How many of these have you heard spoken in your direction or in the direction of someone you love?
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How many of these have you heard spoken in your direction or in the direction of someone you love?
How many of these have been suggested to you?
What other ones do you know of or have you heard?
We need to start thinking about bodies in the same way we think about tulips. No body is better or worse than another body because it is fringed or cupped. Variety isn‘t just the spice of life; it sustains life. Variation allows organisms to survive. Instead of eradicating difference, we should celebrate it.
There are sixty thousand types of trees, three thousand varieties of tulips, and four hundred kinds of sharks. No one claims fringed tulips are better or worse than cup shaped tulips. They are both beautiful in their distinctiveness.
We need to disentangle ourselves from any system that claims there is a hierarchy of bodies and minds. We already have a context for this in the rest of creation. We expect there to be variety when it comes to trees, flowers, and animals, just not humans.
Instead of desperately trying to cure all disabilities, the church should do the slow and difficult work of healing the surrounding society by tearing down spaces, practices, and mindsets that are inaccessible to disabled people, even when those spaces are inside the church itself. The church should follow Jesus by healing instead of curing.
The goal of healing isn‘t fixing, but restoring. It‘s a transformative process that seeks to make someone feel whole. Healing is not about erasing the experience of trauma (which I‘m pretty sure is impossible) but about processing it and coming to terms with it, no matter how heavy it might be to carry.
Curing is a physical process; it‘s individual, usually (fairly) rapid, and concentrates on eliminating disease. Healing is a sociocultural process. It focuses on restoring interpersonal, social, and spiritual dimensions. It‘s lengthy and ongoing because it‘s a process of becoming whole.
Any body who doesn‘t fit in a tidy box of cured or “normal” makes other people feel out of place.
