#disabled god

My dear friend Laura joined me on YouTube to look at cool artwork of God/Jesus in a wheelchair!

Drawing from the insights of wheelchair users like renowned theologian Nancy Eiesland and Laura themself, we discuss how such images can transform how wheelchair users see themselves, and show faith communities how critical it is to ensure disabled people experience full access and belonging.

As Rabbi Julia Watts Belser puts it:

"We live in a world that consistently devalues Black and brown bodies, fat bodies and femme bodies, queer, trans, and disabled bodies. We live in a world where those bodies are too often held as incompatible with the sacred, a world where those bodies are imagined as the antithesis of God. 

Theology requires a reckoning with politics. It requires that we confront the question of who has been afforded the power to name and claim our bodies as close kin to the divine.”

In Jesus, o God, you know what it is to be frustrated by your own limitations or others' misunderstanding. You know trauma and scars and the need to rest.

Well met! This Mythological Throwback Thursday we’re stepping into the forge to meet the Greek god of smiths, crafts, and fire: Hephaestus. Let’s drop it like it’s hot!

Hephaestus had a raw deal from birth. Born of Zeus and Hera, king and queen of Olympus, he was the only Olympian to be born ugly. Disgusted with him, Hera threw him from the top of the mountain. He landed badly, as might be expected from such a height, crippling him in his foot. Hephaestus landed on the island of Lemnos, where he was raised by the ancient Sintian people. This tribe were the ones to teach him in the ways of crafting. They did a pretty good job, considering. Alone among the denizens of Mount Olympus, Hephaestus had the power to animate inorganic matter: fashioning golden and silver statues that could move and attack unwanted guests. His cunning crafting abilities also helped him get revenge on his mother. He built and sent her a golden throne, which when Hera sat on it trapped her, rendering her immobile.

Hephaestus was not on the best of terms with the other gods. His half-brother Dionysus was the only one who was able to convince him to return to Olympus, and even then only after plying him with wine (what else?) and carrying him back by donkey. Even after his return, Hephaestus shunned his family and preferred to live in the base of a volcano, which suited his smithing very well. It is from Hephaestus’ Roman name, Vulcan, that we get the word volcano.

In spite of his irascibility, Hephaestus was married off to his half-sister Aphrodite. Sources disagree as to why. Some say that it was Hephaestus’ price for releasing his mother from her trapped throne, while others contest that Zeus arranged the marriage in order to prevent conflict between the other gods who sought Aphrodite as their own consort. It didn’t work. Ares was a frequent visitor to their marital bed while Hephaestus was in the smithy. They couldn’t hide the affair from Helios, the sun god, however, and he informed Hephaestus.

Hephaestus had been thrilled to be married to the beautiful goddess, and had made her many beautiful gifts and jewels, including a golden girdle. Furious that she had humiliated him, Hephaestus rigged the bed with another trap: a golden net, which caught Ares and Aphrodite in the act. With them unable to escape, Hephaestus brought all the gods of Olympus to laugh at the humiliated, naked adulterers. However, Apollo, Hermes, and Poseidon had sympathy for Ares and paid Hephaestus to release him. Aphrodite, who lacked wealthy friends, instead retreated to Cyprus to avoid her husband.

Hephaestus may have had dysfunctional relationships with the gods, but he was known as a generous patron of mortals. He created Achilles’ armour which he wore during the Trojan War, instruments for Heracles, a staff of office for Agamemnon, and even made a prosthetic shoulder of ivory for Pelops after Demeter accidentally ate his flesh one. (Long story, don’t ask.) He also made Hermes’ winged helmet and sandals, special arrows for Eros (aka Cupid), and a golden chariot for Helios. For himself he made servants to help him in his crafting, and it is said, a special vehicle to help him get around despite his disability. To punish Aphrodite for her infidelity, Hephaestus crafted a cursed necklace for her daughter by Ares, Harmonia. It had the enticing power of conferring eternal youth and beauty on the wearer, and was passed down to Queen Jocasta, mother of Oedipus. Yeah, we don’t need to go into how badly that turned out.

Hephaestus’ legacy is a mixed one. His physical infirmity meant that even in cities that prized craftsmanship like Athens, he played second fiddle to Athena. His vindictive side is perhaps most famously immortalised in his creation of Pandora and the box of woes she carried, as payback to humanity after Prometheus stole fire from Hephaestus’ forge and gave it to the humans to keep them warm. Still, it seems that he was popular enough to influence figures in other mythologies, notably Wayland, the disabled master blacksmith of German legend.

Jesus, I'm imagining a heaven full of wheelchairs, walkers, and canes — singing with sounds of stimming — alive with AAC and signing hands.

And there you are, smiling in the middle of it all in a glorious wheelchair of your own, stimming and signing along.

‘ Some Christians are going even further in rethinking what the Bible has to say about disability. Among them is 16-year-old Becky Tyler, who in 2017 preached to 6,000 people at the Christian festival Greenbelt. Tyler has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and communicates using eye-gaze technology and a speech synthesizer. She tells me she talks to God every day inside her head.

"God says to me that He loves me a lot. He says that I am made in His image and that my disability doesn't make me any less than an able-bodied person. He loves us all the same."

[id: a teenager sitting in a wheelchair smiles as the viewer, with a person and guide dog seated on a couch behind her.]

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone born with a severe disability, Becky hasn't always believed this.

"When I was about 12 years old, I felt God didn't love me as much as other people because I am in a wheelchair and because I can't do lots of the things that other people can do.  I felt this way because I did not see anyone with a wheelchair in the Bible, and nearly all the disabled people in the Bible get healed by Jesus - so they are not like me."

She felt alienated by much of what she read in the Bible - until she was given new food for thought.

"My mum showed me a verse from the Book of Daniel (Chapter 7, Verse 9), which basically says God's throne has wheels, so God has a wheelchair.

"In fact it's not just any old chair, it's the best chair in the Bible. It's God's throne, and it's a wheelchair. This made me feel like God understands what it's like to have a wheelchair and that having a wheelchair is actually very cool, because God has one."’

- From “Stop Trying to ‘Heal’ Me” by Damon Rose

[id: black-and-white illustration of a person kneeling before God, a figure with robes and a beard sat in an ornate throne among clouds and winged creatures. The throne has a wheel on either side as well as on the front.]

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Becky isn’t the only person to encounter the Divine on wheels. Julia Watts Belser is another wheelchair user who discusses “God on Wheels,” this time from a Jewish perspective:

“...On the morning of the holiday of Shavuot, Jewish communities around the world chant from the book of Ezekiel, reciting the Israelite prophet’s striking image of God. The prophet speaks of a radiant fire borne on a vast chariot, lifted up by four angelic creatures with fused legs, lustrous wings, and great wheels. …One recent Shavuot, Ezekiel’s vision split open my own imagination. Hearing those words chanted, I felt a jolt of recognition, an intimate familiarity. I thought: God has wheels!

When I think of God on wheels, I think of the delight I take in my own chair. I sense the holy possibility that my own body knows, the way wheels set me free and open up my spirit. I like to think that God inhabits the particular fusions that mark a body in wheels: the way flesh flows into frame, into tire, into air. This is how the Holy moves through me, in the intricate interplay of muscle and spin, the exhilarating physicality of body and wheel, the rare promise of a wide-open space, the unabashed exhilaration of a dance floor, where wing can finally unfurl.

On wheels, I feel the tenor of the path deep in my sinews and sit bones. I come to know the intimate geography of a place: not just broad brushstrokes of terrain, but the minute fluctuations of topography, the way the wheel flows. When I roll, I pay particular attention to the interstices and intersections: the place where concrete seams together uneasily, the buckle of tree roots pushing up against asphalt, the bristle of crumbling brick. I have come to believe this awareness reflects a quality of divine attention. Perhaps the divine presence moves through this world with a bone-deep knowledge of every crack and fissure. Perhaps God is particularly present at junctions and unexpected meetings, alert to points of encounter where two things come together...”

...For the Reverand Zoe Hemming, these contemporary readings of Christian scripture have provided new ways of seeing - and coming to terms with - her own disability.  

"I can't believe it took me this long to realise it," she says, "but when Jesus rose from the dead, his risen body still had scars," explaining that crucifixion left holes in his hands and feet as well as his side. "It was profound for me to realise that the most powerful symbol of the disabled body in the Christian story is His."

She says she is glad that Jesus didn't come back from the dead as physically whole and perfect. "He came back better than perfect," she says. "He wore his scars because they told his story. That's the Jesus that I find in Christianity, not the one that wants to normalise everybody."

Prof Moss says the fact that Jesus retains his scars after the Resurrection suggests that disabled people might also retain their disabilities in the afterlife - something she hopes for herself.

"I think that if I'm not disabled in heaven, I'm not myself so I certainly hope I'll still be disabled in heaven. I certainly hope that I don't feel pain in heaven - that seems antithetical to what heaven is. But I still want to be me. And I don't think that I would be me without the conditions that I have. It's shaped who I am, how I think, what I do. Everything about my life involves this part of myself, which is integral to who I am."  

I understand this. My visual impairment, along with the things I've come to love and cherish as a result of having it, is so bound up with my identity, I would feel a bit weird if I were to suddenly not be blind. That said, I think on balance it would be quite handy being able to see.

I asked Lyndall Bywater, who is also blind, if she would like to be disabled in heaven. "Oh no I hope not," she replies. "That isn't because I think that there's anything wrong with being blind and I've thoroughly enjoyed it thus far. I just want to be able to get in a sports car and drive a sports car. That's really what I want to do. So I'm desperately hoping."

But despite her personal hopes, she believes some people will retain their disabilities in the afterlife.

"The Christian message does have in it this sense of restoration," she says. "Now what restoration looks like for each of us may well be different. I suspect there might be some surprises in heaven as to people that are like: 'Do you know what, I have still got this disability because restoration for me was never about that.'"

Prof Candida Moss thinks disability may not have the same meaning in heaven as it does in this life: "I don't know if you would need to see in heaven. Saint Augustine has a whole conversation about how he's not sure it's necessary to be able to see in heaven to love God. That might be because, when you look at descriptions of heaven, people just kind of stand around singing to God, so it might not be as necessary to be able to see because I don't really know what it's like. None of us do."...

Something seemed amiss, though, in this take. In seeing God as ableist, I was crafting God in humanity’s image. Whenever we design God in our own image, we’ve tried to contain God in too small a shell. And God is not a hermit crab. Neither is God a thing we can hold, nor just a man who holds things. ...

For a time, I raged a little at Jesus. I heard the healing stories in church and huffed. I encountered the stories during my morning Bible time and scrutinized. Please stop ‘fixing the cripple,’ Jesus, I thought while my daughter’s walker wheeled across the sanctuary floor.

Eventually, though, I started noticing something surprising. Jesus heals a lot of people, sure, but he also becomes pretty secretive about it, even frustrated by the demands of it. ‘How long must I put up with you?’ he says after someone asks him to heal an epileptic boy. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says to the man who takes up his mat, the same man who then goes straight to his people and tells. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says again and again to the one he heals. Jesus seems to lament that ‘Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe.’ It’s almost as though Jesus is telling us, ‘these corporeal healings? They are not the thing!’

Perhaps Jesus saw that the signs were misdirecting people. God’s glory was looking to them like human glory, like bulging biceps flexed on top of an award podium, like ableism. We cannot expect God’s work, and God’s glory, to look like human work and human glory. This is why I think Jesus is often insisting people keep mum that he healed. Healing is not the point. Don’t get distracted.”

Heather Lanier in her article for the first Sunday of Disabling Lent: An Anti-Ableist Lenten Devotional

Questions for Reflection:

Lanier says she longed for disabled figures who remain disabled within the pages of the Gospels, and she is not the only one. Janet Lees suggests that some of Jesus’s disciples may well have been disabled themselves! What feelings arise in you when you imagine a disabled person encountering Jesus -- and remaining disabled? Are you troubled? surprised? encouraged? How does this idea challenge your own assumptions around disability?

What aspects of God have you constructed in humanity’s image? How can you invite God into your understanding, to help you unpack any ableism, racism, sexism, cissexism, etc. there?

If God’s glory is not like human glory, what is God’s glory like?

Further Reading:

This post on passages from Paul’s letters and disability theology (weakness is strength, and foolishness is wisdom)

This quote from Australian disability advocate Elizabeth Hastings

Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource by John M. Hull (read excerpts here)

“God on Wheels: Disability and Jewish Feminist Theology” by Julia Watts Belser

Video - “Wait, don’t we want a cure for disabilities?” in the Disabled and Blessed YouTube series

[image has text that reads “Goodness Embodied: an intersex, nonbinary first human and a disabled risen Christ. Listen on Blessed Are the Binary Breakers, a multifaith podcast of trans stories.” Image includes details from “Homage to Apollinaire” (1912) by Marc Chagall and Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin’s piece “id:TRANS” (2017). Chagall’s painting shows a human figure that shares a set of legs but splits at the waist to have two heads & two torsos joined at the side. One has breasts, the other a penis. Wallin’s photo, based off Caravaggio’s “Incredulity of Thomas,” depicts a person with short-cropped hair parting their shirt to expose top surgery scars; person places their finger just below the incision mark.]

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In this latest ep of Blessed Are the Binary Breakers, I share my sermon from a recent worship service centered around the goodness of all bodies -- particularly those the world labels broken or lesser.

When so many of us are made to feel imprisoned by our own flesh, how do we embrace embodiment as something holy? Let's look to ancient interpretations of the first human (ha-adam) as intersex; connect this human's story to gender affirming surgery; and explore Jesus's choice to rise in a physical body with disabling wounds to discover how what the world calls broken, God calls Good.

Finally, let’s imagine what it might mean for disabilities not to be removed, but redeemed at our resurrection, and work here and now to show our bodies love even when it’s hard to feel that love.

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“God is the one Being who could be entirely self-sufficient -- but the power God chooses is interdependence!

Jesus and the first human teach us that our mutual need is a gift: we feed one another, we wash one another’s feet, we take care of the earth as she takes care of us, and in this mutual support we find love and fulfillment and everything else we need to live into abundance.”

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