Pastoral Relationship with People with Intellectual ... - Theses

2046.1.3.2 God with DisabilityThe second core, personal pre-understanding brought to the process ofreflection and analysis concerns how I understand the Christ who is present withthe people with intellectual disability with whom I pastorally relate. Thisunderstanding is derived from the aforementioned pre-understanding concerning‘people with disability,’ as well as my reinterpretation of the contemporaryascription of the Incarnate Christ as the Disabled God.The term ‘Disabled God’ or ‘Disabled Christ’ is a theological term thatvarious authors have articulated in recent decades so as to incarnationallydescribe God’s identity with people living with a disability. 544 In the 1990s it waspopularly articulated by Nancy Eiesland, a person with her own disability, whosought a Christ figure who was in solidarity with her disabled self. She thusdescribes her realization of this Christ figure.I saw God in a sip-puff wheelchair, that is the chair used mostlyby quadriplegics enabling them to manoeuvre by blowing andsucking on a straw-like device. Not an omnipotent self-sufficientGod, but neither a pitiable suffering servant. In this moment Ibeheld God as a survivor, unpitying and forthright. I recognisedthe incarnate Christ in the image of those judged "not feasible","unemployable", "with questionable quality of life". Here was Godwith me. 545Here God is seen as one who is ‘on the side’ of those socio-politicallymarginalised people who live with disability, offering hope through God’s ownfully disabled being. Speaking as a liberation theologian Eiesland proceeds todetail a biblical focus of revelation that describes texts and interpretative544 An early proposer of the term was,Lewis, A. "God as Cripple: Disability, Personhood, and the Reign of God." PacificTheological Review 16, no. 11 (1982): 13-18.Others who have endorsed this theological designation, with its capacity for humanidentification, with the same or similar terminology, include,Cooper, Burton. "The Disabled God." Theology Today 49, no. 2 (2006): 173-82.Hauerwas, Stanley. "Suffering the Retarded: Should We Prevent Retardation?" In SufferingPresence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church,edited by Stanley Hauerwas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996, 104.Newell, Christopher, and Fran Gillespie. "Narrative, Psychiatric Disability, and Pastoral Care:Towards a Richer Theology of Disability." Paper presented at the 3rd National Conference onSpirituality and Disability – Exclusion and Embrace: Conversations about Spirituality andDisability, Melbourne 2001, 10.Rappmann, "The Disabled Body of Christ.”Swinton, Resurrecting the Person, 202.Tan, Amanda. "The Disabled Christ." Phronesis 2 (1995): 47-48.Taylor and McCloughry. A Disabled God?545 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 89.