My classmates and I were getting a tour of the Illinois Center for Rehabilitation and Education (ICRE), a rehabilitation center for adults who are blind or visually impaired on Wood Street in Chicago. This was last Wednesday during a week of visiting various blindness organizations in the Chicago area as part of our preparation to be teachers of the visually impaired.
Our lively tour guide named Everett Davis lead us into an elevator, his long white cane extending a few feet in front of him, and continued his joke:
A man was in his apartment building and heard that it was raining. He wanted to feel the rain, so he stuck his hand out of the window. Out of nowhere a prosthetic eye fell into his hand. He looked up and saw a woman leaning out of the window above his. “Is this your eye?” he asked. “Yes it is!” she responded. “Thank you for catching it! Please come up and have dinner with me.” The man went up, returned the eye, and had dinner. When he was about to leave, the woman stopped him. “No, stay the night with me.” The man replied, “Do you offer your love to everyone who comes for dinner?” “Not everyone,” the woman said. “Only those who catch my eye.”We laughed along with our guide as we walked out of the elevator, the blind leading the sighted. This sense of lightness and laughter lived in the rooms and hallways of the facility and was embodied by Derrick Phillips, the superintendent of ICRE, with whom we had met earlier that day.
“Why are people laughing?!” Phillips was recalling his thoughts on his first day at the institution. “Those must be sighted people. I know blind people don’t have nothing to laugh about!” We sat at a table in Phillips’ office, hearing about his experience of coming to ICRE in the eighties after losing most of his vision as a result of a degenerative eye condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP). For Phillips, this condition accompanies an underlying condition called Usher’s syndrome, which begins with hearing loss at birth and eventually progresses to develop RP. He was suicidal as a result of his rapid vision loss, and could not understand sounds of joy in a place devoted to blindness.
Blindness was not a fate he expected or wanted for himself, and most people would understand why. Most would understand him bargaining with God in his grief over his sight, even rebuking God for bringing on this apparent suffering as Peter rebuked Jesus for telling of his coming crucifixion. And as Peter denied his affiliation with the crucifixion, Phillips denied his affiliation with blindness. "I already had trouble hearing," he says. "If I was blind too I figured people would really think I was a freak."
“Are you blind or visually impaired?” his roommate at the facility had asked him on that first day. Phillips only had a small amount of barely-usable vision when it was light out, but he used that bit of vision as an excuse to distance himself from the word blind (1). “I’m visually impaired.”
Phillips recalled a similar conversation happening three different times. Each time he was asked to perform some visual task, and each time he was unable to do so. His apparent failure was met with welcoming laughter. “Man, you’re blind, just like us. As long as you keep pretending you ain't blind, you going to keep having problems.”
By denying his affiliation with Jesus’ death, Peter denied his identity as a follower of Christ. In the same way, Phillips’ denial of his affiliation with blindness was also a denial of his identity as a blind person. Peter realized this when a rooster crowed as the sun came up. Phillips realized it when the lights were going out. “I finally admitted it to myself,” Phillips told us. “I’m blind. So what?” This declaration of acceptance became the title of his first book, published in 1998.
His journey to self-acceptance and independence was hindered by the lack of acceptance of others. A 1993 article about Phillips in The Chicago Reader by Steve Bogira describes Phillips’ experiences with bullying in school growing up. He first went to a school with a program for children with hearing loss in a nearby white neighborhood before eventually transferring to a school in his black neighborhood of Englewood. In the article, Phillips recalls being bullied by his white peers because of his race and bullied by all of his peers because of his hearing aids. This dual experience of racism and ableism that people of color with disabilities face is why we must center these intersectional voices.
After receiving job-skills training at ICRE, his marginalization continued. “You’re black, you’re blind, you’re hard of hearing, and you have a degree,” people would tell him. “With affirmative action, you’ll have no trouble getting a job.” However, this wasn’t the case. He was repeatedly turned down by employers who could only focus on his vision loss and could only find stable employment at blindness organizations such as ICRE and the Chicago Lighthouse.
Among other accomplishments, Phillips went on to write a second book, become the superintendent of ICRE, and become a minister. Before he obtained employment at ICRE, however, he never thought any of this was possible. “People don’t have no belief that blind people can do anything,” he lamented.
It struck me that his and others’ perceptions of blindness had made a vocation in ministry seem like an impossible goal. Are those whose bodies do not align with our image of perfection exempt from being theological Subjects? Is ministry only to be done for them, but not by them?
I would argue that the very body of the resurrected Christ testifies against this. Even after after death, Jesus had holes in his hands and his feet and a gash in his side. His body, which had been unjustly broken, still bore the marks of injustice but was no longer broken. His body was never fully restored to the state it was in before he was lynched, but it was not less whole. This was, after all, the body that ascended to the throne of Heaven. This body, riddled with unconventional holes that set it apart as holy, is the firstfruits of the Kingdom of God (2), the bread of life that comes like manna from Heaven and makes us whole. People with disabilities, whose bodies are made holy by their deviance from our false norms, take part in that same work by embracing God’s love for them and their bodies. A person who is made whole in their acceptance of their “deviant” body brings forth the image of Christ and his coming Kingdom of wholeness and unity (3).
It was this whole/holy/hole-y resurrected body that Peter had to affiliate with and follow in order to embrace his identity, an identity that became the rock on which the Church was built. He had denied this broken body and the identity it signified three times, and three times he stated his love to the resurrected Jesus.
People with disabilities are too often placed at the receiving end of a well-intentioned paternalism in ministry and humanitarian work. However, they have a central role to play in reshaping our physical and spiritual theological landscapes, leading us out of spiritual darkness and into the light of Christ (or maybe leading us out of whiteness and into blackness?). When these people and their bodies are embraced as Peter embraced the resurrected body of Christ, the Kingdom of God is revealed. This Kingdom is glimpsed in a faith-based organization called L’Arche. L’Arche is an international network of communities of people with intellectual disabilities. The founder of the organization, Jean Vanier, reflects on his experiences living with people with disabilities in his book Living Gently in a Violent World:
“Does the church really believe in the holiness of people with disabilities? Some people believe the church should do good things for the poor. But do we believe in their holiness? I get upset when people tell me, "You're doing a good job." I'm not interested in doing a good job. I am interested in an ecclesial vision for community and in living in a gospel-based community with people with disabilities. We are brothers and sisters together, and Jesus is calling us from a pyramidal society to become a body…Communion in our communities is not just receiving consecrated bread; it is the satisfaction of a deep yearning for communion in the hearts of people with disabilities. They are called to become saints, people of communion with others…We discover more and more that those who are rejected by society because of their weakness and their apparent uselessness are in fact a presence of God. If we welcome them, they lead us progressively out of the world of competition and the need to do great things towards a world of communion of hearts, a life that is simple and joyful where we do small things with love…[W]hen we meet people with disabilities and reveal to them through our eyes and ears and words that they are precious, they are changed. But we too are changed. We are led to God.” (4)At ICRE, our tour guide continued cracking jokes along with everyone else we met. The place was full of the joy of the Kingdom that comes from divine love of the self and of others. The protagonist in our guide’s joke caught a prosthetic eye, a piece of an unconventional body raining down like manna, and received unexpected love. The loving embrace of people with disabilities is a loving embrace of the resurrected body of Jesus, an embrace that bleeds unexpected love that spreads outward to build the Kingdom of God.
Notes
1. In the field of low vision and blindness, terms like low vision, visually impaired, legally blind, blind, and totally blind are used by different people for different reasons. Although the use of labels is less emotional than it is in Deaf communities, my week in Chicago showed me multiple instances of the word “blind” being avoided because of the emotional weight of that word and the negative perceptions of that identity. Another example was at an organization called Second Sense, which used to be called The Guild for the Blind. They changed the name primarily because many adults who were losing their vision would refuse to participate in an organization with the word “blind” in its name.
2. “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power.” – 1 Corinthians 15:20-24
3. I recently read the books Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright and The Disabled God by Nancy Eiesland at the same time. Wright helped me understand the significance of the resurrection in bringing about the Kingdom and Eiesland helped me understand the significance of the resurrected body for people with disabilities.
4. This book was written by both Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas, each author writing every other chapter. The quote is pieced together from Vanier’s chapters. I obviously had a difficult time narrowing down what quotes to use, because this is just a really good book. Like, you should really just read this book.
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