Introductory
Locations
I am: cis-male, white British, married, retired Anglican priest, bisexual, neurotypical and disabled.
History
In 2023 Modern Believing published an edition looking at the report Living in Love and Faith (LLF). In this edition, King pointed out the inadequacies of the report in terms of the body and “the disappointingly small part history played” (King, 37). King’s identification of these gaps led me to read LLF myself. In the index there is a reference to the body as related to incarnation and six other topics rather than the body as body (LLF,455). This gap in LLF inspired me to think through what I actually think about body. Eventually I chose to look at body in terms of disability; LLF has one page on disability (199) and that is it.
This paper is written in a distinct style. The academic discourse is interrupted by my own discourse and I use the academic discourse to reflect upon myself.
My story (1): symptoms
What this section undertakes to do is to provide the gritty realism of what it is to be disabled, to have multiple needs (Siebers: 65).
Pain: I have grown to become affected by pain. This started when going round museums and art galleries, as an ache in the lower back. Gradually the pain became permanent and spread so now I have pain in my lower back and both hips. The pain has severely limited my ability to walk; I can walk 20 paces before the pain takes over. I have three painkillers; together they take the edge off the pain.
Catheter: My bladder decided to retain urine and this became catastrophic so the hospital fitted me with a catheter to assist with urination.
Medication: At night-time I take a fistful of pills which stabilize my mental health. They handle the depression, anxiety and psychotic episodes I have.
Academic (1): normality
Strikingly, Totton argues that there is one group of people which has called itself “normal”. They have captured for themselves power and a mode of being which appears to be common sense but is actually cultural hegemony and serves the interests of this group. These people manage to reinforce its material power by making opposition to it seem “abnormal”.
To some degree, everyone has something in them coming from this cultural hegemony of the normal (Totton, 18-20 and Yong, 10-11). Looking at the unconscious assumptions within ourselves, we soon come across Reference Man. Reference Man incarnates a generic human being; he is the standard of normality. Conventionally, Reference Man is Caucasian, is 25-35 and weighs 70kg. For example, Reference Man in action has a great deal of physical equipment which does not fit most women or relatively fat or small men. Therefore, the stab vest worn by police officers was not designed for people with breasts (Totton, 20-22).
My story (2): wheelchairs
I have two wheelchairs, Scarlet, who is bright red and is a manual push wheelchair, and Ebony, who is an elegant black and is motorized. We found, through experience, that Scarlet was not enough; we did need, if we could afford it, a motorized machine. Ebony gives me the chance to access this world, to get to places. We have conquered the route to the municipal library. This gives me the sense that, even though I am disabled, I am part of this world.
Academic (2): Jesus as the perfect man
All too often preachers will have paragraphs in which they imply or state that Jesus was the perfect man. This can be seen as a form of the Reference Man, where Jesus becomes the means of enforcing what is normal. I would want to argue that Jesus should be seen as being the one who denies Reference Man his power.
Academic (3): What we call ourselves (i)
The language we use helps us fashion our worlds and shapes our mentalities. Yong writes about his struggle to find the right language when reflecting upon his disabled brother and what disability means to him in that context. He argues that non-disabled people such as himself live in a world which is privileged due to his temporary able-bodiedness, which means that he has to work hard to overcome what Rosemary Garland Thomson calls “my normate biases”. (Garland Thomson (1997), 8-9. Yong, 10). By “normate biases”, I mean the unexamined prejudices non-disabled people have towards disability and people who have them. These assumptions function normatively so that the status of people with disabilities is inscribed into our consciousness: “Note, for example, how the rhetoric functions to describe people with impairments as dis-abled, in-capacitated, in-capable, ab-normal, and so on”. (Yong, 10). There is an assumption among some non-disabled people that their view of the world is somehow natural and obviously right and that people with disabilities are not normal.
My story (3): The carers
My main carer is my wife. I can’t do without her. She is everything to me, even to the extent of being willing to type up this article, for which I am immensely thankful. One of the impacts of my disability has been to give me shakiness in my hands, which makes typing very difficult.
For two days a week, Wednesday and Thursday, I have carers come in to get me up from bed and to put me to bed. They wash me and dress me and make sure that my catheter is working. So far, the carers have been uniformly gentle, caring, and respectful of my needs. By having carers come in, my wife can go out to work, away from home two days a week, knowing that someone will care for me and that I am going to be watched over.
Academic (4): What we call ourselves (ii)
Yong highlights that since the American Civil Rights Movement people with disabilities have begun calling attention to these normative attitudes and behaviours that function to oppress them. Yong emphasizes that Americans now have the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, along with the experience of the challenges evoked by these cultural and political milestones. “Christian theology cannot go on as if disability were only a spiritual, individual, or private reality; it must take into account contemporary understandings of disability informed by all these developments.” (Yong, 11).
Yong prefers the term “ableism” which names the discriminatory attitudes, negative stereotypes, as socio-political and economic structures and institutions which together function to exclude people with disabilities from full participation in society. “Ableism that identifies the normate bigotry, evaluative chauvinism, and structural injustice that people with disabilities have to endure at the hands of the dominant (read: non-disabled) culture.” (Yong, 11).
“Ableist” is one of the terms preferred by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Piepzna-Samarasinha is a disabled activist based in Toronto, Canada and previously Seattle, USA. Other terms that she prefers are “crip”, “cripping” and “queer”. The “crip” is short for “cripple” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 64-70) and is a deliberate taking on of the vocabulary used about people with disabilities. So “crip” is used as a term of deep irony and as a badge of pride. “Cripping” is parallel to “queering”. Many crip theorists identify as queer as well as disabled. “’Cripping’ means identifying and foregrounding those aspects of any given situation that involve descriptions of experiences of deficit, abnormality, of damage – aspects that are often backgrounded and even erased but, when recognized, radically alter our sense of the whole” (McRuer, 2018).
In my own struggle with disability, I remain unsure as to whether I can apply the term “crip” to myself and I prefer the softer option of being a person with disabilities. Disabilities here refers to my physical and mental health problems. Some people prefer to use the term “disabled people”. Liz Carr, the UK-based activist, preferred to use this term during an interview on 16 May 2025.
Academic (5): the social model of disability
Shakespeare writes this about the development of public life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
[It] is important to note that modern cities grew up at a time when disabled people were largely excluded from participation in public life, which meant that their needs did not have to be considered. The great civic buildings of Europe were built on classical lines, with imposing flights of steps. Schools, workplaces and other ordinary buildings were also never designed to be accessible to all who might want to use them. New forms of mass transport – trains and trams and buses – were constructed with no thought for people with mobility impairments or even children. Centuries later, expensive retrofitting has been necessary to ensure that access barriers can be minimised with the addition of ramps, lifts and accessible toilets. (Shakespeare, 35).
What Shakespeare is describing is a social theory of disability. That is, disability is not caused by the impairment of the person involved but rather disability is caused by the social environment in which the person lives. Therefore, the grand civic buildings of the nineteenth century cause those who have mobility issues to be disabled by the architecture of the buildings themselves.
Malleson argues that this insight should be taken a step further. Malleson writes: “It is not simply disability that is environmentally mediated, it is everything about the self; the self itself. All of our abilities – our powers, our accomplishments, our income – are mediated through various social structures. The human self is suspended by webs of social environments.” (Malleson, 169; Totton, 65). This realization is spreading further and further through communities of disadvantage (people of colour, sexual minorities, women). The old idea of a solid, consistent, permanent self (that is Reference Man) is past its sell-by date and needs to be replaced by something that is more flexible and lightly held.
Alison Kafer, in the paper “Crip kin manifesting”, argues for this lightness of being and of seeing even inanimate objects as having meaning and grace:
“I love my feeding tube,” writes a disability activist posting about queer crip desire, “and people don’t understand, at all, how I could feel that way about a couple of tubes inserted into my abdomen to add and remove things from my body. But I do. I love my tube so much, I wish I could write amazing poems about my feeding tube” (Withasmoothroundstone, N.D.). How might we take this person’s love for their feeding tube more seriously? Feeding and breathing tubes are often technologies that people fear, go “too far”, rendering life not worth living, draining it of its quality”; can we recognize the radical potential of insisting on kinship, relationality, and animacy, the very points that life is presumed to end? (Kafer, 13; Totton, 66).
One of the ideas suggested by Totton is that everyone has a part of themselves that identifies as being normal; conversely, everyone has parts of themselves that do not identify with normality. Totton argues that in the original situation at which intersectionality theory arose when women of colour found that they were oppressed by their white feminist allies; they found themselves in a chain of oppression. This is not to say that anyone should be compelled to identify as normal which Totton writes, “we must remember is always an identification over and against someone else who is not-normal”. “Intersectionality” emerged as a term in conjunction with vehicles crashing into each other, thereby causing new alliances and meanings to be formed (Totton, 67).
Intersectionality reveals the doubleness of identity: how I am normal always carries the shadow of how I am not normal and vice versa. The more absolute normality becomes and the more insistent it becomes on obedience to its strictures, the more parodic normality becomes. It crips and queers itself, evoking the disabling stiffness of conformity and the absurdity and limitation of conventional gender identities. “Identity and difference, solidarity and freedom: these are the basic polarities of human society that have a profound impact on questions of social justice”. (Totton, 69).
My story (4): drinking straws
I use drinking straws because I found that lifting food and drink to my mouth pulled adversely on the muscles in my hips. Using straws gives me two or three inches, enabling me to drink with something approaching comfort.
My story (5): church
My main church is an Anglican church dedicated to SS John and Mark; it is a grand building with a flight of steps dividing the nave from the chancel; when we come to Communion, the priest and minister have to come down to me. Everybody else receives Communion at the altar rail in the chancel; I can’t get my wheelchair up the two steps dividing the nave and chancel. I asked two members of the Parochial Church Council (PCC) about how I was supposed to get my wheelchair up these steps; they took the point and now the PCC has ordered a ramp which means I can wheel myself up for Communion. A disabled person was disabled by the building and has sparked off reform of the building so that the disabled person is also part of the Body of Christ and not a sick person to be gently patronized. Having said all that, I am profoundly grateful to the clergy and ministers who ensured that I could receive Communion (Eiesland, 112).
Academic (6): misfitting
Garland-Thomson states that when our environment accommodates our needs our experience is that of a continuous background:
Fitting is a comfortable and unremarkable majority experience of material anonymity, an unmarked subject position that most of us occupy at some point in life and that often goes unnoticed (Garland-Thomson, 2011, 597).
By contrast, Garland-Thomson describes misfitting as the formative experience “of slamming against an unsustaining environment”:
A misfit occurs when world fails flesh in the environment one encounters – whether it is a flight of stairs, a boardroom full of misogynists, illness or injury, a whites-only country club, sub-zero temperatures, or a natural disaster. (Garland-Thomson, 2011, 600; Totton, 39).
Misfitting is a striking reality for a disabled person. Even the most simple of things can become impossible once the environment which should sustain turns against the person.
Now I want to turn to more directly theological issues. Three areas will be covered: the Bible; the disabled God, and the Eucharist.
Academic (7): the Bible
Yong states that the central argument of his book is “that while the Bible can be read in ways that have portrayed disabilities negatively, it can and should be redemptive for people with disabilities today”. (Yong, 17). In his book, Yong argues for the reinscription of the Bible as a book of hope rather than a book of condemnation and he does this through a substantial rewriting of biblical stories. For example, Yong argues that the Lukan narrative of the blind man (Luke 18:35-43) is a case in point of the multisensory and multidimensional activities in and through which the blind man witnessed to the presence and activity of God. Thus the blind man bears witness to the wondrous works of God not only in receiving his sight at the command of the Spirit – anointed Son of God, but also in exhibiting faith – as manifest in his alertness, aggressiveness and response.
Jesus performs a somatic ministry that is bodily as well as being psychological in outlook. His ministry is received in the body as can be seen in the story of the blind man as well as the story of Jesus’s appearance at Emmaus (Yong, 74-75). Yong argues that the Lukan text has embedded within it a much wider epistemic and communicative range of sensory capacities; said capacities have been usually missed (Yong, 80). Indeed, people with disabilities become central rather than marginal to the Gospel accounts. This is a world turned upside down.
My story (6): Good Friday
At Bury Parish Church we gathered for the Good Friday liturgy. When it came to Communion, the priest had to come down to us as the building is filled with steps. He placed the wafer in my hands and said, “The body of Christ broken for you”. I could have wept as I felt there was at least some kind of acknowledgement of my situation and still being part of the body of Christ.
Academic (8): the disabled God
Just as Yong attempts to reinscribe the Scriptures as being agents of redemption, so Eiesland attempts to reinscribe Christology as being a moment of salvation. Eiesland writes:
A reconception of the symbol of Jesus Christ, as disabled God, is developed here as contextualized Christology. It is contextualized in that the disabled God emerges in a particular situation in which people with disabilities and others who care find themselves as they try to live out their faith and to fulfil their calling to live ordinary lives of worth and dignity (Eiesland, 98).
The early disciples understood the coming of Emmanuel in terms of death and resurrection. At the resurrection, the disciples understood the person of Jesus for who he really was:
In the resurrected Jesus Christ, they saw not the suffering servant for whom the last and most important word was tragedy and sin, but the disabled God embodied both in impaired hands and feet and pierced side and the imago Dei . … God is revealed as tangible, bearing the representation of the body reshaped by injustice and sin into the fullness of the Godhead. (Eiesland, 99-100).
There is no longer a taboo on disability. Instead, the resurrected Jesus reaches out and enables us to touch his impairments. There is a graphic physicality being written into this Christology that enables us to bear witness to what we have seen and touched and, with Thomas, calls us to declare that this is “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28).
The disabled God is not a romantic notion of “overcomer” God. Instead, here is God as survivor. Eiesland here notes that language fails us because the term “survivor” in our society is contaminated with notions of victimization, radical individualism, and alienation as well as with an ethos of virtuous suffering. In contradistinction to that cultural icon, the image of survivor here evoked is that of a simple, unself-pitying, honest body, for whom the limits of power are palpable but not tragic. The disabled God embodies the ability to see clearly the complexity and the “mixed blessing” of life and bodies, without living in despair. (Eiesland, 102).
The disabled God makes possible the renewal of hope for people with disabilities and others who care. Called out by the disabled God is the solidarity between those who are disabled and the temporarily able-bodied who support them.
Academic (9): Eucharist
We turn now to the Eucharist as a place of the calling out of the wholeness of the disabled. Eiesland writes positively about the resurrection and the sacrament. Resurrection is not about the negation or erasure of our disabled bodies in hopes of perfect images untouched by physical disability “Christ’s resurrection offers hope that our non-conventional, and sometimes difficult, bodies participate fully in the imago Dei and that God whose nature is love and who is on the side of justice and solidarity is touched by our experience. God is changed by the experience of being a disabled body.” (Eiesland, 107).
The Church is the location for the struggle for justice and liberation. The Church is marked by sin and is broken by sin; church structures keep people with disabilities out. Church officials affirm our spiritual callings but tell us there is no place for our bodies to minister. “There is no ‘perfect’ Church as there is no ‘perfect’ body”. (Eiesland, 108).
People with disabilities have been both visible and invisible, seen and stigmatized but not acknowledged. The Eucharist as a practice of justice and inclusion welcomes people with disabilities and recognizes the Church’s impairment when we are not included. The Eucharist symbolizes that our non-conventional bodies cannot be reduced to artefacts of injustice and sin. “Most people with disabilities see our bodies not as signs of deviance or deformity, but as images of beauty and wholeness.” (Eiesland, 115). The Eucharist is a place of struggle, of challenges for people with disabilities and the able-bodied.
My story (7): “Does he take sugar?”
The nurse didn’t mean to, she knew she shouldn’t, but she had a question to ask about me so she automatically turned to my wife and asked the question of her. I answered that it was my body that she was treating. We untangled ourselves and the blood test went on.
Conclusion
This exploration of the body through disablement has led us to encounter again ourselves as being many bodies with aspects of the “normal” being in all of us and with the gift of disability being available to those who choose to take it. Disablement is a location for struggle, for justice, beauty and truth. The Eucharist becomes a practice for the revelation of the disabled God who calls us to be in solidarity with the Divine.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carr, L. Interview on PM (Radio 4), 16.05.2025
Eisland, N. L. (1994), Disabled God, Nashville TN: Abingdon Press
Garland-Thomson, R. (1997), Extraordinary Bodies, New York: Columbia University Press
Garland-Thomson, R. (2011), “Misfits: a feminist, materialist disability concept”, Hypatia 26 (3), 591-6
Kafer, A. (2019), “Crip kin, manifesting ”, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5 (1), 1-37
King, H. (2023), “Being flesh: bodies, history and LLF”, Modern Believing 64(1), 2023, 36-43
Living in love and faith, (2020), London: Church House Publishing
Malleson, T. (2018),“Interdependency: the fourth existential insult to humanity”, Contemporary Political Theory 17 (2), 160-186
McRuer, R. (2006), Crip theory, New York: University Press
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2022), The future is disabled, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press
Siebers, T. (2008), Disability theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Totton, N. (2023), Different bodies, Monmouth: PCCS Books Ltd
Shakespeare, T. (2018), Disability: the basics, London and New York: Routledge
Yong, A. (2011), The Bible, disability and the Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Word count: 3652
KEYWORDS
Disability, God, people with disabilities, Eucharist, Bible, non-conventional, able-bodied, imago Dei
Keith M. Trivasse is a retired Anglican priest, living in Bury, Greater Manchester
ABSTRACT
This article looks at the body through the lens of disability. I use two discourses to balance out and correct misapprehensions and misunderstandings. These discourses are the academic discourse and my own story. This article is inspired by the gap in Living in love and faith (2020) of the body, there being no reference to the body as body in this report.