have said that this passage speaks to disability: it’s true that God can work in and through the disabled body, and it’s also true that God might choose not to heal us for that reason. This says nothing about a person’s spiritual status or favour under God. But we have little idea what this passage really refers to; there’s some idea that this ‘thorn in the flesh’ might’ve been a stalker, sent (in Paul’s mind) to make him veer from his mission. For all we know, it could speak to homosexuality; indeed, it could even refer to latent homosexuality on Paul’s part. Maybe the ‘thorn in the flesh’ is a phallic euphemism. Maybe Paul, just for a short time, ‘struggled’ with gay leanings. It’s as good a theory as any, because the fact is, there’s quite a few, and they’re all speculative. Let’s be honest about that.
Blue
All of this, and more, is why I choose to be a Christian who affirms and accepts the LGBT community: because I am a cripple, and because most of you (if we’re friends) have affirmed and accepted me. I do not live under Levitical Law. The Law is written on my heart, thanks to the blood of Christ. I am ‘disabled’ because of society’s unwillingness to see me as equal, not because I am cursed by God (neither I nor my parents sinned!). I can’t ‘abstain’ from being a cripple. Neither should I have to. God accepts me as I am, and Jesus demonstrated that in what he said, as well as what he didn’t say.
Paul, in Galatians 3:28, said: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (that is, not under The Law). Many of us, whether consciously or unconsciously, have added “neither disabled nor able-bodied” to this list of defunct separations, without asking why, or even whether it was OK to do so. We just did it. Why do we struggle so hard to add “neither gay nor straight”? Especially when “gay / straight” is maybe the greatest divorce the Church has suffered since the first century’s “Jew or Gentile”. Why do we not see the full implications of “neither male nor female”? Especially when LGBT Christians (because that isn’t an oxymoron: ‘straightening out’ our sexuality or gender has never been a prerequisite of believing) are being mentally and physically persecuted, pushed to suicide, rejected and abused by the Church itself?
I’ve heard most of the objections to adding ‘gay / straight’ to Paul’s list, but while we keep adding other divisions to it simply because it makes sense to, I don’t buy them.
Because I'm a cripple. And because I don’t live under Levitical law.
Indigo
The law, and its theological underpinnings, served a purpose in its day. This purpose was to separate the people of Israel – a brand-new, specific, chosen nation – from the people of Canaan, a theme which follows through the Old Testament: Israel must appear different, in every way, from surrounding pagan nations (especially when it comes to those behaviours associated with the Canaanite temple ceremonies, where children were sacrificed to Molech – I’m talking about sodomy!). But in Christ there are no longer any boundaries – physical or geographical – that define who is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of God’s favour. People of every sexual orientation simply want to love one another. Some of us are Christians, and ours is a global faith.
Violet
For me, all of that puts paid to any arbitrary ‘rules’ about who we are, or aren’t, allowed to love.
Because I'm a cripple. Because I was once condemned under Levitical law. And because I'm not condemned anymore. The curtain has been torn. "It is finished."
*amendments made thanks to feedback
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