The Summer edition of Making A Difference Magazine from the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities features five articles about the power congregations have to be places of inclusion and opportunity for people with disabilities and their families.
Thank you to Reverend Bill Gaventa, Ginny Thornburgh, Imam Furqan Muhammad, Pastor Devin Strong, Rabbi Harvey Winokur, Reverend Denny and Varion Spear, Pat Nobbie and many others for their work in lifting the profile of this important issue.
Thank you to The Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities for shining a light on religious leaders and congregations who actively engaging people with disabilities in worship, study, service and leadershi.
The second episode of the Interfaith Disability Connection podcast features an interview by Mark Crenshaw of Reverend Bill Gaventa; keynote speaker of the upcoming 2009 IDC Summit. The conversation provides a preview of the 2009 IDC Summit and it gives listeners a glimpse of Reverend Gaventa’s passion for the full-inclusion of people with disabilities in congregational life.
Reverend Gaventa serves as the Coordinator of Community and Congregational Supports at the Boggs Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Click the play button on the player below to listen to the podcast.
This article by Archbishop Wilton Gregory from last week’s Georgia Bulletin provides and important example. I am grateful for the Archbishop’s perspective on these important issues
Reading and then meeting Dr. Nancy Eiesland brought about a transformation of thought and a transformation of possibility for me. She was a wonderful mentor, conversation partner, and friend. I am most grateful for her prophetic advocacy in the classroom, from the pulpit and in the larger world. She was capable of painting a picture of the already and the not quite yet for people with disabilities with equal measure of hope, grace and urgency. She did not shy away from inviting G-d into the fray or to request an account of the church’s failure to respond to the gifts and the needs of people with disabilities.
(Ret.) Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks about the concept of ubuntu. Watch Tutu speak about ubuntu:
I understand ubuntu because of Dr. Eiesland. I would not be who I am apart from her contributions as teacher, writer, mentor, and friend. I assume that many people who met, heard and interacted with Nancy felt similarly.
Nancy’s books The Disabled God and Human Disability and The Service of G-d (Edited with Don Saliers) provide some of the most well conceived scholarship at the intersection of theology and disability even though it has been more than a decade since their publication.
Nancy will missed, but she leaves a hundreds of students and friends who will work to carry on the conversation in her absence.
Nancy’s words, deeds and friendship transformed the world for people like me, who were privileged to spend time with her. I ask that I may be an agent of that continued transformation so that Nancy’s legacy might live many years past her time here on Earth.
Nancy’s husband Terry and her daughter will remain in my prayers.
If you would like to attend a memorial service in honor of Dr. Eiesland there will be one held in the Cannon Chapel at Emory University on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 2 PM.
Links to other pieces written about Nancy:
Links to Articles that Nancy wrote that help tell her story:
As stress increases more and more people in our congregation are likely experiencing the effects of depression. I have found that too often we have difficulty speaking the truth about depression because we feel we should be better able to control our moods. We become convinced that depression is a sign of weakness.
May faith groups have put together resources to assist congregations in talking about and responding to depression and other form of mental illness in our midsr. Here are links to a few of them:
I was reminded of these issues and the importance of providing space for this important conversation by a recent interview I saw with Quaker teacher and Scholar Parker Palmer.
Please take a few minutes minutes to view the clip below:
I would love to hear your reflections on our times and the rise of depression. I would also love to hear from readers concerning your reflections on the Parker Palmer clip.
Inclusion if people with disabilities in our congregational and community settings is a two way street. It opens up the possibilities that children with and without disabilities can learn together and challenge each other.
This morning I read a post from Dave Hingsburger at Chewing The Fat. Dave is one of the most observant bloggers I have encountered. He seems to be intentionally present to the lives of the people he encounters each day. This post is no exception. (Read it ready to be moved!)
I have often encountered families, unaware that I am hearing their conversations, who are not prepared to use the presence of a person with a disability as a teach-able moment. The parents in Dave’s story do an amazing job answering their son’s questions and giving him information to begin to remake his image of what it means for his neighbor to live with disability.
If we are to remake the world and our communities to include people with disabilities in powerful, life-giving ways we must begin by paying attention to the opportunities around us. We must engage those opportunities as experiences that can dispel ignorance and fear. I was moved by the simple, loving, educational interaction between the members of this family and the role that the presence of the stranger turned friend played in opening up possibilities.
Sometimes the power of inclusion is simply in the showing up! Showing up is helping to create the next generation of advocates and allies.
Have readers who live with disabilities had experiences with children that opened up possibilities?
Have family members been able to find language to help children dispell myths, fear and ignorance around the presence of people with disabilities?
Does anyone have other suggestions about speaking to children about disability?
I have said countless times before: the meaning of the Exodus is that anything is possible, that there is no status quo that cannot be overturned. Imagine a world in which you are a slave, and your father was a slave, and his mother before him, and so on for generations. And then, seemingly suddenly, God intervenes and you are no longer a slave. To be sure, the journey ahead will be long and arduous. Indeed, there will be moments when things seem so frightening and unsettling that you will even find yourself longing for the way things were before. But there is no returning to the way things wereâ?? not ultimately, anyway. The Exodus is a rupture, a break in history, a moment after which all things are new, a moment in and through which all things are possible.
I have a very personal confession to make: over the past couple of years, as my struggle with chronic illness has continued and in many ways intensified, I have found myself less able to talk about the Exodus in this way. Is there really no status quo that cannot be overturned? I have asked myself. What about the pain and fatigue that wrack your body each day? What about the degradations and devastations that pervade the globe and seemingly make a mockery of human dignity and of lifeâ??s meaningfulness? Perhaps all this talk of the Exodus as paradigmatic for human history was just loose talk, just so much Pollyanna nonsense. I have wondered, and lamented the depths to which life seems resistant to, indifferent to, the stories we tell and the narratives we strive to live by.
This morning I feel something I have not felt in quite a long time: I believeâ?? but really believeâ?? in the Exodus again. That which was utterly impossible, indeed unimaginable, will become a reality in just a few short minutes. The United States of America, the great beacon of freedom and democracy, has always been tainted by the monstrous legacy of slavery and the ways it denied that black men and women, too, were created in the image of God and were thus every bit as infinitely valuable as their white counterparts. Today these same United States will swear in its first black president, a black man who will occupy the very house that slaves built so long ago. The status quo has been overturned, repudiated, one might even say redeemed. (This, I hasten to add, remains true regardless of oneâ??s political commitments or affiliations.)
We ought not be deceived. Just as the Israelites faced a long and torturous road to the Promised Land, so also do we Americans face a long and difficult road ahead (and on more fronts than I can begin to list). The Hasidic masters teach that each year we are obligated to re-live the Exodus, to tap into the liberatory energy that the Exodus represents, to reclaim and deepen our own freedom and dignity as Godâ??s creatures. I cannot help but feel that the Exodus is being re-enacted and re-experienced in our day, today.
To be sure, many of the worldâ??s problems will remain as intractable tomorrow as they seem today. On a personal note, my own battle with illness is not likely to disappear soon. Iâ??m still not sure about every status quo being overturnedâ?? at least not before the Messiah comes and enacts a kind of cosmic Exodus for us all. But what Iâ??ve learned this morning is that much of what we take as given and immutable is in fact neither. So I go back to what I have said and taught over and over again: to take Judaism seriously is to believe that the world as it is is not yet the world as it must be, and to know that we are implicated in the sacred task of closing the gap between them. May all of our faith in the possibility of redemption and transformation be renewed and revitalized by this extraordinary day.
â??This is the day which the Lord has made, let us rejoice and delight in it.â?
God bless all of you, and God bless the United States of America.
The bold emphasis has been added by me.
I appreciate the point of Rabbi Held’s writing because I sense something new in the air, but I find myself intrigued by the paragraph I highlighted.
The onset of chronic pain and disability can affect a person’s ability to believe in one’s G-d and in oneself!The onset of chronic pain and disability can and does alter our experiences of community. Chronic pain and disability can and does change those who live with it in so many ways.
This raises several important questions for our congregations, I think.
1. Are we asking people how we can help them?
2. Are we willing to be present to the pain and grief without trying to explain it?
3. Are there ways our congregations can support people in their journeys of questioning and discovery?
4. Do our congregations have care teams and other support mechanisms in place to remain connected to people who are struggling with the onset of chronic pain and disability?
Are there other questions I am forgetting?
It is my hope and prayer that our congregations begin and continue to offer love, support and connection in the difficult and pain-full times in the lives of the members of our communities.
One of the “must read” blogs that shows up in my feed reader is written by a man named Reverend Gordon Atkinson. The blog is title Real Live Preacher. I read the blog because it is consistently thoughtful and well written.
The post begins with a father’s grief about what has been lost. It continues through an understanding about the reality of a child who literally and figuratively sees the world differently. From there something ordinary like going to see a 3D movie provides a common context from which to experience life together. Finally Gordon’s daughter tells him that she prefers her world the way it is.
There are many angles to approach this story from. I will just say that having experiences that open us to each others realities from time to time really is the stuff of everyday miracle. When we have experiences where the “light bulb goes on” and we perceive
reality in new way those are indeed holy moments.
