I studied for an MA in Mission back in 2011, so ten years ago. I went full of anger, with a desire to “teach the church” a lesson. I wanted to speak out about what I perceived to be it’s appalling treatment of our children. All three of them are autistic, all three of them have additional “needs”, yet each and everyone if the bible is to be believed, is created in the image of God.
This is where my journey gets interesting, because the language of power, the language of theology, and the language even of liturgy fails to acknowledge disability as an image of God as seen through the eyes of fellow disabled children or teens. There are a few books by disabled writers that tackle this subject, yet neurodiversity by neurodiverse adults has a teenie tiny section in any theological library.
Ableism on the other hand has a larger section, in fact it has whole academic departments in universities devoted to the subject of disability studies within the field of theology. And herein lies a conundrum for those of us interested in this field of study and who later in life find ourselves diagnosed as neurodiverse. Should we acknowledge our disability, or continue to mask who we are, in order to move along the conversation of disability and theology?
When I started my MA I had no idea I would later be diagnosed autistic. Like Melanie Sykes of recent times, I too was diagnosed autistic in my fifties. What surprised me even more though, because by then I had cottoned on to that possibility, was being told I probably also had ADHD. I mean, where did that come from? Then slowly, while I waited for a diagnosis, all the puzzle pieces of my own life fell into place.
The anger I had felt on behalf of own children, was actually my anger. All those years of having communicated with ministers and priests, bishops and chairmen of the district, speaking about theology and faith, believing I was talking the same language: using the same words yet somehow talking through this glass wall that seemed impenetrable, leaving me frustrated and angry. All of this makes sense now. We spoke the same words yet somehow they had different meaning; a hidden meaning known only to them and which I was shut out from. I was often told I couldn’t say what I had said, yet I was sure I simply repeated what I had heard already, while missing out the subtext, using the shorthand I thought I had learnt so successfully.
Power does not like to be challenged. Ableism seeks to play down the voices of those disabled who dare to challenge their take on disability. The Church too is unwilling or unable to learn from those it historically has sought to defend. The power has shifted from equality in God, through the belief we are all made in the image of God, to that of being beholden to, and somehow inferior to our fellow able bodied Christians, and most especially our church leaders.
God, like a diamond, is multifaceted. Each face of a diamond is cut differently according to what the cutter sees within its shape, yet each face is a reflection of the beauty found within the stone. Until we learn to accept that each person is a reflection of God, each a facet of the whole, then we will continue to treat each other as unequally and not as the image of God.
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