Kathy Black
"Reflections from the Produce Aisle"
a report from the Re-Imagining Gathering
by Doug King
posted 11-1-00
Kathy
Black, Ph.D., holds the Gerald Kennedy Chair of Homiletics and
Liturgics at the Claremont School of Theology in Claremont,
California, and is an ordained United Methodist minister. She has
worked as the chaplain at Gallaudet University, pastored two churches
for deaf persons, and taught classes in deaf ministry and ministry
with persons with disabilities at Wesley Theological Seminary, Pacific
School of Religion, and the School of Theology at Claremont. Kathy
authored A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disabilities; her
writing has been included in several books, and she does many
workshops and presentations both in the United States and
internationally.
(From the Gathering program book)
Black began by sharing -- with some wry humor and not
a trace of self-pity -- a bit of her own life story. She grew up in New
Jersey, in a community built near a farm that had long been used as a
dumping ground for toxic waste. As a Girl Scout she spent many hours
each summer at a camp whose lake contained the 21 toxic substances
carried by run-off from the nearby waste storage.
As she grew older she began suffering from
"spells" which came on without warning, and left her unable to
control any of her muscles. She couldn't stand, move a hand, speak, or
even control her own breathing. The disease is progressive and
incurable, and has taught her to be pitied, stared at, regarded as an
object (as in "Oh, that poor thing!").
These spells have given her time to reflect on life --
"My time of forced meditation," she calls it -- and she shared
some of those reflections. She was in a supermarket once when a
"spell" came on, and found herself sitting on the floor in the
produce section, in the middle of a large puddle of milk from a jug that
had fallen from her cart. She waiting, immobilized, for someone to offer
any help, or even concern. She heard two sets of footsteps go by, with
no action. A third pair of feet approached. A women spoke quietly:
"There but for the grace of God go I." And she moved on.
What does that say about God, she wondered. About
God's relationship with us? People try to make meaning out of suffering,
but they end up implying either that God is capricious, or that we
deserve our troubles, perhaps because of our sin, perhaps because of our
lack of faith. So we perform the neat trick of making God both the
source and the (possible?) cure of our suffering. Conservative or
liberal, Christian or New Age or whatever -- everyone seems to offer
some variation of the same answers.
Black went on: "Now, I don't believe I
am cursed by God. I don't believe God has anything to do with it --
cursing or blessing or testing or using me. I do believe God
can use it -- but the cause is a farmer with stored
toxic waste on his land."
So how can our disabilities be reconciled with our
understanding of God? Her answer is that "the notion of an
all-powerful God has be to re-imagined." If God is "the great
puppeteer in the sky, and everything is in God's control," then
"God's power becomes more important than God's presence, more
important than God's love and compassion."
In contrast, she suggests, we need to learn from the
last fifty years that everything in life is interconnected. So
disability can happen for all sorts of reasons, including poverty and
accidents and bad judgment.
"But in the midst of it all we are confident that
God is with us, and wills our well-being." That is part of our
Christian affirmation of the resurrection, of life overcoming death.
But, she added, that well-being is different for each of us, and God
knows what it is for each of us.
"For me," she added, "adapting to the
unexpected is a given," but she had learned to stop hiding that,
for instance by getting a walker, which is "an absolute liberation
for me." Yes, it is a kind of dependence that she was reluctant to
accept, but it frees her to move around with a new sense of security.
So, she added, God works to transform all our lives,
in all our own unique circumstances. From her years of experience as
chaplain and teacher for deaf persons, she suggested that we try
"hearing" a Mozart symphony not with our ears, but through the
vibrations felt by holding a tightly inflated balloon. So, she said, God
takes the lives that we have and provides transforming opportunities
that move us ahead.
What's the role of the Church in all this? God calls
the faith community, said Black, "to bind up the
broken-hearted," comforting and healing their wounds. But too often
they merely bind the broken hearted instead -- by attitudes, by
lack of access, by excluding them in ways both blatant and subtle from
full participation in the life of the community.
The trouble comes, she said, "when we've bound up
the wound. Then we remove the bandages and the wound is still there, the
healing hasn't happened." Too often, then, we don't know what to do
or what to say, "so after a while we just withdraw."
This happens partly, she suggested, because we fail to
see the difference between healing and curing. She does not deny the
possibility of miraculous divine intervention, which may effect a
"cure" -- the lifting of the disability or illness. But that
is not within our control or understanding, and doesn't always happen.
But healing can happen, when people are accepted for who they
are. "When people can be with you and not freak out or take over
your life -- that's healing," she said.
For herself, she added, "Just let me get on with
my life. Being paralyzed now and then is normal for me. But I am
whole." So urged that as we pray in our faith communities for
healing, we find ways to do that without implying that people are not
already whole, whatever their disabilities or diseases, as they are. We
need to "stop defining wholeness (or holiness!) for others."
Prayer and transformation enable all of us to become
more while, she concluded, and interdependence is a vital part of this.
But we live in a culture that demands independence. The church should be
the place where dependency is acknowledged and interdependence is
furthered. So we need a theology which sees that "God is dependent
on us, to create the vision and to be the vessels of God's compassion in
the world."
