Different is Beautiful
In collaboration with Mennonite Women USA
This post is a collaboration of ADN and Mennonite Women USA for Disability Pride Month. Read Sarah’s article, as well as those from other women of faith, on their website.
Disability is just a different way of being in the world. It isn’t inherently negative. Rather, it is culture that turns a difference into a disability by excluding people, either by design or by neglect. Ableism is discrimination against people with disabilities that sees them as inferior to able-bodied people. Ableism holds that people with disabilities are in need of “fixing” and defines people solely by their disability. It is a prejudice that sadly permeates our culture and plays out in both subtle and blatant exclusion and humiliation of people with disabilities.
What disability is and is not
God created the world to be a place of beautiful and vast diversity, humans included. God created blind people and deaf people and people with limb differences. All of us are reflections of this diverse creation. Some people become disabled due to an illness or an accident, and that doesn’t make them any less whole or sacred. It is highly likely that you will become disabled, either permanently or temporarily, at some point in your life. Disability is simply part of what it means to be human, inhabiting a fragile body, made up of the soil of the earth. Disability is not a sin or a sign of unfaithfulness. People with disabilities do not define themselves by a particular diagnosis or a particular accident or illness. You should not presume that someone with a disability would rather have a “normal” body or a “normal” life. Everyone’s experience of disability is different. There is no universal disability perspective.
My own embodied experience
It took me decades to come to fully appreciate my disabled body. I spent my adolescence and young adulthood being told that something was wrong with me, that I was not “normal” and therefore not whole. I was different from others my age, with strange injuries and unexplained neurological differences. I saw a long line of doctors who attempted to “fix” me, who saw me only as a problem to be solved. I was well into my thirties before I stopped seeing myself as a problem and started appreciating the beauty of my life and the wisdom that my particular experience has brought me. The more I accepted my body for what it can do and for the uniqueness of my embodied existence, the more whole I felt. There are some things I am unable to do, and sometimes pain puts limits on me, but I have a full and joyful life. My unique body has made me wiser and more empathetic than I would be otherwise, and for this and many other aspects of my embodiment, I am incredibly grateful.
Reading suggestions
If you are interested in learning more about the experience of disability and how to become an advocate against ableism, here are some good resources to get you started.
- For a quick overview of ableism:
- Memoirs by women with disabilities:
- My Body is not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church by Amy Kenny
- Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism by Elsa Sjunneson
- Theological reflections on disability:
- Disability and the Way of Jesus: Holistic Healing in the Gospels and the Church by Bethany McKinney Fox
- The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability by Nancy Eiesland
