The
Disabled God: Towards A Liberating Theology of Disability
Nancy
L Eiesland
The
bodies we inhabit and the lives those bodies carry on need not be perfect to
have value. Bad things do happen, we know-to bad and good people alike-but so
do good things. Life curses like life blessings are always mixed
-Nancy Mairs.
This
is one of the academically exploded and theoretically well written books on
disability studies. Nancy L Eiesland tries to read the Christian believing
system in a more inclusive way. Accessibility is the core theme of her book.
She considers Jesus Christ as a disabled God whose body was badly broken. This disabled
God inspires the entire Persons with Disability and his broken body to make the
Christianity a more inclusive and accommodative system hence she proposes a
liberation theology which accommodates the persons with disability and creates
spaces for them through refashioning and
re-theorising the social-symbolic order of the society to include liberation
for all.
The
body is vehicle for self perfection and the target through ritual of
degradation of social exclusion. There is a deliberate attention to the body in
order to prevent it from becoming socially erased or subsumed into notion of
normal embodiment so the normal body is projected as the perfect body. This
perfect body survives in a network of structures and systems which continually
normalise the purity of the body. Alms
to the disabled body strengthen the purity of able-body-ness as persons with
disability are help through strategies of paternalistic care to try to adjust
like a normal person. It was not an able bodied god, but the disabled god
promising grace through a broken body is at the centre of piety prior practise
and mission. Here an attempt is made to re symbolise of some of our fundamental
symbols. Disabled god represents full personhood as fully compatible with the
experience of disability. Persons with disability must game access to the
social symbolic life of the church and the church must game access to the socio
symbolic life of the persons with
disability are prone to social stigmatisation, marginalization and exclusion
that render them silent and invisible and
they are consider as object of pity and patternalisation.
The dissonants raised by the non acceptance of persons with
disability and acceptance of grace through Jesus Christ broken body
necessitates that the church find new ways of interpreting disability. The
disabled have been named by medical and scientific professional or by people who denied full person hood and the persons with disability are imagined
as less realistic less intelligent less capable of decision making less logical
less self directional than non disabled
person. Capable bodies define the experience of the disable. She further brings
to experiences of two persons Diane Bebries and Nancy Maries who recount their
experience of painstakingly inhabiting their bodies and of disputing with
society about their proper social place in the process they de-mythologize
disability and the refuse to acquiesce to the societies stigmatisation. The
alternative knowledge they relate about the bodies and the social relations
reveal full bodied resistance to the dominant stereotypes of persons with disabilities
and move towards a liberative theology of
disability hence they teach the
world the aesthetic experience of living
in a non conventional body.
