Jan 6, 2025
I share so many foundational commitments with this doctor, but when will well-meaning Christians learn to discipline their thinking about disabled people? The person-as-object-lesson is just too tidy to resist, it seems:
[T]hey live closer to the cross than the rest of us. They carry their disabilities all the time. They don’t get a day off. They don’t get a minute off… And so I find they bring me closer to the cross. They feel it; they sense it; they’re part of it more than I am. I sometimes have to think my way there, whereas they simply guide me – they take me by the hand and bring me there.
They show us, they teach us, they tell us — this language runs through the whole piece. Really? Who is this they? People with Down syndrome will always be trotted out in these narratives, I find. What about a man who’s had a sudden significant hearing loss in his 60s? A woman in her twenties who had rheumatoid arthritis that’s now in remission? An amputee? Someone living with a low-lying malaise of depression for decades on end? Are these people the same in any meaningful sense?
To be sure: the Christian framework does offer sacrifice as an inevitable part of any human life and an invitation. We hold our many sufferings and, by grace, let them be united with the sacrificial Love that precedes and subsumes them. And yes, disabling conditions may well show up in the Venn diagram of our suffering and our sacrifices; like all givenness in life, those conditions can also be gifts if seen in light of that same Love. All of that mix — our gifts and our suffering as sacrifice — conjoins us to one another as no more and no less than human. If some abstract they is used to teach an edifying lesson, you can be sure that we’re dealing with flat characters: cardboard cutouts and allegorical symbols, not human beings.
But of course we do teach other. A person might say: People with cognitive disabilities remind me that I am too impressed by the genetic lottery distribution of book-smart cleverness. But one might also say: People with very few material resources show me that I too often hoard ephemeral pleasures. People in recovery teach me that idolatry lurks everywhere. And we’d also have to say: People with twice as much courage as me — twice as much compassion, twice as much magnanimity — they teach me that virtue. The old idea from Iris Murdoch endures: the most important revelation that stories offer is that other people exist. Stories in fiction and stories unfolding right before our eyes. Other people exist! A miraculous banality, half comedy and half tragedy, and a truth that takes rituals and habits to take seriously. We calibrate our inflated sense of self by learning from others’ gifts and from their suffering, and perhaps we learn the most when those two are almost irreducibly mixed. We — we, all of us — teach each other, insofar as we have the capacity to really learn.