How can it already be Holy Week? Lent seems to have flown by…and I have not been spectacularly successful in doing all that I intended to do during Lent. Today’s post, written for the devotional, is about that, sort of. Now, however, I have a toddler to put to bed.
I can account for the hiatus in posts: last week I was in London for a day exploring the theology and practice of accompanying people with intellectual disabilities through experiences of loss, especially the death of loved ones. Although this isn’t one of my areas of experience or study, I was interested in the journey of accompaniment. What I found was that, like any other interpersonal adventure, the way forward requires less map-and-compass skills, and more listening and patience. Good navigational skills are necessary, but not sufficient, for walking with someone through the valley of the shadow of death–whether the death in question is their own or another’s.
In doing things with my young children, I frequently find myself repeating “slowly and gently”–it started with stirring cake batter. “Slowly and gently.” Then, as my youngest started trying to descend the stairs: “Slowly and gently.” This has never been my strong suit. Doing things slowly and gently and attending to the details requires time (of which I seem always to be in want) and patience (ditto). As I listened to the speakers throughout the day, this phrase came back to me. The journey of accompaniment, at any stage of life, is about going slowly and gently.
Slowly and gently becomes not only advice for toddlers learning to stir; it changes the way I approach theological questions. Attending to the person with me, the person with an intellectual disability, impresses on me the reality of each person’s creation in the image of God. What is it to be human? It is to be in relationship with God, and that relationship originates with God and not with us. Ours is the capacity to receive the relationship God offers us continuously. The question for theological anthropology then becomes, ‘What does the disabled body (including the disabled mind) reveal to us about God?’ If what obscures the image of God in the first place is sin, then intellectual disability is not necessarily something that obscures the image of God. In and through that disability, God is revealing himself, revealing transcendence, divinity.
Because this is so, there are two important features of spiritual friendship with a person with an intellectual disability. First, the relationship that person has with God is no more or less than ours, though it will be expressed differently and experienced differently by us. The obstacles we encounter in relationship with people with intellectual disabilities are not obstacles for God. Relationship with God is not impaired by cognitive impairment. (Sin does that.) The second feature of that friendship is that the revelation of the divine through the divine image is not a one-way street, from those of us who are aware of being made in the image of God to those who are not. We ought to be looking for God’s image in the faces of those with intellectual disabilities, and expecting to find God’s self-revelation there.
But we will only see it if we go slowly–slowly and gently.
Today’s post is about idolatry–at thinking coram Deo, as usual.
I have not been doing a very good job of reflecting on the Mass readings. Too many days, I feel, I have relied on the meditations I wrote a few years ago. Today, though (maybe because teaching has finished?), I have returned to my old friend, Psalm 46:10, at thinking coram Deo: ‘Cease striving, and know that I am God’. Thanks for reading.
This week I have been talking a lot, to anyone who will listen, about liturgical catechesis. More on that later, but if you’re interested, you might have a look at Sacrosantcum Concilium, paragraphs 4-13, and/or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1066 and following. What does it mean to attend to the liturgy? To participate fully, with understanding? How can we (the laity) be helped in our participation? These are the questions I have been asking myself. I can’t say that the answers are to be found in the day’s Mass readings, but my mediation for the day (from the manuscript, again) is at thinking coram Deo.
Reading over the text of the reflection for today, which I wrote a few years back (book production for me is a slow affair–something to do with having four children, maybe), I found myself surprised by my confidence in eternal life. It isn’t that I have to cross my fingers now every time I say the creed. Rather, it is that there is always a sense that we keep using that term, and I am not sure it means what we think it means (to adapt Inigo Montoya’s immortal line from The Princess Bride). I don’t doubt heaven’s existence, but I am certain I don’t have the faintest idea what it will be like. Not really–it’s that whole eternity and time thing, which from where I now stand, is a mystery.
Today’s reflection might be more ‘riff’ than a straight engagement with the text. Thanks to fr Ben for the homily that inspired me!
The reflection on the Mass readings is at thinking coram Deo, as usual–from the manuscript of the devotional. So a saying from the Apothegmata Patrum is included.
Wednesday was the feast of St Joseph; yesterday was the feast of St Cuthbert. Today is World Down Syndrome Day, and I celebrate my daughter–her life, and the way she teaches me about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and a child of God. For her, indeed, I say Deo gratias.
I spent some time with the verses from Jeremiah today; Jeremiah 17: 9 is one of my very favourite verses. Not because it offers particular consolation…unless knowing that God knows us better than we know ourselves is consolation. Knowing that ‘the heart is deceitful above all else’ (as some translations have it) reminds me that I am something of a mystery to myself. I cannot trust myself to want the right thing or to do the right thing. I can only trust God, who has prepared the way, ‘the good things, that [I] might walk in them’. I posted the reflection from the the manuscript of my Lenten devotional, though. I have more thinking to do about the way Jeremiah contrasts trust in ‘man’ with trust in God, in verses 7-8.
a theologian in the family 