Stanley Hauerwas - Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness

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Im not interested in doing a good job. I am interested in an ecclesial vision for community. We are brothers and sisters, and Jesus is calling us from the pyramid to become a body.

JEAN VANIER

B efore I entered academia I spent many years as a psychiatric nurse and then as a mental health chaplain working alongside people with various forms of mental illness and intellectual disability. Unlike many of my mental health colleagues, I was never very interested in the diagnosis or etiology of peoples conditions. Even though I was young, I recognized that diagnoses and labels do not accurately represent people. In fact, these explanations can lead to destructive labels and stigmatizing assumptions that devastate their recipients. What did interest me was how people with these life experiences viewed the world. They saw things differently. And when I listened carefully, those whom the world called mad or disabled became a conduit that allowed meand anyone else who chose to look and listento receive a different truth in the midst of a world that loves to deceive.

In chapter three of this book Jean Vanier tells us, I realize as I get older that I have difficulty meeting so-called normal people. I dont know what to talk about. I can fool around at the dinner table with people with disabilities, but I can see that I am becoming marginalized. I know it is important to speak to the wider world. But it is not always easy when you discover you are living in two worlds. I know what he means. Negotiating the world of disability and the world of people who dont consider themselves disabled can be tragic, frustrating and deeply joyful all at the same time! But such encounters carry the potential to transform our friendships, our politics and our spirituality.

Marginalization is often the primary currency used by the citizens of both worlds. But the dialogue between these two worlds is vital for the church to be the church and for the world to recognize Jesus and be transformed. Taking seriously the world of the disabled and allowing our perspectives to be shaped and changed by listening carefully to those who see things differently is a prophetic ministry of transformation and hope that all of us need to engage in if we are to live faithfully. One of the hopes of the authors of this book is that the essays presented here will help you the reader to become odd, to see the world differently and thereby recognize the prophetic nature of that oddness for faithful discipleship. So a warning: By the time youve finished reading, your friends may start to think youre a little strange!