Pentecost People: Theology as Disabled Learning

Disability Theology
Many voices dealing with disability and theology speak to the gift of the resurrection in understanding disability[1]. To look at the
resurrection as presenting a broken body or disabled God as the model
of resurrected life their thesis becomes clear and understandable.
Christ resurrects with a tear in his side and holes in his hands and
feet. Salvation in the disability theology model means we are not saved
away from our broken bodies but into a deeper relationship with them as
sites of resurrection and goodness in the world.

Disability theology in this way challenges our assumptions of normative
bodies and of salvations ability to heal us from difference into
normative states. If we look at the time of Christ – a time when we
have no medical plans, no health care – then when Jesus engaged in the
act of healing he was not moving them from abnormality to normality but
was instead moving them from normality to abnormality[2]. It is into
the recognition of the goodness of our bodies, broken as they may be
that we are being saved into.

Broken Bodies/Broken Attention
This model does not work for the learning disabled, called herein the
Differently Wisdomed. To engage in a discourse of the body centered in
this particular understanding of resurrection leaves no room for people
whose disabilities are invisible. To be gifted with an invisible
disability is to be located in a very particular situation: a normative
body but a brain or body chemistry that functions in a manner that is
not normative in its information processing, emotion regulating,
attention span, stimulus management, and which affects relationships
and is considered disruptive by society.

It is my assertion that the Differently Wisdomed provides a model for
church and society about the nature of dis/abling our learning and
wisdom assumptions so that unconventional wisdom and learning may
challenge our assumptions of power. Invisible disability, such as the
Differently Wisdomed which is our main focus but also the bipolar,
dyslexic, and those with aspergers syndrome and many others, can be
seen as a model of the Holy Spirit.

The resurrected Christ provides little in the way of salvic model here,
but the upper room of Pentecost may. Like the Holy Spirit the
Differently Wisdomed erupt in the midst of our controlled environments
drawing attention to the realities of chaos and begging that we pay
attention to those places often overlooked in our power, ministry and
educational assumptions.

A Differently Wisdomed Theology
Theology at its best is a disablement of our understanding of the world
and of God, in the best tradition of liberation theology[3]. Theology
is not set to the goal of propping up the powers that be but should
instead be engaged in the practice of radical de/construction of our
assumptions of knowing and learning. It is in this way Theology
dis/ables our learning. Learned systems of oppression, for example,
must be disabled in order for the wisdoms of the oppressed to be heard
and to create a space of challenge for our knowledge assumptions.

To think of the Differently Wisdomed theologically is to envision the
gifts of a people who bring to us w/holy disruption. To be Differently
Wisdomed in the classroom/boardroom/workplace and human relationships
is to disrupt our safe assumptions of knowledge and to allow other
wisdom systems to present new possibilities from outside the box.

Engaging in Disability Theology as a methodology is to seek out those
places in culture and the world where those who have been labeled as
invisible by the nature of their disability continue to challenge our
normative assumptions. What and how we learn is not only limited to the
classroom or workplace but also involves the attitudes and ideals we
learn socially. Many of these learning’s lend themselves to systems of
oppression based on race, gender and economics. To be gifted as
Learning Disabled or Differently Wisdomed theologically is to engage in
the practice of disrupting learning, knowledge and the ordering of
bodies so that those who suffer under oppression may be liberated.

Theologically speaking then we must be Differently Wisdomed. We must
engage in a work that brings about disruption to oppression so that the
people of God, with their plurality of gifts, can flourish in the human
space. To dis/able our learning then allows us to disrupt ways of being
that lead not to health but to death and enable ways of being that
engage our deepest levels of humanity.

This is what it means to be church. The church is called into a
position of radical disruption by which we form community out of those
society has cast aside and named as being dis/abled or dis/abling. It
is only here at this location that we are able to participate in the
welcome of Christ.

1) Holy Spirit
In this model we turn to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the
invisible presence of God. To draw on the panentheistic model of
theologian Sallie McFague[4] is to view the earth and all creation as
the body of God (but God is not the earth). In this way we can
understand the way in which the Holy Spirit fills all of creation with
the presence of God.

Differently Wisdomed peoples know themselves as disrupters of our
learning assumptions. Like the Holy Spirit we often find ourselves
filling the life-world of our social context. Like God in McFagues
model the differently wisdomed are the unseen who hide in plain site,
ready to erupt into the life world of our community at any given moment.

Theology as Disabled Learning then could see its self as a way of being
in the world, a way those with invisible disabilities can see
themselves[5]. Like the Holy Spirit our task is to transgress
boundaries and to disrupt our knowledge assumptions. Like the upper
room we are to interrupt our speaking and language when it becomes a
form of ingrouping/outgrouping, abuse or discrimination. Differently
Wisdomed people are called to speak Babel in the face of oppression, to
announce the chaos of life and the God that is present in it. When
society disables people and ignores their wisdom and knowing we are to
lay on hands and proclaim that despite what the powers-to-be have said
these are healthy people and they belong to God.

2) Babel
Like the Holy Spirit which disrupts ordered language with tongues,
disrupts ordered worship with prophecy and which speaks Babel in the
face of those who insist the world is easily ordered[6] and controlled
the Differently Wisdomed disrupt our ways of thinking and being. The
DW, by the nature of invisible disability, can disrupt our expectations
of relationship, communication and learning. It is an attack on our
assumptions of power and authority, an attack on our assumptions of
control. The individual with an ADD brainstyle can and will interrupt
our structures with insights and ideas from far outside the box. The
gift of this person is, like the Holy Spirit, the moods, insights, and
realities of ADD cannot be controlled. Like the spirit they blow here
and there, dragging disruption and blessing in their wake.

William Stringfellow quickly addresses the notion of speaking in
tongues in his ‘An Ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange
Land’. To engage in Bable is to speak nonsense in the face of systems
that seek to create control and order in our political and religious
systems. Babel then is to engage in a holy form of chaos when the
church or world seeks to define and control the giftedness of human
persons to the living space of the world.

The holy gifts, or gifts of the spirit, as described in Corinthians
could in many ways be described as the gifts of the Differently
Wisdomed people[7]. Like those filled with the spirit – and maybe to be
Differently Wisdomed is to be in/spirited– the Differently Widomed may
speak prophetically (pressured speech when all your ideas can no longer
be contained, speaking truth due to a lack of impulse control) or may
disrupt our gatherings and learning environments with a Babel that
draws attention to an ecstatic inner dimension of information
processing (disruptive behavior, communication breakdowns, a
sidetracked imaginative addition to the discourse). The gifts of the
Differently Wisdomed can be seen in the way in which spiritual gifts
are imparted in the laying on of hands, built into the insistence that
to learn wisdom and to encounter the voice of God in the world must
happen through tactile learning.

The very gifts created as a model of what the church is to be in the
world, spoken metaphorically by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians,
are the gifts of the Differently Wisdomed. The nature of the
Differently Wisdomed in the church is to speak Babel as a call to
repentance. It names that the nonsense speak of one may in fact be the
wisdom of God entering the world, a new type of upper room.

Babel as holy vocation then is to engage in a consistent dis/abling of
our assumptions. Speaking Babel announces that the ordered world
creates ways of knowing and knowledge that ables forms of abuse,
neglect and oversight of those who fall through the cracks. By creating
Babel – Holy Chaos – we enable those ways of knowing and those who are
Differently Wisdomed to claim the space of chaos – and any dyslexic or
ADHD student, worker, business person or artist can tell you about
chaos – as holy space.

3) Dis/abling salvation to enable salvation
To move our language from Learning Disabled to Differently Wisdomed is
to speak that the state of being disabled in this manner is not a thing
we can be healed or saved away from. Instead it is an opportunity to
name our truth as whole people whose very existence is a challenge to
the assumptions we make in the world. A disabled person is a person who
must be ‘abled’ through accommodation. A Differently Wisdomed person is
a person whom, by their disabled nature, bring gifts of wisdom and
knowing.

In turning towards the bible the Differently Wisdomed Theologian will
naturally move his or her gaze toward Jesus Christ. I am not suggesting
that we view Jesus as disabled but instead as embodying the best traits
of the gift of the Differently Wisdomed and other/wise invisibly
disabled. In the face of ordered structured ways of knowing – ways of
knowing bent on the support of systems of oppression and the
codification of knowledge systems/ways of knowing that supported Rome
and the imperial agenda – the message of Jesus breaks in and dis/ables
the safety barriers and assumptions of cultures. By being a DISruption
in the knowledge and wisdom of the world Jesus enABLES ways of living
wisdom that announces the validity of bodies and learning styles that
break out from our assumed norms.

The Differently Wisdomed disrupts our social norms and assumptions, the
primacy of the individual in her/his human and social relations[8]. The
differently wisdomed, by the nature of their gifts, insists that human
relationships, including cognitive relationships, function best in
relational communities. To be differently wisdomed, in the educational
system, workplace, or your human and romantic relationships, is to
insist that multiple wisdoms work best when they function as a communal
exercise of mutual dependency. The Differently Wisdom challenges our
assumptions of autonomy and instead insists that humanities true nature
is interdependence or in/dependence.

To be in mutual dependence, Differently Wisdomed people insist, is to
recognize that relationships involve the breaking down of barriers and
safety zones and the creation of areas of mutual dependability,
vulnerability and support. The Differently Wisdomed person functions in
relationship the way the church should: the community of people join
together in mutual mission and pool their gifts for the benefit of
those both in and out of the community. Where one community member
lacks the other members supply their own gifts, or collaborate together
to create community. Differently Wisdomed people, who may have trouble
organizing or sequencing information, who may have to step out of a
dinner party for a 20 minute walk to regain their focus, begs the
members of the community and family to recognize they are not mere
consumers with each other of a product but are, in the biblical phrase,
co-creators.

Independence then is in/dependence[9]. Relationships exist in mutuality
and co/dependence. To function as a community means to be communal. For
the church it means not only reclaiming our practice of Eucharist[10] –
a communal event where we celebrate the God who comes to us as broken –
but also a reclaiming the symbol of Pentecost.

Conclusion
To enter into a way of being that sees the church as a distributed
presence throughout the world whose goal it is to disrupt the assumed
learning’s of power and oppression is to enter into the gifts of the
Differently Wisdomed. If the church and world can more fully take stock
of its Differently Wisdomed members then the task of the Differently
Wisdomed having come into ownership of their way of being may have
provoked a change in the world.

For the Differently Wisdoemd to come into a model of Pentecost – of the
Holy Spirit disrupting life – is to come into a model of a way of being
that asks that we view holiness not as normative learning and
information processing but to instead view it as a type of
w/holiness[11] rooted in the gifts of multiplicity. To enter into the
gifts of Babel is claim that in what the powers-that-be and our
normative assumptions claim as nonsense is the people of God taking
root in our life-world. To name the Differently Wisdomed as being a
Pentecost people, people gifted with Babel, is to see their way of
being in the world as being a gift to the human whole.

Bibliography
Lisa Curtice, “The Social and Spiritual Inclusion of People with Learning Disabili...?”. Accessed 2008.
Nancy L Eiesland,. The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability Nashville: Abingdon Press
William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other A lines in A Strange Land Eugene, Or: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1973
[1] Nancy L Eiesland,. The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 101
[2] Eiesland,, 101
[3] Lisa Curtice, “The Social and Spiritual Inclusion of People with Learning Disabili...?” . Accessed 2008.
[4] Multiple conversations with Dr. McFague at the Vancouver School of Theology. Can be found in her book ‘Body of God’.
[5] Curtice 1
[6] William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Alines in A
Strange Land (Eugene, Or: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1973) 143
[7] Curtice, 5
[8] Curtice
[9] Curtice 5
[10] Eiesland, 115
[11] Curtice