reynoldsVulnerableCommunionTheology2008

Cite

Reynolds, Thomas E. Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008.

Jeremy

This book was much more theological that I was expecting it to be. It drives home the idea that vulnerability with one another is what allows the presence of God to be recognized. It is through disability (which everyone does or will experience to some degree in their life) that highlights our need for one another. Instead of being ashamed, we rely on being fully human when we recognize that we can not be made whole with out one another.

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FirstAuthor:: Reynolds, Thomas E.
~
Title:: Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality
Year:: 2008
Citekey:: reynoldsVulnerableCommunionTheology2008
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Brazos Press
Location:: Grand Rapids, MI
ISBN:: 978-1-58743-177-7

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Table of Contents PDF.

Abstract

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Notes

# Jeremy’s Review of Vulnerable Communion

This book was much more theological that I was expecting it to be. It drives home the idea that vulnerability with one another is what allows the presence of God to be recognized. It is through disability (which everyone does or will experience to some degree in their life) that highlights our need for one another. Instead of being ashamed, we rely on being fully human when we recognize that we can not be made whole with out one another.

# Vulnerable Communion Reading Notes

Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality

By: Thomas E. Reynolds

Introduction  

“what can happen in our churches and in our daily lives when we encounter not only people with disabilities, bur also other people who are different in some way or another? How can we build bridges of understanding and mutuality, fostering mechanisms of support and empowerment instead of barriers that exclude?” (Reynolds, 2008, p.12)

“Protective walls can be deceptively insidious. In defending against possible suffering, they ironically create further suffering by cutting off the possibility of healing and companionship in relationships of trust.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.13)

“Hospitality involves actively welcoming and befriending the stranger-in this case, a person with disabilities-not as a spectacle, but as some one with inherent value, loved into being by God, created in the image of God, and thus having unique gifts to offer as a human being.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.14)

“There is, in the end, no hard-and-fast dualism between ability and disability, but rather a nexus of reciprocity thar is based in our vulnerable humanity. All of life comes to us as a gift, an endowment received in countless ways from others throughout our lifetime. When we acknowledge this, the line between giving and receiving, ability disability, begins to blur ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.14)

“The basic argument of this book is this: wholeness is not the product of self-sufficiency or independence, but rather of the genuinely inclusive communion that results from sharing our humanity with one another in light of the grace of God.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.18)

“The power of God is unseemly and strange. It discloses itself paradoxically, not in autonomy but through the stranger’s lack of ability: The stranger, however, is not merely a moral lesson. He or she is a person full of dignity, full of humanity, whose call is for us to be present, to listen, and to open up and share our lives. ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.20)

“For hospitality is a gift offered without preconditions expectations, an emblem of openness to the other. ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.20)

1: Theology and Disability: Perils and Promises

“Disability does not simply mark a personal tragedy that calls for healing. Neither does it indicate a diminishment of the image of God imprinted upon human beings. Neither does it suggest that people with disabilities are “children of a lesser God,” an ineffective or non-loving God. Rather, it calls into question the Christian community and its understanding of human wholeness, normalcy, impairment, redemption, and God’s love and power. ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.24)

“The medical model tends to reduce disability to a problem requiring diagnosis and treatment, a broken object to be fixed, made better, or overcome. In so doing, however, the person becomes reduced to a function of disabilities rather than vice  versa.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.25)

“Genuine healing is more than a matter of an individuals bodily adjustment to fit society’s definition of normalcy. It is instead a matter of society adjusting to the presence of diverse people with a range of impairments.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.26)

• 6. McClourghry and Morris, Making a World of Difference, 15.

“Disability, then, is not merely a medical problem for individuals; it is more a social problem. … For example, a person who uses a wheelchair becomes disabled when there access barriers (i.e., when there is no ramp to enter a building or an elevator to travel to the fourth floor). Thus it is that, as a loss of bodily function, impairment is socially transformed into a disability, a restriction of activity that excludes social participation. Perhaps we might then see disability less as something one has, or worse is, and more a series of moments defined by interactions between people and the public institutions where they occur.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.26)

• 8. McCloughry and Morris, Making a World of Difference, 15. See also Lennard J. Davis, Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New University Press, 2002),

“Among Christians, disability is commonly represented something to be healed or gotten rid of-a fault, a lesson in lack of faith, a helpless object of pity for the non-disabled faithful to display their charity: a vehicle of redemptive suffering, a cross to bear, or fuel for the inspiration of others. Whatever the case, it is clear thar such theological reductionism is alienating oppressive for persons with disabilities, nurturing a traumatic sense of being oppressive for persons with disabilities, nurturing a traumatic sense of being of place. ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.28)

“disability mirrors back the limitations of our communities and the ways they are constructed to some and not others, the conscious acknowledgment of which is unsettling and disorienting. Disability confronts us with different us with different ways of being human and living in the world, rupturing the comfy but precarious assurances we hold to regarding the purpose of human life. So we seek to neutralize it by remaking others in the image of our assurances, fixing their brokenness to more adequately reflect what we perceive to be true and valuable—that is, what is like us, normal.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.29-30)

“In order to open up space for a more fruitful theological picture of human wholeness and disability, however, we must examine and critique problematic notions of disability that emerge from the coupling of theology and disability terms of theodicy. ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.34)

“The linkage of sin-punishment-blemish with faith-forgiveness/salvation-healing claims too much. By treating disability as a faulted, person-defining condition, it is easy to easy to the next step and conjecture that the whole person is somehow imperfect, orally flawed or lacking adequate faith. For if it is taken for granted that God’s can and God’s love wishes to eliminate creaturely imperfection and suffering, restoring the dignity of health and wholeness, there must therefore be something that is blocking God’s healing presence.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.37)

“Disability is not a way for non-disabled Christians to grow in charity.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.39)

“People with disabilities must not be assimilated into romanticized moral meanings foreign to their experience, Unique persons are involved, in each instance possessing an irreducible dignity that shines of its own accord and is fully capable of achieving self-defined goals regardless of whether or not they instruct non-disabled people; or regardless of whether or not impairments can be wrapped in diagnoses of one kind or another and alleviated. Employing disability for mere theological gain is something to be vigilantly guarded against.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.40)

•  

“The notion of virtuous or redemptive suffering fallaciously links disability with suffering. But more seriously and dangerously, it promotes passivity and resignation to situations of personal hardship or social exclusion and oppression that otherwise should be resisted and transformed. Not only does this sanitize impairment by explaining it away in terms of the potential good it produces, it also baptizes the status quo, sanctioning the cult of normalcy. ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.42)

“Full personhood iss neither diminished by disability nor confirmed by ability. Instead, it is a factor of the interdenendent relationships we share with one another as creatures loved into being by God and in the image of God.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.42-43)

2: Communal Boundaries: Dwelling Together and the Cult of Normalcy

“The reality of cultural and religious diversity and the need for justice among people who are marginalized and poor makes the gospel message of love and neighborliness especially relevant. But we must tread with great caution. Inclusion is risky business. Too often it is servant to the status quo, championing the interests of convention rather than attending, to the particular uniqueness of persons. ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.46)

“A vision of health and wholeness is taken for granted that relies upon standards produced by social negotiations, ideals and norms of which favor some people over others. Hence the limitations of the medical model: it trades on processes of tolerance and assimilation that ritualize normalcy.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.47)

“Normally operates as a cultural system of social control. On one account, it is simply a way of ordering and bringing meaning to the everyday world shared by a group. It is unavoidable and itself good. There is, however, an insidious undertow that accompanies it, working to draw all into a certain caste or type. Normalcy is a force that flows according to strategic mechanisms of power that serve the conforce that flows according to strategic mechanisms of power that serve the conventions of the status quo, which in turn serves primarily those persons whose bodily appearance and abilities fall within a recognizably standard range.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.48)

• Ordering isn’t bad in of itself. It’s when we lose the ability to see people who fit outside the majority does ordering turn evil

“The Greek word oikos carries the root meaning of “home.” It signifies a place of belonging, a house. And because home is where the heart is, this implies more than simply a geographical point or physical residence. Basic to our existence is a desire to dwell in place that welcomes us, an environment worthy of trust and hope, to which we fundamentally belong.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.51)

“Our heart’s deepest impulse hankers after connection with a trustworthy creation—a purposeful macro-context that bathes our lives in meaning and value, thus cultivating a sense of being at home. The world is good. In  such a place, tragedy is not the final word - hope is.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.51)

“For if the notion of “place” is fundamental to our identity as persons, the experience of displacement yields suffering, undermining or blocking our desire for meaning and value. It is yields suffering, undermining or blocking our desire for meaning and value. It is understandable, then, that persons with disabilities come to distrust their world, often overwhelmed with a broad sense of being unwelcome. ” (Reynolds, 2008, p.52)

“An impairment becomes a disability when it runs up against a barrier to social participation and is subsequently seen as a lack of ability.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.52)

“Insofar as humans crave orientation and being rightly placed in reference to good, frameworks are inescapable. Staying with this metaphor, we might say that a framework provides the communal home its particular shape and stability, without which it would collapse. Frameworks thus create a shared dwelling place, endowing a group with a sense of identity: a sense of what it means to live and endowing a group interact together.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.54)

“It is no accident that the human body becomes a primary locus of such identification markers, its appearance (form) and ability (function) measured according to common expectations and standardized ideals.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.58)

• 23. I am adapting this distinction loosely from Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995), 11-12.

“It is this fear that is projected onto “the other,” the dissimilar and strange. Persons with body markers different than the mainstreamed body, in form and/or function, come to be seen as exhibiting an incompleteness or messiness that signifies an aberration. They mark an anomalous territory of experience that does not readily conform to the values affirmed by the majority, fostering insecurity and instability. And because, as Lennard Davis remarks, the human “body is never a single thing so much as a series of attitudes toward it,“29 it is easy to see how the differently marked body becomes represented as defective, an inverse and negative reflection of bodily features attributed with significance, such as beauty, efficiency, productivity, and so on.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.60)

•  29. Lennard J. Davis, Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New University Press, 2002), 22.

“Bodies are regulated so as to remediate and thus neutralize their deviances. This is the product of an economy of exchange that fears the disruption of its management system. At base, then, the cult of normalcy is an evasion strategy trained upon nurturing conformity and manufacturing consent. It is the symptom of an inwardly turned community, one that fears what is outside. Relying on techniques of standardization, bodies are disciplined and made compliant and docile, to use Foucault’s terms.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.60)

“Whether assimilated or excluded, the body in the cult of normalcy is seen as an objective marker of the good, reduced to its function in the system, a tool used to purchase recognition.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.62)

“In a now classic book, sociologist Erving Goffman offers a way of accounting for lack of body capital, through his theory of stigma. A stigma is a discredited attribute that fails to live up to what is expected and demanded of a person. Thus, its ascription depends upon social interaction. Someone possesses a stigma if he or she is marked by “an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated,”

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.63)

• 36. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).

“Stigma is a vehicle for projecting onto others an inverse image of normalcy; imputing deviancy to solidify its power to provide value and meaning, even prestige, to the dominant majority.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.64)

“Stigmatization is a procedure by which the cult of normalcy ends up biting its own tail, actually a procedure by which the cult of normalcy ends up biting its own tail, actually undermining the status quo by cultivating a sense of alienation among the majority at the same time that it attriubutes imperfection to the minority. Reducing persons with stigmatized attributes to their alleged blemishes ends up reducing the scope of what qualifies as normal. The cult of normalcy thus undoes itself, excluding virtually everyone. People are then forced into pretense, living lies by playing roles in order to fit in.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.64-65)

“In other words, ability means having the power to move with conventions, to conform, to be normal and whole, even to be holy. It means to control one’s body in a certain way. How a community understands power and the good, therefore, has everything to do with how that community understands and responds to disability: For disability is seen as disorderly and out of control. The issue is systemic and social in nature. “Lack” of self power is a liability to the group, rendering a person “needy” and “dependent” upon others to be made whole, or, if deemed permanently “lacking” segregated from public spaces that require wholeness for access.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.67)

“Consequentially, lack of ability is considered indicative of a faulted moral condition. According to the cult of normalcy. disability is a breach of the order of things. It is a liability to the group, calling for defensive maneuvering. And it is a short step from here to the notion that impairments arc the result of sin, curse, or lack of faith, and the person with disabilities bearing the burden of responsibility. The good of the community, then, requires that disability be ritualized into normalcy or rendered invisible if the community’s sense of orientation and meaning has been threatened with fragmentation and chaos. Disorder is impure. Human beings fear lack of order, which symbolizes falling apart and disorientation.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.67)

“The process of normalization deunal pends upon an understanding of the “normal” that goes unquestioned, giving unchecked license to the cult of normalcy. An idealization of what counts for independent living, free choice, and inclusion is simply presumed. The person is (re)made to fit the system. So, for all its noble prospects, too much is yielded to the social mechanisms that set up disability as something incomplete and faulted, something to be fixed and made whole, fully functional. It is not merely the impairment or undesirable inherited trait that needs readjustment; it is the community’s conception of normal form and/or functioning that needs readjustment. Independent living and communal inclusion should be measured as subsidiaries of broader and more holistic goals, such as living as as richly and fully as one’s bodily capacities permit, and doing so in a way that enhances one’s capacity for joy.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.69)

3: Able Bodies? The Illusion of Control and Denial of Vulnerability

“Lennard Davis articulates nicely-that is, “because the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person.”³ Normalcy creates disability as an obstacle to human flourishing, an incomplete and out-of-control body.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.73)

“The issue, then, is whether in seeking the good of people with disabilities nondisabled persons are inadvertently seeking their own good-that is, the good as conforming to the markers of a society’s economies of exchange is genuinely good, whether it actually makes possible human flourishing.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.74)

“Efforts to “normalize” a child in our culture often lead to sacrificing or suppressing genuine uniqueness, creating a docile body. Yet, conversely, efforts to affirm and give license to the uniqueness of children with disabilities often lead to institutionalization and social exclusion, for established social conventions are not set up to accommodate out-of-control bodies. Indeed, convention requires controlling and minimizing unconventional.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.75)

“Through such duality, self-definition and social definition are internally related, symbiotic. Precisely this is what makes governance by and for the people such an advance over more centralized or authoritarian forms of rule. For if preserving group identity and cohesion is politically prioritized, the freedom of self-definition for individuals is constricted. However, the reverse is also true. If individual freedoms are politically prioritized, the collective identity and common good of the group is jeopardized, resulting in fragmentation.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.77)

“Emmanuel Kant in his famous second categorical imperative, namely, that a person should not be treated asa means to an end, as an instrument defined by the self-interest of other people. Stated positively, this means that the human being should be regarded as an end, a value in itself. It follows, then, insofar as they are woven into the fabric of human personhood, that freedom, equality, and independence are also ends, values inherent to human dignity that must be preserved. A life without these is not worthy of dignity. This underlies Kant’s concept of duty and moral obligation, which cannot simply be reduced to self-interest.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.80)

“First, let us explore the notion of equality. “Equality” is a comparative term  that connotes a similarity between things. Burt this can be dangerous. Stanley Hauerwas puts the problem bluntly: “Often the language of equality only works by reducing us to a common denominator that can be repressive or disrespectful.”13 Why repressive or disrespectful? Because equality implies a a sameness and parity between individuals that homogenizes individual differences, washing them away on the tides of normalcy. A paradox is introduced. On the one hand, the ideal of equality promotes the sense that the other is like me in some fundamental sense equality promotes the sense that the other is like me in some fundamental sense the group. On the other hand, this very awareness can rob the other of his or her uniqueness, projecting an image of sameness onto the other, even to the point of demanding that the other become like me, like us.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.81)

• 13. Stanley Hauerwas, “Community and Diversity: The Tyranny of Normality,” in Critical Reflection on Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability: Disabling Society, Enabling Theology, ed. John Swinton (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2004), 39.

“Human beings do not simply come forward as self-sufficient and complete individuals from a place outside of a social world. The individual becomes a person only in the presence of others. So it is relational connection and not solely independence that defines our lives and shapes our desires and interests. The idea of an autonomous and self-constituting person is an illusion. It neglects the role community has in identity formation. Relation with others is primary, not secondary.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.83)

• A tree is not a forest, but a forest does not exist without trees.

“The ability to reason is a cherished commodity among modern human beings, so much so that its loss or dysfunction is often perceived as a form of suffering that should be avoided or remedied.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.85-86)

“Whether as state socialism, fascism, market capitalism, or the empirical sciences, rationalism has the capacity to systematically impose itself on and turn everything into a compliant object This produces an “instrumental reason.” And the end product is domination, which legitimates societal and economic systems built on the calculability, abstract equivalence, and exchangeability of things and persons.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.87)

“It is simply assumed that normal and functional bodies -  that is, complete, whole, or healthy - will be able to participate independently in the public process of generating capital. And if not, according to the norms of productivity, they must be rehabilitated (normalized) and rendered capable of doing so via medical or therapeutic technologies.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.89)

• Pointing out the flaw of the wealth accumulation of th eproductive imperative

“For disabilities might not exist, quips Hauerwas, “in a society that values cooperation more than competition and ambition.”

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.90)

• 49. Hauerwas, “Suffering the Retarded,” 90.

“Efficiency is perhaps the most predominant value of the productive imperative. The ideal body is efficinable of producing and consuming capital at a tempo that contributes to the ongoing societal mechanism of wealth creation.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.90)

“Indeed, we expect each other to be experts in controlling how we use time. But to control the use of time, we must control our bodies, fining tuning them for maximum output with minimal expenditure. We train our bodies, fining tuning them for maximum output with minimal expenditure. We train our bodies to produce instantaneous results. Speed is a key ingredient of efficiency. In this way, the ideal of efficiency instrumentalizes bodies as a time managing resource in the generation of capital. The ironic twist, however, is that by managing time and resources more efficiently, our freedom and individuality themselves become managed. We accede to the external demands of the economic machine, as tools to be used more productively and more effectively.  

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.90-91)

“It goes without saying that efficiency is an ideal that cannot help but marginalize people with disabilities. The rapid pace it fosters is, in fact, one way that disability is social constructed And it leaves many behind (e.g. the aged, the physically developmentally impaired) who are unable to be re-made in the image efficiency.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.91)

“The new is the ideal, marking fresh opportunities. Simply embarking into the future is. And the body is an instrument employed to make this possible. We can remake ourselves; we can become better. While this sounds like optimism on the surface, it actually signifies a deep existential restlessness with the contingencies and limitations of finite human life.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.92)

• Novelty isn’t always a good thing, it often helps to create a category of disability based on those who do not have the capacity to renew themselves in a way society deems appropriately new enough.

“Our worth is ascribed in an economy of exchange which identifies what resources or goods we have to offer. If we cannot accumulate wealth, we cannot purchase. And if we cannot purchase, we do not contribute fuel to the economic engine. We are, in effect, worthless apart from serving the productive "" economic engine. We are, in effect, worthless.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.94)

• The person as a consumer creates seperation between those who can freely buy and those who can not.

“We are made to serve a market whose stated purpose is to serve us. Rather than being nourished, our individual freedom is actually diminished. We become docile consumers habituated to self-indulgence. And this makes us pliable, willing subjects of market forces, in the end conceding what is allegedly held in the highest esteem-our freedom. Far from being free choosers, we become managed by an economic system that keeps us from promised well-being and satisfaction by rousing new cravings directed toward innovative, better, and more efficient goods. We are trained to be restless. Our insatiable desire for more devalues what we have and erodes the satisfaction that may come with making us ever fearful of not having enough.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.95)

“The problem is we believe the lie, and so facilitate disabling mechanisms that dehumanize and marginalize persons. We all grow old and eventually become impaired. The illusion of youthful beauty and vitality is seductive, for it makes us invulnerable and in control of our bodies. But notice how the cult of normalcy at work. The physically and mentally able-the potent, acquisitive, efficient, and innovative body-is normalized. Conversely, excluded is that anomalous and dysfunctional body deemed lacking in these preferred and desirable traits. The disabled body is thus created. Able-bodied people fear the lack represented in the disabled body, so it is ostracized or normalized. Consequentially, everyone ends shunning those dimensions of human existence that are vulnerable and weak, perhaps wounded or imperiled. We hide, ashamed. Instead of facing our vulnerability directly, we participate in the cult of normalcy, projecting shame onto the the different-that which is categorized disabled. We then ignore or pity those ugly, deformed, monstrous, senile, retarded, and otherwise unseemly bodies. In doing so, however, we flee from our own bodies, reducing them to instruments, commodities in the service of productive value exchange.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.97)

“We are all God’s creatures, full of an inbuilt preciousness that radiates of its own accord apart from the cult of normalcy. Because of this our churches can be more than mere reflections of society; they can be inclusive communities acting as harbingers of societal change.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.98)

4: Recovering Disability

“If it is true autonomous individuals; it is equally true that we are not determined products of society, simply passive receptors internalizing its norms and values. Human beings are personal beings. That is, we are agents identified by the relationships beings are personal beings. That is, context of these relationships informs our sense of self, but such that we become responsible agents in our own unique flourishing.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.103)

“Instead of being spurned or made invisible, the so-called deformed and dysfunctional become the normative fulcrum for understanding the human. Not ability but disability is basic. Why? Because, I suggest, how we understand and evaluate bodily form (appearance and/or completeness) and function (productive and/or performative capacity) is secondary, the product of the way we experience our vulnerability in interactions with others.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.105)

“Our existence as persons emerges in the presence of others. We are inherently relational creatures who need each other to become ourselves. That is, we are unfinished and deficient unto ourselves. And this highlights illusion of insecurity and weakness, undoing the illusion of security gained from being inscribed with body capital within the cult of normalcy. Seen in this light, disability is no fringe issue. Through it emerges a more holistic picture of what it means to be a person.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.105)

“While some persons may struggle with a higher degree of disability others, all human beings are disabled to some degree-often unpredictably and at different periods of our lives-from infancy to old age. And each of us, threatened by various contingencies, need each other to take note of our own particular condition and become empowered as individuals. Disability is an element intrinsic to human flourishing.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.106)

“The upshot is that personal wholeness is found not through ability but through an acknowledgment of vulnerability that is made concrete in relations of dependence upon others. Notice the word “acknowledgment.” It is not just the brute  fact of our vulnerability and dependence upon others that is important here. Rather, it is the explicit recognition of this fact. The acceptance of our dependence key to our flourishing, the means by which we become unique persons, free subjects of our own experience. Paradoxically, freedom is not a property of the self-determining subject, but a qualification of the dependent relationships by which the subject becomes who she or he is. I am free only insofar as I am with others.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.107)

“Refusing to own up to our vulnerability cultivates an aversion to difference. This, in turn, yields ideologies of exclusion and violence, for prejudice is nourished by fear. It feigns the status of strength by connecting well-being and wholeness with power, ability, and sameness, idealizing an imaginary completeness that supwith power, ability; and sameness, idealizing an imaginary completeness that suppresses or denies the capacity to be wounded. Fear insists or preserving the status presses or denies the capacity to be wounded. Fear insists on preserving the status quo and demands that it be protected against disruption and change.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.110)

“Pity is a deceptive emotional response to perceived suffering. Why deceptive? Because it feigns a closeness that is really distance. When unsure of ourselves and afraid to step outside the insularity of what is comfortable and reassuring about normalcy, we respond to undomesticated suffering with pity. Pity emerges from the presumption that we must do something to hide affliction when we encounter it, making it go away. This urge to cover up suffering is a symptom of shame, the shame we attribute to another whose out-of-control body elicits our own sense of shame. So we condescend to others as pathetic, feeling sorry for them in order to connect with their suffering as though it would be tragic if it were our own.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.114)

“By being subject to the other’s r vulnerability I am brought to my own vulnerability, not as a sterile form of self- contemplation but in a posture of vulnerability to the other. I am disposed toward and made “response-able” to the other, brought into a relation that changes me. Without appeal to some utilitarian economy of exchange or logic of equivalence I am carried beyond myself toward a personal presence that is of itself, apart from projected meanings, worthy of response.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.121)

“I do not love simply in order to fulfill a social prescription or become richer as a human being; these are by-products of love that are misplaced if given priority as ends in themselves. I love because of the revelation to me of other’s intrinsic value.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.122)

“Vanier observes: “To love is not just to do something for [others] but to reveal to them their uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can express this revelation through our open and gentle presence.”” (Reynolds, 2008, p.122-123)

• 52. See Vanier, Becoming Human, 22-23.

“Fidelity requires giving time to others on their own terms, patiently and persistently, and without treating them as a means to some other end that I may have in mind. like being helpful. Indeed, knowing and respecting someone necessitates being with them such that they experience welcome and can claim you as a friend.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.126)

“weakness harnesses a strange power. It breaks through the pretenses that have numbed our sensibilities. It disturbs the normal and in so doing excites the imagination. How so? By rendering us insufficient to ourselves.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.128)

“Compassion is a feeling-with the other for its own sake, preconditions aside. It does not simply undergo and suffer with another, it reaches out and desires the other’s well-being joy. In the posture of compassion I am brought to resist dehumanizing or her cause my own. Thus compassion signifies a mutual relation of vulnerability that exists beyond conditions established by the status quo. Because of this it requires an imaginative leap outside the conventions of a community’s itself. Compassion acknowledges that another may lack the means to reciprocate according to an economy of exchange but desires the good of that other despite this.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.128)

“the common good of a community is that which cultivates and preserves our capacity for love, our capacity to foster each other’s joy, which cannot happen outside of relationships morally charged and shaped by our basic availability to one another. The humanizing community must hold up respect, fidelity, and compassion as common ideals oriented toward the mutual flourishing of all who belong.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.129)

“vulnerability is key to our openness to each other. It nurtures a community of diversity rather than of sameness or uniformity dictated by normalcy.  Society becomes an open rather than closed circle of belonging. It preserves and celebrates differences as equal, not a closed circle of belonging. It preserves and celebrates differences as equal, not pressuring differences to become equal, normal like “us.”

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.130)

“Living our vulnerability, then, is a source of genuine public good in three ways; it entails (1) being with others - represented by a range of needs and disabilities—as essential to (2) our own mutual flourishing, and also to (3) the common good of the larger communities in which we flourish. Vulnerability links us to a human community.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.131)

5: Love Divine

“Love, then, both occurs amidst and exceeds the range of limiting conditions that define our lives. It means being available to another and attuned to that person’s singular worth beyond the utility and convenience of standardized systems of economic exchange. Love’s respect, fidelity, and compassion traffic in the space of an unconditional regard for another.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.136)

“True, justice is an ideal measured according to the Golden Rule. But giving unto others as you would have them give unto you” can easily be perverted and drawn into a utilitarian mode of “I give in order that you will give.” What protects against this perverse interpretation? Ricoeur suggests it is the commandment to love one’s neighbor, to give as it has already been given unto you, even to the point of loving one’s enemies. This “hyperethical” injunction runs counter to the utilitarian economy of exchange, not because it entails self-sacrifice, but because it is based in an economy of grace, an awareness of preexisting gratuity built into the nature of human relations from the beginning. Neighborly love stems from the revelation of value in another person that is basic to the way we find ourselves with others in the world. It points toward the always already possible reality of love, of mutual relationships of compassionate regard and life-giving generosity.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.137)

“Presented in vulnerable uniqueness and difference, the other is precious merely cause he or she is. Accordingly, another person comes as a gift set before me, whom I am invited into relation. And this astonishing fact testifies to the sheer gratuity of my own existence too.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.139)

“Isolation and hopelessness are siblings.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.142)

“God is not an abstract power of nature or principle of being, but a righteous will disclosed in the liberative transformation of an historical community, calling persons into right relationship with divinity and each other. As personal presence is an agency that confronts the of others in the mode of encounter, so, analogously, the model of divine disclosure or revelation is one of agential encounter: God comes to the people; God redeems.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.148)

“Experientially, redemption clears our vision. But in actuality God’s work as creator precedes and makes possible God’s redemptive work.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.151)

“God’s creativity is not one-sided and controlling burt is mediated through creatures. Creation, then, takes place not merely from the outside, through God’s word, but also from the inside, from within the abundance potency of the created realm. Creation itself participates in God’s work; the sea animals, birds, and human beings are blessed, called to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:22, 28). It has a creative charge of its own that is self-generating.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.154)

“Creation is thus a theater of redemption, the worldly milieu in which God becomes revealed-both generally, through the sense of God, and specifically, through calling people into right relation according to God’s good purpose. As such, creation itself is a communication of God’s loving intention to give. The purpose of creation, then, lies in God’s desire to create good. And the consequence is a good, a grace received.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.158)

“God is an animating and vitalizing power, setting the rhythm of day and night into motion and activating a creative pulse within creation itself. Energized by God’s directive lead, creation is creative in its difference from God and in its diversity. This is why creation’s diversity should not be seen in atomistic terms, that is, detailed simply by counting things numerically as separated fragments. For creation is an interdependent nexus within which all beings coexist. God enlists the elements to cooperate with divine creativity.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.161)

“Tragedy is best seen as the shadow feature that accompanies creation’s interdependent and relational structure. To be different requires being relational, which in turn implies not being self-complete and perfect. Creatures are a mix of being and non-being because they, unlike God, do not have the power of being absolutely. To be creaturely means to be contingent, called into and upheld in being out of nothing. We do not have our “own being”; it comes ultimately from God and occurs in relation to other existents. And this is the same as being susceptible to suffering, to being imperiled by influences not of our own making. Existence is a blessing with a tragic structure.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.163)

“God gives the world a distinct worth, the intrinsic precariousness of which allows for the possibility of conflict and suffering. Yet this is not to say that God purposely engenders conflict or wills harm. There is no greater harmony that God intends by producing suffering, such that a better or more complete world will be created. Recall that God’s creative and providential power not controlling power. It releases and lets beings be, and so does not determine all events, triggering natural disasters and creating impairments. Neither is God helpless, powerless before tragedy. Instead, out of nothing God creates beings with  unique differences, the events resulting from their interaction taking a course determined by the nature of those differences. This is what we mean by natural laws, and this means that God is not the sole actor in cosmic process. Events are not preordained according to a calculus of divine necessity. The universe is an open system.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.164)

6: Worthy of Love? Humanity, Disability, Redemption in Christ

“The transcendent God is not far off, but near, immanent in creation. Hence, God’s love sweeps horizontally, not simply vertically. It spills outward toward creatures, attending to the particular value of concrete others, up close and personal. Giving thanks to God then entails giving recognition to the inherent worth of others-accepting the generosity that God has already given-and letting it run over into the between-space of human relations.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.176)

“Rather than provide a definition of humanity or outline criteria constituting the human person, I shall propose an intentionally loose way of understanding the imago Dei. This shall help avoid reductive views that are disabling, and instead foster the inclusion of God means to be created for contributing to the world, open toward the call to love others. Three dimensions are implied: creativity with others, relation to others, and availability for others.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.177)

“the image we have of God has dramatic consequences for how we interpret the image of God in human beings.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.179)

“In all, God is creative, relational, and available. Perhaps, then, the imago Dei can best be seen as a form of creativity, relationality, and availability.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.179)

“Fundamental to human relationality is a material, bodily existence. We do not have bodies; we are our bodies. Human beings are living souls, not souls trapped in a material body, but organically unified, embodied creatures. And our bodies define our limits. To deny this is to deny our relationship to other creatures, for relationships depend upon the differentiation created by bodily limits. Furthermore, denying the body denies the God who lovingly sculpted from the earth.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.181)

• Reminds me of the end of Falling, Catching, Flying by Henri Nouwen

“Human beings, then, are free persons neither because of a fixed trait embedded in their nature nor because of something they produce, but because of something they are: loved into being by God, created in the image of God as vulnerable beings open to the possibility of love. All human beings are therefore precious and marked by dignity in relationships with others.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.186)

“we can affirm that being human is an incarnate desire for relation, not simply a desire to be but a desire to be with others and, ultimately, God. This takes place in an empowering matrix of bodily connection, in a home that welcomes. The creatively relational and available character of human being is what it means to be whole, which is the imago Dei.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.186)

“Persons are not perfect and autonomous beings but depend upon their environment to live, and depend upon the welcome provided by other people to flourish. When these dependencies are put at risk by maladaptive or conflictive biophysical relationships, impairments occur. Limitations like this are part of the tragic structure of creation.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.187)

“That human beings can turn away from their original relation to God, creation, and each other indicates a freedom for relationship that can be violated and abused. We are responsible creatures, and not solely determined by past experiences and lationships. However, this power of freedom entails a marked instability. That is, there is within the openness to possibility a volitional indeterminacy.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.189)

“For people with disabilities, sin is often experienced as oppression, exclusion, and isolation from others. While these have social origins, there are personal consequences in that they ignore, suppress, or harm the image of God in people, depriving them of creative, relational, and available possibilities for being.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.195)

“Redemption in Christ effects a transformative reversal of the fear-based mistrust we have characterized as the basic impetus to sin. It makes possible a conversion (metanoia) to God that promises new life amidst the perils of tragedy, trading paradoxically on the experience of vulnerability and lack as a harbinger of divine abundance.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.197)

“For according to the sin-infected dynamics of human life, Jesus represents what has no value or worth. redemptive work of God dives into the lowest point in order to raise human beings into divine welcome.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.201)

“The spiritual life is part of embodied life; indeed, it is at the center of embodied life, connected to our relationships with each other.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.201)

“That Jesus embodies God’s love for humanity in its vulnerability helps us move away from an individualistic hero model of Christ. Christ is no superhuman, beyond struggle, pain, or the possibility of deformation. His body was a conduit for accessibility to those who were disempowered and weak, with whom he in fact identified. His redemptive presence was interwoven with others. He did not occupy a lone space, a hero figure of autonomous individual strength. He was vulnerable, and made himself vulnerable, to others.  

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.201-202)

“The person and mission of Jesus (iconically) manifest God by signifying the glory and power of God that abides in the frailty of a human person. Thus, Jesus transforms what it means to be human, reversing conventional standards of human worth. The integrity of the human is neither a function of exchange value and productive ability nor a spiritualized body, but rather is based on God’s unconditional regard. And this is manifest most powerfully in a vulnerability infused with creative, relational, and available power.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.202)

“Not only is humanity created in God’s image; God also draws near to abide in, validate, and empower human vulnerability as loved by God. God’s nearness is one solidarity. God shows solidarity with human weakness and suffering by embracing the physical. We are bodies, desirous, restless, broken, and twisted. The divine is not set apart from this because Christ becomes united with it. Thus there is a revaluing of the human through Christ as God with us (Emmanuel).

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.203)

“At the cross the dehumanizing powers of domination and exclusion, against which Jesus stood, overextend themselves and become exposed for what they are - evil. The paradox revealed here is that precisely at the juncture where God is most conspicuously absent, God’s power is made palpably real. Jesus succumbs to death rather than mitigate the message of love. At this moment of f brokenness and baseness the world becomes complete and reconciled to God (Gal. 3:13).

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.203)

“Suffering is not a good, but a consequence of love’s risk opening itself to become available for the other, flowing freely and bestowing good upon that which is imperiled by sin and distorted in its way of being. Suffering as Jesus did is not a requirement for love, God did not need a sacrifice to satisfy God’s offended sense of honor in order to love. God loves us enough to die for our sake while we are yet sinners (Rom. 8:5).

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.204)

“God does not enter into human finitude and vulnerability in the abstract, but enters into it by means of human brokenness and sin. So Jesus’s cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” becomes God’s own participation in the pain and destitution of human alienation from God. The cross marks the intersection of divine love with human travail. And the result is at once scandalous and transformative.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.205)

“At the cross Jesus subjects himself to disability, and his resurrected body continues to bear his scars as a sign of God’s solidarity with humanity. The disabled body of Jesus represents one who understands by embodying disability even in his transformed, resurrected body. Furthermore, it suggests that disability indicates not a flawed humanity but a full humanity. Our bodies participate in the imago Dei in and through vulnerability and its consequent impairments, not despite them.”

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.207)

• Idea from Eiseland’s The Disabled God

“disability is tragically but redemptively fundamental. On the one hand, it is tragic in that it concerns 1 . 1 involuntary impairments and real suffering, much of which is the consequence of disabling social alienation and exile. This implicates human sin more than it does a flawed humanity evoking condescending acts of pity. In fact, the very idea that disability reflects a deficiency implicates sinful mechanisms of interchange, including the cult of normalcy, which denies vulnerability in favor of the illusion of control. Disability is redemptive, on the other hand, because God affirms by embodying it in Christ, contesting exclusion and ratifying vulnerability and relational interdependence as normative. God’s power is made complete and perfected in God’s weakness.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.210)

7: Being Together

“Compassionate regard and self-giving care do seem easier and more alluring as general ideals than as particular realities. Once we encounter other human beings and acknowledge their genuine difference from us, recognizing the peculiar ways they call us to respond to and affirm their uniqueness apart from own agendas or expectations, it is difficult to love. At close range, the little details get in the way. Bur the truth is: it is only at close range that love becomes active and real.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.217)

“we can say redemption means being ready for and available to God. On the other hand, openness to God means also to be with and for others, for the whole of humanity. It is to be ready for and available stranger, one who is different. Love of God and love of neighbor to the stranger are twin moments of the same redemptive momentum.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.217-218)

“In the kingdom of God all persons are gifts to be welcomed, not simply because of neediness but because each human being is loved into being by God in the image of God - authorized God and given unique abilities by God. It is not scarcity that governs the kingdom of God but abundance. God’s love knows none of the conventional istinctions between “pure” and “impure” or “good” and “bad”” The kingdom of God is radically inclusive.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.219)

“Devotion to God implies welcoming and sharing with others, a total dedication to the well-being of the human family. This involves no less than feeding the hungry, aiding the poor, tending to the orphan and widow, forgiving those who injure us, washing one another’s feet, claiming a humble instead of prestigious place, denying ourselves and raking up the cross, and bearing one another’s burdens. Paul echoes this theme in Jesus’s teaching by claiming that loving each other fulfills the whole law, striking the fundamental chord of his announcement that the kingdom of God is at hand (Rom. 13:8; Gal. 6:2). Conversion to God is a conversion to the other, for the other, with the other.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.221)

“It is not simply the physical healing that is important, as if Jesus intends only to cure making normal what was previously abnormal and faulted, lacking humanity. In fact, it is crucial to distinguish between the words “cure” and “heal.” The latter signifies something much deeper than the former. Cure tends to be understood medically as a restoration of function, a making right of what was broken, seen in terms of the cult of normalcy. Jesus does not condescend to take pity on persons with disability that their defects might be eliminated. True, he seeks to alleviate suffering, and does not make an explicit distinction between physical restoration and healing. Nevertheless, it is clear that healing means something more fundamental than curing. It means promoting wholeness as well-being.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.223)

“Contrary to societal mechanisms of exclusion that pit normal against abnormal, lack of ability is not the truly defining characteristic of the people Jesus heals. Social exclusion is. Thus, God’s redemptive and reconciling grace takes precedence the cure. It is not merely that healing becomes liberating because those who sick and impaired now gain access to the social life of the community as able-bodied people, made strong and “fully human.”

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.224)

“Wholeness and healing run deeper than the restoration of bodily function, for becoming able-bodied is not the criterion for membership in the kingdom. When healing occurs, it is the result of being redeemed, stemming faithful response to God’s welcome, a yes proclaimed in gratitude to God’s prior yes. Faith involves experiencing oneself within the arc of God’s love. It may or may not entail physical restoration.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.226)

“So as overall strategies, it is problematic to link harm with sin, and physical cures with righteousness. Such connections wrongly emphasize the individual and overlook the social powers of exclusion that Jesus is addressing. Faith is a matter of becoming whole in terms of creative, relational, and available possibilities,a ecreation of self in connection with God and other human beings that does not creation of self in connection with God and other human beings that does not operate according to norms fashioned in economies of exchange, but according to God’s economy of grace.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.228)

“If God’s glory is made manifest at the point where the Messiah, the anointed one, is dispossessed of ability and made weak, so too, conformity with Christ the faithful disciple experiences the glory of God in weakness.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.231)

“The household of God is a dwelling place structured according to a divine economy of grace. The Christian cannot be faithful alone or in isolation. Others are implied who, in different ways, also find themselves taken up into God’s transformative work. There are thus many rooms, each joined together by a shared field of resonance that makes them something larger than they are alone. This field of resonance is grace, and such grace is experienced insofar as genuine solidarity and communion in Christ is made real.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.234)

“Far from being a community of the privileged and powerful, the church ideally is comprised of people who take up the cross and suffer with and for others.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.236)

“Theologically speaking, then, the body of Christ is fractured when people with disabilities are excluded from full participation in the church. Genuine love is prevented from coming to fruition when physical and social barriers prevent access. Yet access is not something to be provided out of charity or pity, which often herely contributes to the problem. Access is not an extra option, an afterthought erived from feeling bad for persons who lack body capital. It is mandated by the character of what it means to be church, a people joined together by God’s precious gift welcome.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.238)

“Hospitality embodies divine love. It neither condescends out of pity nor forces the other to conform or assimilate to the household rule, but rather lets the other yielding space for the other’s freedom and difference. In this it reecognizes the preciousness of the other as a person loved by God.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.241)

“hospitality is a radical form of reciprocity that creates space for identifying with and receiving the stranger as oneself.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.242)

“Hospitality itself involves vulnerability, a mixing between guest and host that undoes the distinction between outsider and insider. Doors swing open and strangers welcomed as part of the household. Here boundaries shade into one another, the generosity of hospitality consents to a kind of role reversal that now also leaves the host vulnerable and dependent.

” (Reynolds, 2008, p.243)

“If hospitality is shown in order that something is gained, it becomes reduced to helping another out a position of superiority and strength. But hospitality is not a matter of “us” serving “them,” those weaker others who need us to achieve something they do not have. Rather, it is a matter of becoming a more inclusive and interdependent “us” fostered within relations of mutual giving and receiving.” (Reynolds, 2008, p.245)

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