Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

CONCEIVING A QUILT: CREATING A METHOD
disabled person presents a potent reminder to others that woundedness and
death is very close, and that, in fact, they are experiencing a non-enviable
death-in-life experience. Even with limited injunctions of specialness, the
overall view of the disabled is that, as less than whole, they are more at risk.
When the disabled are made the special objects of divine care, the remarkable
compassion of the one doing the good deed is emphasised rather than deserving
nature or dignity of the recipient. 59
2 Distinctive Problems of Disabled or Ill Women – Because the Bible views
women as a group who is fulfilled, legitimated, given full membership into their
community, and cared for in old-age by their children (especially their sons),
anything which threatens a woman’s ability to be a fertile, able sexual partner
is considered disastrous. Therefore, any disability or illness which threatens a
woman’s ability to fulfill her patriarchal purpose indelibly strikes her selfesteem,
structured as it is by patriarchal expectations, and in doing so, denies
her ‘rightful’ place within the fabric of society. When the polluting, almost
magical quality of women’s functional blood is added to this mixture of
sociocultural and theological attitudes, the situation of the disabled or ill
woman becomes quite dire. Not only has she been denied the self-validating act
of procreation, and hence full entrance into participation in her society, but she
is rendered ritually impure, and therefore, a perpetual outsider to her
community and an object of pity and scorn. 60
3 Special Origin of Disabilities – It is clear that in the Bible, the nature of
‘disabilities’ has something to do with the deity or malicious sub-deities.
Although this is not a new concept invented by Israel or the New Testament
because it is present in some of the earliest myths from Mesopotamia, it is
‘Yahweh’ who is seen to create the disabled, and who can reverse the
disabilities. 61 Therefore, the motive for such actions is seen as punishment for
sins and, in later times, malicious spirits and sub-deities are explicitly named as
responsible for brokenness. This ‘other-worldly’ origin, then, sets its bearer
apart, marked as specially cursed, protected, or objectified for the sake of
divine healing action. 62
4 Disability and Illness as Forms of Impurity – There are concepts of purity at
work in society’s view of the disabled who are seen to represent how fragile and
precarious bodily purity really is. This is exemplified in the (commonly stated)
Levitical passages about access to the sacred precincts:
And the LORD said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, None of your descendants
throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the
bread of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, a man
blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or a man
who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a
man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed
testicles; no man of the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a blemish,
he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God. (RSV; Lev. 21: 16-22)
17