Rebecca F. Spurrier - The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship

THE DISABLED CHURCH

HUMAN DIFFERENCE AND THE ART OF COMMUNAL WORSHIP

REBECCA F. SPURRIER

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2019

Copyright 2019 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Spurrier, Rebecca F., author.

Title: The disabled church : human difference and the art of communal worship / Rebecca F. Spurrier.

Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019028504 | ISBN 9780823285532 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823285525 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823285549 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Public worship. | People with disabilitiesReligious aspectsChristianity. | People with disabilitiesReligious life.

Classification: LCC BV15 .S68 2020 | DDC 264.0087dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028504

for Sacred Family Church and for Silas

The image on the front cover is a photograph by Cindy M. Brown of a room where Sacred Family artists weave together during weekly day programs. In the center of the photograph is a painting of a loom by a Sacred Family Artist (used here with permission). The loom is rendered in dark green on a bright red background and sits on a black floor. Next to the loom is a small brown table on which are piled cones of thread and a smaller table loom. The painting hangs on a cream-colored brick wall that sits over an actual table on which are piled cones of thread of various sizes and colorsred, gold, green, purple, aqua, white, multicolored. A manual bobbin winder is in the center of the table with scissors beside it.

The dominant colors of red and green in the cover and title are reminiscent of the bright reds and greens of the cover of Nancy L. Eieslands book The Disabled God, which is referenced by this books title, The Disabled Church. The title is not a description of Sacred Family Church but rather an argument for the transformation of the Christian church.

For three years I am known as the person who wanders around Sacred Family Church with a notebook and a voice recorder. One spring morning a congregant calls me to her and asks me to record her skills in my research notebook. Before I begin, Lillian makes sure that I write down the date: March 11, 2014. She then asks me to record this list:

I can do hair.

I write poems.

I can sing.

I can fight.

I can sew.

I can paint.

I can dream dreams.

I have visions.

I can see things that arent there.

I see invisible people.

I can do makeup and nails.

I can have good sex.

Im a librarian.

I can dressfashion dressmodel gowns.

Im a good lover.

I can tell fortunes.

Lillians description of herself and the playfulness of the moment lead her to use her fortune-telling skills to tell me about myself. I like talking to Lillian. I am fond of her witty company. She has shared some heartbreaking stories from her life with me, but she also makes me laugh, and I share with her stories about my life. I offer her my hand. She takes it and carefully runs her finger along the lines in my palm, talking to me while she does: Youll have a long life. Youll have two children: a girl and another baby. And then as she runs her fingers along my fingers: You are mysterious, curious, nosy, feisty; your husband likes you and you like him and theres the band to prove it.

Youre feisty too, I comment.

Yeah, but Im not nosy, she replies.

As a participant observer at Sacred Family for three years, I am both observer and observed; I participate in the representation and construction of my own identity and the identity of others. Accepting Lillians self-identification as a fortune-teller requires me to reflect on the kind of fortune she predicts for me and the way she sees mea future that involves both great love and my characteristic nosiness. Indeed, my friends and those closest to me would confirm Lillians description of me. If I were to make a list of skills like Lillian did, I would probably list this as one of the things I do in any place where I happen to be: I ask questions.

While Lillian is the only fortune-teller I meet during my research, her interest in my husband and future family is a common point of inquiry and fascination among the people of Sacred Family. I became engaged and then married during the time of my research, and so the most frequent questions I field are about my spouse: what he was doing that day, how did I meet him, and when was he going to come visit Sacred Family with me again. Because Sacred Family is a place that welcomes many visitors throughout the week, on occasion I brought friends and my spouse to join us in Sunday or Wednesday worship. Many Sacred Family congregants expressed their pleasure in being able to meet people close to me and especially to meet my spouse. And I experienced it as a privilege to introduce these friends and family to a place that had impacted me in profound ways.

Attraction is difficult to predict or dissect. There is a mysterious quality to the way that any particular person or place catches our attention and elicits a desire for future engagement. I could say that my relationship with the congregation about which I write in this book was love at first encounter. My nosiness was born of attraction. I visited Sacred Family my first month in Atlanta, having learned about it from another student. Almost twelve years later, I find myself returning again and again. Although my own role and relationship with the church have changed over timeintern, regular attender, researcher, occasional attendermy desire to be woven into the ever-changing community that is Sacred Family persists.

My attraction to Sacred Family was both unexpected and unsurprising. Sacred Family was not only a place where it was fun to spend time and where I had enjoyable and thought-provoking conversations with people like Lillian; it was also a place where people like Lillian claimed the beauty of their lives and cared for (and fought with) one another in experiences of pain and distress. From a young age I had lived among extended kinship networks that were practices of faith and mutual care rather than blood ties or biological bonds; I had long been interested in countercultural communities that testify to human beauty and mutual care. Sacred Family appeared to me as one of those communities.

It was also a place that made profound sense to me in light of other communities in which I had actively participated. Prior to my arrival in Atlanta, I volunteered for six years in the country of Ukraine with a Christian organization called Mennonite Central Committee. My work in Ukraine connected me with a number of Ukrainian organizations and groups that supported people with disabilities and mental illness: a group of local women who were advocating for families with disabled children; a home for the elderly that took in people of different ages who had been abandoned by friends and relatives; and a group of church women who regularly visited patients at a local psychiatric hospital. Simultaneously, my experiences with Orthodox, Baptist, and Mennonite liturgies in Ukraine prompted an interest in the power of worship and liturgy. When I arrived in Atlanta, Sacred Family was a place where the presence of disabled people in Christian worship provided me with fresh ways of thinking about what it is that Christians do when they worship God together and why people with disabilities are vital for Christian worship.