People with disabilities and faith

From Catholic Analysis
by Oswald Sobrino, J.D., M.A.

“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; . . . . so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”–St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:27, 29 (ESV)

The famed Catholic activist Jean Vanier is known for his work with disabled persons in l’Arche. As I understand it, his group provides group homes for disabled persons in which friendship and personal warmth are seen as key to restoring respect and joy to the lives of the disabled.

In a commentary he wrote on the Gospel of John, Vanier, a former philosophy professor and naval officer, notes this remark made to him by a bishop: “You in l’Arche are responsible for a Copernican revolution: up until now we used to say that we should do good to the poor. You are saying that the poor are doing good to you!” (Quoted in Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John, Paulist Press, 2004, p. 173).

Vanier goes on to talk of his own experiences of living with the disabled. He speaks of how they are the ones “in fact healing us” by awakening tenderness and compassion in us (p. 173). He goes on to contrast hardness and tenderness. Hardness makes the other retreat. Tenderness opens up the other to joy.

How interesting that, in a Western culture where the disabled are seen as a catastrophe, as a great burden and inconvenience, as embarrassments, here is a Western intellectual, born to privilege, who discovered the exact opposite: that the disabled make us, the fully healthy and accomplished, less of a catastrophe, less of a burden on others, less of an embarrassment to humanity by replacing our arrogant hardness with tenderness.

Who is really the embarrassment to humanity? Is it the disabled infant or adult, or is it the hard, successful, know-it-all, accomplished man or woman? The gospel indeed brings a Copernican revolution to our Western culture in which perfectionism demands the elimination of the weak. This Copernican revolution sees in the weak of the world the strength of God that transfigures the parody of humanity that is the hardness of the successful into the tender, but very real, power of agape taught by the weakest among us.

Here is the link to L’Arche Canada.