The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability Vol 1, No 1 Spring 2021

Editorial Amy Elizabeth Panton and Miriam Spies 1–2

Invited Commentaries The Myth of Happiness: A Commentary on Racism and Mental Health in Canada 3–7 Jessie Yum

Dear Mama: Or, Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic through My Disability and Queer 8–16 Theological Lenses Robbie Walker

Sadly, She Felt There Was Nothing She Could Do: A Reflection on the Tragic Suicide of 17–21 Physician Dr. Laura Breen Jane Smith-Eivemark

Coronavirus and the Ability to Love Your Neighbour 22–25 Alexa Gilmour and Elizabeth Mohler

Research Articles Enchanted Suffering: Queer Magick as Educated Hope 26–40 Jasper Jay Bryan

Christian and Secular Perspectives Regarding Student Suicides at the University 41–54 of Toronto: Impact on Student Bodies Alex Jebson

Embodied Spirituality: Maternal Reflections on the Intellectualization of Worship 55–65 and the Embodied Leadership of People with Intellectual Disabilities Laura McGregor

Creative Work “Doing Church” During Covid-19: An Autistic Reflection on Online Church 66–70 Krysia Waldock

Prayer in a Time of Pandemic 71–72 Matt Arguin

Stings like a Sunburn: A Sermon for Emmanuel College During the Covid-19 Pandemic 73–77 HyeRan Kim-Cragg

Black Lives Matter: A Prayer 78–79 Miriam Spies

Love/Hate: A Poem 80–81 Mike Walker

How to Mend a Broken Heart: Art Quilt on Burlap and Cotton Fabric 82–83 Amira Ayad

Building Blocks: Short Fiction 84–92 Megan Wildhood

Finding Belonging in the Margins: A Reflection on Disability and Community 93–96 Jasmine Duckworth

Theological Reflections on the Film Mad to Be Normal: Thoughts on Psychiatrist 97–102 R.D. Laing and Connections to Liberation Theology Michael Sersch

Yee: Turn Eyes Into Ears, A Poem 103–104 Jizhang Yi

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Editorial

Spring 2021 Editorial

Dear Readers,

We are very excited to introduce you to our new “baby” and hope you grow to love the ideas, reflections, and creative theological works found in our first edition! We want to tell you a little bit about us. We are both PhD students who have gotten involved in practical theological research in order to contribute to change. Miriam is a Crip Theologian, often seen in sweatpants with bedhead, whose work focuses on disabled leadership in the church using both disability/crip theory and disability theologies. Amy is a Mad Theologian whose research on the intersections of madness and spirituality has meant she has been living in her pajamas and drinking a lot of coffee over the past year as she has been writing her dissertation on lived spirituality and self-injury. This journal is the result of countless hours of weekly Zoom calls, late-night texts, and heated debates about grammar, especially how to use apostrophes. More importantly, we helped create this space to invite members of mad and disabled communities (which, in our opinion, includes their loved ones) to share their thoughts, academic papers, and creative works through theological lenses. It is also important for us to remember our friends and colleagues who wanted to write for this spring issue but were too sick, anxious, or depressed, in the hospital or stuck at home – basically who are just trying to survive. We want you to know that your spirits are a part of this issue. Most of the work in this issue relates to the ableist and racist impacts of Covid-19 on people with lived experiences of mental distress and disabilities, and on people in BIPOC communities. These categories are not mutually exclusive and we hope to present an intersectional approach as we consider these issues largely within a Canadian context. We will then be moving more broadly into wider mental health/disability topics. We encourage you to read the “author’s notes” that are at the end of each piece as they give more insight into their contexts and motivations for writing the work. As queer-cis-white editors, we have been shaped and challenged by the stories found within these pages, and hope you encounter these voices with an open heart. It is clear to us that Canadian societies need to value, listen to, and learn from “edge-walkers,” a term borrowed from Krysia Waldock’s piece. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to our Editorial Board – Tom Reynolds and Pam McCarroll – for their guidance, Pamela Couture, Steve Simmons, and Ivan Khan for their late-night advice, Emmanuel College/Michelle Voss Roberts for their financial support, PhD students Sam Needham and Fiona Li for their copy editing expertise, U of T librarian Mariya Maistrovskaya for her technical support, Jay Dolmage from the Canadian Journal of Disability

1 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Editorial

Studies, and Frank Smith from the National Educational Association for Disabled Students (NEADS) for their encouragement and finally, all of our authors and peer-reviewers for sharing their time and wisdom. Hope to meet you again this Fall.

Miriam Spies and Amy Panton April 2021

2 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

The Myth of Happiness: A Commentary on Racism and Mental Health in Canada

Hyejung Jessie Yum PhD Candidate Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada [email protected]

Abstract: Unlike the pervasive belief that there is little racism is in Canada, this commentary argues racism has detrimental effects on the mental health of racially minoritized people. Not only through individual racist incidents, our mental health is adversely affected also by racist structure and culture, which discourages us from expressing negative emotions and speaking up to resist it. We often feel pressured to look happy to avoid a risk to become victims of the racial stereotype such as “villain.” In the white normalized society, dismantling the racist structure should be the fundamental remedy to improve mental health of the racialized. As a Mennonite, I seek subversive peace, as Jesus, Wonderful Counselor and Prince of Peace, took initiatives to challenge oppressive system for the marginalized. Thus, I call for living out the liberating way to eradicate racial violence in today’s Canadian context.

Keywords: racism, structural violence, mental health, Mennonite, peace, disability

A recent report on an investigation into anti-black racism of the Peel District School

Board (PDSB) in Mississauga, Ontario was released on May 15, 2020. The report notes that the Board has been “dysfunctional” as it grappled with anti-Black racism despite the claims of Black communities, colleagues, and students for decades.1 In relation to the report, a Toronto Star article on October 6, 2020 highlights how racism impacts the mental health of Black educators.2 A Black male interviewee shared the pressure to be happy to avoid a risk to be seen as “the villain.” “Being a Black male … especially in this board, you have to walk on eggshells,” one said.

“You essentially have to be fake: you have to be a happy guy, you can’t have conflicts, it’s hard to advocate for yourself or anybody quite frankly because you are always made to be the

1 Adam Carter, “Peel School Board ‘Dysfunctional’ in Face of Racism, Can’t Govern Properly, Report Finds,” CBC News, June 8, 2020 (website), accessed October 28, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school- board -racism-report-1.5603109; Arleen Huggins “Investigation of the Peel District School Board, 5/15/2020” (website), accessed October 28, 2020, http://edu.gov.on.ca/eng/new/PDSB-investigation-final-report.pdf . 2 Isaac Callan, “‘You Have to Walk on Eggshells’: Racism Taking Its Toll on the Mental Health of Black Educators at PDSB,” thestar.com, October 6, 2020 (website), accessed October 28, 2020, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/10/06/you-have-to-walk-on-eggshells-racism-taking-its-toll-on-the- mental-health-of-black-educators-at-pdsb.html.

3 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary villain. I have had weight issues, blood pressure issues, extreme anxiety, stress. I’ve been to see specialists and doctors.”3 As this case indicates, Black and other racially minoritized people are often impacted mentally not only by individual racist incidents but also by the racist structure and culture. In this environment, their voices are unheard. Canadian laws are meant to protect people from the harm of racism, but racially minoritized people know that when they speak out, it comes at great personal cost. They may be socially isolated, being branded as troublemakers who shake the stability of the system structured by the white norm. In this climate, racially minoritized people feel pressure to suppress their emotions exacerbated by everyday racism in order to survive in the system. This pressure to chronically suppress emotions affects their mental health. The system that neglects and even fosters racial violence threatens people’s mental health, but the responsibility of coping with these threats is left to the individuals. In The Promise of Happiness, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, who works at the intersections of feminist, queer, and race theories, argues that people, especially the marginalized, are forced to be happy within certain social norms and to be silent about what is sacrificed. When a person speaks out about an unjust experience, the person becomes an “affect alien” who mars others’ happiness and kills joy by reminding them of uncomfortable history and matters.4 However, the affect alien becomes an unhappy subject due to very false happiness.5 False happiness is often demanded of Black men in order that they will not become victims of racial stereotypes historically shaped by white-centered norms. Individual counseling and medical assistance are ways to get mental support. Yet, as the Black educator of the Peel District School Board in the interview above notes, without eradicating the racist structure and culture that is the very root cause of the deterioration of mental health, they continue to be exposed to harmful factors. Racist microaggressions and incidents in their daily lives continue to violate their dignity. Moreover, the racist structure that neglects and consequently fosters such violence maintains pressure to suppress their negative emotions by continuously reminding them of the risk of speaking out. Dealing with mental health issues caused by racism requires a structural approach in addition to an individual one. As an Asian migrant in Canada, I've had to pay a great personal cost after speaking out about an unjust system. The key for racial justice is not about hearing voices of those who experienced racism, but more importantly about whether people in the system are willing to pay the actual cost to change the racist structure after listening to these experiences.. Without the awareness that change is needed and willingness to be changed, the gesture “We listen to you” is a hollow claim and even an irresponsible act of handing back the burden to those who have been victimized and traumatized by the violent system. In a racially biased society, sharing about racially discriminatory experiences requires courage to be vulnerable. For there to be genuine solidarity with racially minoritized peoples, and dismantling of racist structures, white people must educate themselves, becoming ready to listen and take on the cost to change. We

3 Ibid. 4 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 67. 5 Ibid., 69.

4 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary must take responsibility before asking their racially minoritized colleagues to speak about the experiences and expecting them to educate their white colleagues. Different from genuine solidarity, “performative allyship” ultimately benefits the ones claiming the allyship by relieving their guilty feelings without actual engagement in the work and the cost together.6 It takes courage for people to share vulnerable stories with hope for change. When there is little genuine solidarity and actual change, this kind of allyship, as a result, emotionally alienates them much more deeply. Many Canadians believe that there is little racism in Canada. My experience tells a different story. From my four years living in Canada, blatant and implicit racism is part of my daily experience on the street, at my workplace, and at school. I have heard similar stories from my racially marginalized friends and colleagues. News is covered with stories about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) violent reaction to Black people, the recent issue about Indigenous fishery burned by a white-owned company in Nova Scotia, mistreatment towards migrant workers, and so on. There are many articles, books, and online resources detailing how racist social structures have been constructed through colonialism, slavery, and discriminatory immigration histories in Canada and, more broadly, in North America. When I share the same social space with Canadians who claim there is little racism and receive the same “Canadian” news, I ask: “How can they not know about racism? Do they not know about it, or do they not want to know it?” Whether or not one recognizes this, one’s race and white privilege impacts one’s mental health. Persons protected by the racist system face much less chance to be insecure, vulnerable, and to find themselves in abusive situations. They do not need to advocate for their rights. They are able to sustain dignified lives without dealing with racism. The white normalized system continues to protect and privilege them. However, racially minoritized people are often not protected and are oppressed by the same system in various degrees depending on their race, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian communities etc. They are exposed to negative occurrences whenever their dignity is violated by racial violence. They have to choose to resist the violence or to suppress their emotions. In responding there is a greater possibility that they may become further disempowered and/or more aggressive. They may be alienated by a social group, lose a job, and even risk being murdered, as many recent incidents against Black people have shown. To maintain their lives in a white normalized society, the racially minoritized bear a certain level of racial violence and ensuing trauma in everyday life. But still the media often only highlights angry protesters as violent. Given the long history of systemic violence such as colonialism, slavery, and human rights abuses as well as continuous white privilege at the cost of many lives, don't those who have been harmed by the system deserve to be angry? In a society that rarely allows them to express negative feelings against racial violence, how can they deal with their long-suppressed emotions?

6 Adele Halliday, “The Problem with Performative Allyship: When We’re Seeking Salvation, Not Solidarity” from Anti-Racism Panel, The Christian Left Conference: What is the Christian Left?, Online, 2020.

5 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

People often regard mental health as an individual issue. Some believe that individuals can handle their mental health issues with better coping skills and self-care. This is true to some degree. However, if someone is continually exposed to a high level of violence, it is obvious that the effort for the one to be liberated from the violence should be the fundamental remedy for healing. Jesus, who is the Wonderful Counselor and Prince of Peace,7 has served as a model of how to respond to such violence that causes long-lasting oppression. In his inaugural teaching in Luke 4:14–20, Jesus announced that the Spirit of the Lord has sent him to set the oppressed free. Jesus took transformative initiatives to renounce dehumanizing power and affirm human dignity throughout his life. His initiatives challenged those who had maintained oppressive laws and cultures at his time and he positioned himself firmly on the side of the marginalized. People are often attracted to the idea of peace and the act of seeking peace. As a Mennonite, a historic peace church tradition, I also seek peace, but through the lens and with the accountability of justice that Jesus set as an example. The sense of peace that I learn from Jesus is not seeking tranquil waters; rather, it disturbs the tranquilness of false peace, like false happiness. Seeking the peace that disturbs challenges the religious and sociopolitical systems that function to privilege certain people at the cost of oppressing the rest. Such peace does not neutralize the sociopolitical demands for justice. Rather, it is subversive. It is a liberating peace, particularly for those who have suppressed their painful emotions from injustice. If we expect racialized peoples to improve their mental health and be happy and peaceful without such efforts to eliminate racial violence, the very myth of happiness will be detrimental to their mental health. Only when expressions of anger, anxiety, and stress caused by racial violence are safely heard, without pressure to be happy, and the voice against racism is ensued by actual efforts to change, we will be able to experience true happiness and peace. This is the way that Jesus, Wonderful Counselor and Prince of Peace, modeled in his ministry in Galilee and Jerusalem. As Jesus took initiative in his context, the followers of Jesus Christ in Canada are called to live out the liberating way in today’s context where racial violence has harmed the dignity of racially minoritized people and deteriorated their mental health. When we follow this call, more people can know true happiness and peace.

7 Isaiah 9:6.

6 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Author’s note: I am a Ph.D. candidate at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto. As a migrant living in Canada, grappling with racism has become part of my life. I grew up in South Korea where I belonged to the normative group in ethnicity and culture. Until I moved to North America and have been situated at the periphery of the societies, I hardly realized that living with discrimination outside of normality would make it difficult to maintain mental health for daily life. Not only from my own experience, I often read news of Black and Indigenous peoples who have been seriously discriminated against by the white normativity constructed through historical violence such as colonialism and slavery. As a migrant who is marginalized but also benefited from the settlement history in Canada, I feel obligated not to be silent on these matters. In this commentary, I wanted to call on Canadian residents for responsible engagements with such violence detrimental to mental health of many in our context.

7 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Dear Mama: Or, Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic through my Disability and Queer Theological Lenses

Robert William Walker (he, they) PhD Candidate Trinity College, Toronto, Canada [email protected]

Abstract: Many conservative Christians seem to be taking an anti-science approach to the pandemic-- framing it within deeply problematic theologies of God's action--that does not consider differential impacts on various intersecting groups of vulnerable people. In a personal letter to his mother, with whom he shares a conservative Christian background, the author challenges her to consider such differential impacts. Through the lenses of Disability Theology and Queer Theology, they propose that viewing COVID-19 as a biblical chaos creature might help Christians better assess how the pandemic exposes the disorderly and even demonic impacts of our assumption about economics, race, queerness, disability, and Christianity.

“DearKeywords: Mama” COVID -19, Queer Theology, Disability theology, chaos creature, personal letter, RobertPentecostalism Walker Toronto School of Theology

Dear Mama,

I hope you’re safe and well! Recently, I was asked by my friend Amy Panton, an editor of a new journal about mental health, disability, and theology, to submit a piece that considers life in the pandemic through the lenses of Disability Theology and Queer Theology—an odd but fabulous pair of glasses, to be sure! The last time we spoke was mid-October, but neither Calgary nor Toronto are doing as well now as they seemed to be just a short while ago. Toronto began a second lockdown in mid- December because cases were spiraling out of control, and now we are in a second lockdown in Ontario. Are things any better where you are?

I

The thing that sticks in my craw, Mama, is how dismissive you seem to be—as a nurse working in an elder-care home!—of the seriousness of the virus. And it really bothers me that you claim the number of cases is “inflated,” and the public health procedures overblown.

8 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

I remember you saying things like, “When you start digging beneath the mainstream media, you start finding…” I still think I was right to respond, “I don’t have any time for conspiracy-theory type stuff.” Tell me, Mama—do you still think the government has inflated the numbers? So many people, especially conservative Christians from backgrounds like ours, seem to be taking an anti-science approach to the pandemic that doesn’t consider differential impacts on various populations—especially where things like race, class, gender, and economic status seem to create multiple layers of vulnerability. It’s really easy—maybe especially for White men like me—to assume that my experience represents “the typical.” But as the character Sportin’ Life sings in Porgy and Bess, “It ain’t necessarily so.” A sizable chunk of conservative Christians in North America have been suspicious of good science for decades, so maybe the general reaction, especially in the US, should surprise no one. Did you know it took me until I was twenty-four years old—despite attending biology classes in public high school—to properly understand the scientific definitions of hypothesis, theory, and law? I can’t express to you how sharply that tilted my views of so many things! I know you say that we must agree to disagree on this one, but I really feel the need to press you a little, especially since we talked about the importance of “do no harm.” The Apostle Paul says in Romans 13:10, “Love does no harm [or wrong] to the neighbour.” I remember an odd piece of information coming out of the World Health Organization at the beginning of the pandemic: people with Cerebral Palsy—like me, your boy!—are at increased risk of contracting the virus, presumably because we, as a people, have increased chances of being immunocompromised or having respiratory illnesses. When you are assessing information, it seems to me—am I wrong?—that you are resisting information that would keep me, and the elderly folks under your care, safer. I’m not saying that medical science has always done good for people with disabilities—it has taken our society a long time to realize that bias and stigma affect how science is done, and that science often has unexpected political or ethical implications. But throwing science out entirely doesn’t seem wise, either. Based on my study and on the experience of my prayer life, I can’t recommend the approach you seem to be taking to others. I want to give honour to the people in authoritative positions to tell me about the pandemic, and I suggest that others take the same approach. I’m not convinced that family physicians/GPs, being generalists, are as qualified as epidemiologists—specialists—to make good calls about the pandemic, not least because they may not have time!1

1 Comorbidities are a crucial factor in how people's bodies handle the virus. High blood pressure/hypertension is a serious example: Current data from the Province of Alberta indicates that hypertension is a prevalent co-morbidity in COVID-19 deaths. See: “COVID-19 Alberta Statistics,” accessed February 22, 2021, https://www.alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx. Though taking medication for high blood pressure does not increase the risk of contracting COVID-19 (See: CBC Radio, “What Do I Need to Know about Blood Pressure and COVID-19? | CBC Radio,” CBC, March 19, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/what-do-i-need-to-know- about-blood-pressure-and-covid-19-1.5502229), untreated hypertension seems so to do. See: Hanna Gaggin and Kemar Brown, “Hypertension, Health Inequities, and Implications for COVID-19,” Harvard Health Blog, November 18, 2020, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/hypertension-health-inequities-and-implications-for-covid-19- 2020111821348, accessed February 22, 2021. The effects of what some people are calling "long COVID" also seem much more serious than a "seasonal flu." See: “COVID-19 (Coronavirus): Long-Term Effects,” Mayo Clinic, accessed

9 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Although “the authorities” should earn the trust of those they govern—and sometimes, indeed, prove themselves unworthy of it—I believe (and see little reasonable evidence to the contrary) that those in Canada’s federal system are being fundamentally truthful in their information-sharing during the pandemic. It does not seem reasonable to me that economic neo-liberals like the Trudeau government would willingly disrupt the economy this way. The economy is like a car: if pumping the brakes to avoid an accident makes it fall apart, it’s poorly designed!

II

You suggested our governments’ responses to the pandemic endanger human rights and livelihoods. That people are struggling financially and suffering injustice during this crisis is well-documented—especially people with disabilities living in poverty, who did not qualify for things like Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) that were on offer from the federal government.2 I don’t know how to assess your claim about human rights, but I must admit being suspicious of analyses from people who seem to be right-wing libertarians (like the folks you seem to post on your social media?) because of previous difficult conversations with such people. With humour at my own expense, this could be my case of Nathaniel’s question about Jesus in the Gospel of John: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Where we agree completely, however, is in our concern for people living with mental health challenges.3 One of my best friends here in Toronto lives with complex PTSD among other mental health realities, and they are the most extroverted person I have ever met. They often find themselves in a despairing anxiety loop, wondering if they will die by suicide before the pandemic becomes manageable. Another friend with Seasonal Affective Disorder, who works with street-involved people as a staff person for a church called Sanctuary in Toronto, is also bracing for a tough winter. Whatever we do to balance these competing needs and situations during the pandemic, I know in the depths of my being that “the economy” must not be the metric by which we make decisions! As someone unable to hold most nine-to-five jobs— and hoping nevertheless for ordination and a career teaching and writing theology—I have learned over the years that society genuflects to “the economy” in so many destructive ways. People living with disabilities, in poverty, or both have been shouting this as loud as we dare for years! But lo! Now the “able-bodied,” newly affected by the same issues, suddenly agree with many of us! A society willing to listen only when the majority suffers harm should repent deeply and at once!

February 22, 2021, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-long-term- effects/art-20490351). 2 CERB and several other Government of Canada programs had eligibility criteria that often meant the very poorest Canadians, including many people on provincial [state] disability assistance, would not qualify for the $2000 CAD/month on offer. 3 I have started auro-sertraline (generic Zoloft) recently to deal with anxiety, though it is not related to the plague per se, but more a constant undercurrent from as far back as my first conscious memories. The silence, Mama! My mind feels so much quieter after more than a month [as of mid-November 2020]. It is such a relief to know that the constant buzz and fretting were not a character flaw!

10 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

It seems to me that anyone who isn’t “productive” is sacrificed to Mammon and treated as a “no-body”—as children were in the time of Jesus (Matthew 19). I have plenty of experience being treated like this, even as an adult: I am cute but messy, “they” say, or lazy and requiring (parental?) supervision to get anything done. I suspect that this is a systemic problem, not just my own. People can also take a dangerous laissez-faire approach, which treats with suspicion any directive or recommendation that will curtail my (individual) freedom, my autonomy, my sense of security. Yes, human beings need healthy touch and social interaction, but are these needs best served by compromising the health of our communities in the name of freedom, of speech, and assembly? Where is the paradox here of voluntarily stripping our privilege and rights like Jesus did (Philippians 2) to gain true authority? I’m all for nonviolent resistance to oppression, but is flouting public health regulations—and exposing vulnerable people to harm—the most Christ-like way to resist the principalities and powers? Take the politicization of wearing masks, for example.4 Some cultures (Japan is one) have social norms where sick people wear cloth masks to reduce the chance of transmission to others. Such a practice seems like an effective way to fulfill “love does no harm to the neighbour” (Romans 13:10), agreed? Wouldn’t wearing a mask give preference to the vulnerable bodies—like street-involved people with no PPE? Aren’t they the ones gathered in after being systemically excluded and oppressed, the “least of these” that Jesus considers his family—including disabled and queer bodies like mine? I see Christians post false information that can be fact-checked and disproven after five minutes on any search engine you please. Please do better, Mama! Do these Christians—our people—think about people living with disabilities, about Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) folks, and others, when they post about the judgment of God and the infringement of rights? It wouldn’t seem like you to agree with folks like these…can you help me understand? I wish conservative Christians like us would have better conversations about how science, medicine, and faith in Jesus should inform our response to the pandemic.5

III

Lately, I’ve been pondering the idea that coronavirus is analogous to a biblical chaos creature—one of the sea monsters from Genesis 1 or the last few chapters of Job. You know me: doing theology never stops, perhaps especially in this time of plague (with a side of murder-racism and insurrection to boot)! It is bizarre to me, but at the beginning of the pandemic, there were so many Christians putting things online that claimed God is the cause of the pandemic because God has exhaustive definite control of all things. I waited a week to ponder what to do, but I posted a short reflection on my social media in which I said (basically), “What shitty theology!”

4 My partner’s mother reminded me recently that people who object to laws about masks are using the same kinds of arguments that those opposed to seatbelt laws used to make. 5 I am becoming convinced that “conservative” and “progressive” are less and less useful terms for framing conversations like this one, which might be a queer notion on its own. See below.

11 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Whether God has literal control over the movement of every single subatomic particle in the universe is an interesting debate in the domain of “philosophical theology,” and I have lots of opinions about it that are not really relevant here.6 But for crying out loud: what does “God is causing the pandemic” say about the character of God? We probably agree: one implication is that God causes harm, which most Christians are unwilling to accept because “love does no harm to the neighbour” (Romans 13:10) and “God is love” (1 John 4:7).7 My own inclination is (was?) to consider the pandemic a demonic force—which is very queer (strange, unlikely) in societies that prize both science and capitalism. What I am calling demonic does not necessarily have to do with quasi-personal and invisible beings called demons (although it might—I know that this Pentecostal, along with most Christians, affirms their existence and activity). Many of the Christians I spend time with have no personal experience with deliverance, so it’s hard for them to affirm the existence of “the devils.” But some of them still talk about the demonic if something they experience has overwhelming and destructive flesh-and-spirit effects on humans and the rest of Creation. Christians like these understand things like war, destruction of the rainforest, patriarchy or (gasp!) global capitalism as demonic “principalities and powers” that we should resist.8 A created thing—what ancient Christian theologians called a “creature”—has at least one “calling” or “vocation” in God’s plan for the universe, and a freedom proper to its type of existence.9 When a creature agrees with God (who is Love), it moves toward flourishing for itself and every creature related to it. But when creatures agree with sin and death, destruction results—and such destruction could be demonic in its effects. The problem with this view— being honest with myself—is that the destructiveness of COVID-19 seems largely the result of human structural, systemic, and individual agency (or lack thereof). In other words, this pandemic sucks so bad because human beings have failed each other on multiple levels. Even if they are around, we do not need any help from the demons! I mentioned earlier that it’s important to take location and overlapping oppressions into account when thinking about Covid-19: ● Black, Indigenous, and other People of Colour (BIPOC) experience disproportionate effects of the pandemic in Toronto and elsewhere, pointing to racialized, in fact systemically racist, gaps in health-care access and delivery.10

6 I subscribe to an Evangelical view called “open theism,” and a pastor-theologian named Greg Boyd is my favourite proponent. I believe that God knows all possible futures, and that the Love of God requires that we have genuine—and even surprising!—freedom to respond to it. And sometimes Creation misuses freedom. As Greg Boyd says, “The reason the world looks like a warzone is because it is a warzone.” A conversation for another time, if you’re interested! 7 I am also unable to accept that God—for inscrutable reasons—favours coronavirus over humanity in this season. I’ve only encountered this view once—from a friend of mine online—but I was so shocked by it that I recoiled physically! 8 One interesting example of this position is Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Harmony Books, 2010), based on his Powers trilogy (which I have not read yet). 9 While a subatomic particle, a tree, and a little girl are all free, in this view, they probably don’t have freedom of the same degree and kind. 10 For a good definition of systemic racism see “Forms of Racism,” Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre, accessed December 13, 2020, http://www.aclrc.com/forms-of-racism.

12 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

● Many people living with disabilities—including those like myself who are able to access social assistance programs—do not have (and never have had) the same level of support given to allegedly “able” people forced to leave their employment by the pandemic. (It baffles me, Mama: do policy-makers and “regular folks” alike really think it’s less expensive to live with disabilities in this society?) ● Street-involved people have less access to PPE and may be unable to practice social distancing—this was especially the case at the beginning of Toronto’s response to the crisis. The government of Ontario’s response, overall, has been inept from a scientific standpoint, and it seems that communication between all three levels of government and to the Canadian public has not been consistent. To be fair, some of this is because, as my friend Decimus often says in these discussions, “We are doing science ‘live’!” Very few people seem to understand either the structure of Canadian federalism (blaming Trudeau for health care at the provincial level, for example) or the process of doing good science (especially under pandemic conditions).

IV

If God is neither punishing us with the virus nor favouring it over humankind; if the social destruction the virus exposes is neither solely the fault of individuals nor solely demonic, then the nonbinary option of the chaos creature can help queer the conversation. Queer Theory and Theology (one of my specializations) makes lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, two-spirit, and other “queer” bodies an important focal point for doing theory and theology. Societies under the primary influence of Christendom, historically, have tended to dismiss the possibility that we have gifts to offer our communities and churches. To my mind, queerness challenges not only our ideas about sexuality, gender, having sex, and desire; Queer Theory and Theology claim that when society forces people and ideas to fit into one of (only) two available boxes—to live within a compulsory binary—their capacity to experience abundant life and God’s shalom is seriously damaged. Evangelical theologian and Old Testament scholar John Walton suggests that in ancient Israel, reality can exist in three possible states, with overlap between them: order (brought by God, and good), non-order (the usual state of things, and neutral), and disorder (which resists God’s order-making—including suffering of all kinds). “Chaos creatures, for the most part,” Walton claims, “are still understood as part of the non-ordered world. They have no [human- like] will of their own. They are instinctive. They have no morality. They’re not good or evil. They just act, and they do what they do.”11 Walton goes on to apply his analysis directly to the pandemic after speaking about how viruses and bacteria fit into God’s good creation:

This situation is like major cities in the US as well. See for example: Donald J. Alcendor, “Racial Disparities- Associated COVID-19 Mortality among Minority Populations in the US,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 9, no. 8 (August 2020): 2442, https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm9082442. 11 “John Walton | Coronavirus and the Book of Job - Podcast-Episodes,” BioLogos (website), accessed November 10, 2020, https://biologos.org/podcast-episodes/john-walton-coronavirus-and-the-book-of-job/. Citation from transcript on website.

13 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

[Chaos creatures are] part of non-order, and you can talk about a certain level of order [or overlap]. In fact, that’s part of what the first speech of Yahweh in Job 38 does. He says, ‘All these things that you [Job] think are not ordered…have more order than you would ever know.’ And we could say the same thing about viruses and bacteria. We might feel like they’re raging out of control. And one of the things that I think God would say if we heard him speak in the storm would be, ‘There’s more order there than you know. And you just don’t know enough to appreciate it.’12

If I apply Walton’s words only to the virus itself, I think they are worth pondering. Certainly, the order that we know from the biological sciences shows us that viruses and bacteria have multiple roles and consequences in the world—including many which are good. The book of Job is part of the genre called “Wisdom literature,” and Walton suggests that Job teaches us that God brings us rest (instead of turmoil), peace (instead of fear), and coherence (instead of confusion) amid circumstances we do not understand. I think he’s right, as far as he goes (especially when Christians place our trust and hope in the life and ministry of Jesus); however, Walton avoids making substantive comments about systemic or structural issues, perhaps because he thinks such comments try to figure God out (which he thinks the story of Job tells us to reject). I want to be careful and humble when I say this, but it seems to me as a Queer, Pentecostal theologian that God is interested in conversation with human beings, especially where that conversation can lead to flourishing for humanity and the rest of Creation.

V

Let us accept, for the moment, that coronavirus itself may be a chaos creature. Even on this view, there are multiple effects that it has depending on where it alights. For example, some Christians of my acquaintance (white and allegedly straight) think that though the virus is God’s enemy, God is bringing good out of the situation (Romans 8:28) by foregrounding the importance of “biblically based” (read: “conservative”) Christian faith and the importance of the nuclear family. Others (of a more “progressive” bent) are emphasizing the use of reason, especially attention to epidemiology and the health directives of governments (at least in Canada). Is the situation as simple as “conservative (or not),” “the family (or not),” “obedience to government (or not)”? I would say, no. Wisdom and discernment require more nuance. For example: what do we do to value elders in care homes, keeping them safe? What about indigenous communities who organize their family systems differently from the nuclear model but can’t see their extended families during the pandemic? Are people able to avoid toxic or abusive relationships, obtain medication promptly, or support sound mental health? Do we

12 Ibid., modified, emphasis mine.

14 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary assume that the “person” in my earlier questions is a white, cisgender man or woman, and how does this assumption create blind spots in our responses to this strange season? Nevertheless, I do think that Romans 8:28 does supply a rubric for coherence in this pandemic, but in a queerer way than we might expect: COVID-19 has exposed the non-order and disorder of structures, systems, communities, and persons, alongside some of the positive resources we can use for creative interventions. (Pride parades and antiracism marches provoke similar reactions.) The non-order of the virus provokes us to see clearly, to actively discern the things that make for destruction or flourishing. In our haste to “get back to normal,” I wonder if we are losing an opportunity to agree with Love by finding the political and spiritual courage to deconstruct and reconfigure our most basic assumptions. Why is “nine-to-five” work culture what we do? Why do we insist on “work-life balance”? Why do we decide who to vote for in elections—like the one recently called in the US—on the strength of the economy? Why must people work for—rather than be given freely—basic “human rights” like food, adequate shelter, and health care? Why are “human rights” the best way to talk about human flourishing from the perspective of faith in the God of Sarah and Abraham? Why does our society continue to make policy decisions based on barely conscious notions of the “deserving” versus the “undeserving” poor, so long rooted in (dysfunctional) Christian theology? Why do so many people resist Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) “on principle”? Why have we created new and nasty (ableist) labels like “libtard” and “covidiot”? I think that Queer & Disability theories and theologies, in their marvelous flux and willingness to argue with the status quo, expose the fact that most human “forced choices” have mostly destructive consequences—especially when we think culturally dominant perspectives apply to everyone the same way (totalization) and we weaponize them as part of political ideologies (politicization). But there is also the possibility—indeed the necessity—of making new, provisional distinctions that an ever-broader range of peoples can use for their flourishing.

VI

Is Covid-19 a chaos creature? Maybe. But this I know: I want—and I want our society to want—a bold, queer courage that will defy easy binaries and simplistic solutions. I trust that God—the Fire of Love burning at and beyond the heart of Creation—brings a queer and liberating justice far beyond anything we can ask or think. In our polarized days, friendly conversation across difference—when we also refuse to conflate “opponent” and “enemy”—is a queer accomplishment, and certainly better than all the division and strife we keep seeing. What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts. Jesus loves you, and so do I!

Your boy,

Robbie

15 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Author’s note: I write this letter as a Queer Christian PhD candidate in Theological Studies— someone who longs to be devout—living with Cerebral Palsy in Toronto. I grew up on the Religious Right in Alberta among Christian Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals, and want to challenge ‘my people’ to learn an anti-oppressive and celebratory posture alongside queer Christians and people. My mother, a conservative Christian still, is full of deep love and compassion as a care-home nurse. From my perspective, she still seems to struggle with my queer life. I submitted this piece for publication on the first day of Toronto’s second pandemic-related lockdown.

16 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Sadly, She Felt There Was Nothing She Could Do A Reflection on the Tragic Suicide of Physician Dr. Laura Breen

Jane Smith-Eivemark RP, D.Min, Diploma Analytic Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada [email protected]

Editors’ note: as Canadians, we are deeply saddened by the recent death by suicide of Dr. Karine Dion from Montreal, and nurse Stefanie Van Nguyen from Toronto in the midst of the current pandemic.1

Abstract : In this commentary, the suicide of New York physician Dr. Laura Breen is reflected upon. Dr. Breen felt that she was “drowning” as she tried to help patients during the height of the COVID- 19 pandemic in New York City and tragically succumbed to the power of death. Dr. Breen’s feelings that was responsible for more than she could handle is a state of mind that needs to be recognized for the sake of mental health.

Keywords: Suicide, Covid-19, spiritual care, mental health, Dr. Laura Breen, New York City

Introduction

I have chosen to write a commentary on the death of Dr. Laura Breen. When I read of Dr. Breen’s suicide in the New York Times2 in the summer of last year, I felt deeply saddened. I have continued to find her death speaking to me as a “touchstone in the arc of being alive” – from perfection to debilitation, from overachiever to overwhelmed, from being alive to dying by suicide.

1 Alison Hanes, “Doctor’s Suicide a Tragic Wake-Up Call” Montreal Gazette, accessed Jan 28, 2021, https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/allison-hanes-doctors-suicide-a-tragic-wake-up-call; Catherine MacDonald, “Toronto Hospital Nurse Who Died by Suicide Remembered as Caring, Dedicated,” Global News, accessed Jan 28, 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/7598494/stefanie-van-nguyen/. 2 Corina Knoll, Ali Watkins, and Michael Rothfeld, “‘I Couldn’t Do Anything’: The Virus and an E.R. Doctor’s Suicide,” The New York Times, July 11, 2020, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/nyregion/lorna-breen-suicide-coronavirus.html.

17 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Dr. Breen was a physician who supervised the emergency department at the New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Upper Manhattan until April 2020. Her act of suicide was decided upon/submitted to as a result of her not being able to do more as a physician at a time when so much was needed in New York. Covid-19 was wreaking havoc throughout the city and Dr. Breen was not her “unflappable” self. In her own mind, she felt that she had broken down. She also felt that she was not aware of herself. For a time and on occasion Dr. Breen found solace with family, she was hospitalized for a time, then went back to work in extreme circumstances, and, finally, thought that she would “go off the radar” for a while toward the end of her life. Regrettably and sadly, she succumbed to the power of death. No one really knows the last thoughts or feelings of Dr. Breen. In reality, no one really knows the last thoughts and feelings of anyone who commits suicide. As a woman (nearly thirty years ago) in training at the Toronto Western Hospital which is, now, part of the University Health Network in Toronto, Ontario I remember hearing our supervisor say that a patient who jumped out of an eight-storey window had finally found peace. I wondered then as I wonder now, how do we know that? Do we rationalize a person’s suicide by saying such things to ourselves? In the case of Dr. Breen, her family of origin has chosen to speak out about her inability to ask for help. They have established a fund to help encourage better mental health for physicians. I applaud Dr. Breen’s family for their actions. I believe that Dr. Breen did try to reach out to others in the last weeks of her life. She sought, as did those who assisted her, conventionally accepted ways of finding support with a view to assisting her sense of “normal” to return. She had hit a very low point and was deeply concerned that she was seen as someone who was not coping. This was very troublesome to Dr. Breen. As both a Jungian analyst and as a spiritual care practitioner I have had the opportunity to work with various physicians who are or were, at times, not coping well. It is not simple for many physicians to see themselves as unwell. They are meant, by their own understanding and educational processes, to be treating others’ state of health to the point of being ultimately responsible for their patient’s well-being. Being a physician is saying “yes” to being a “god” in certain ways, says my colleague who is a palliative care physician. My colleague joked with me a number of years ago and said that physicians don’t have to play god because they are shaped to be a god. To feel one’s self to be a god (if one is human) is to be in an inflated state. To be in an inflated state from a Jungian psychological standpoint is to be in the psychological possession of something greater than what one actually is. This means that an individual is being taken over by an energy that is greater than one’s own ego state (one’s sense of who one is). The person becomes “lost” in the power of inflation in varying degrees. As well, when we consider roles that people play there is another psychological reality from a Jungian perspective that needs to be taken into account – that is the reality of persona. To be in a role means that one wears a particular mask, or personality, which is known as a persona. In Dr. Breen’s case, she wore the mask of a physician. This was her persona.

18 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Dr. Breen felt that she was drowning in the suffering of New York City during the intensity of the “attack” of Covid-19 in 2020. The inflated state of feeling responsible for more than what she could handle was the energy she was drowning in. Yes, there were many, many external circumstances that were calling Dr. Breen to action, but the feeling of being responsible for more than she could handle is a state of mind that needs to be recognized for the sake of mental health. Dr. Breen was drowning through the inflation of feeling responsible for more than what was hers to be responsible for. Due to this inflation, Dr. Breen did not feel the freedom of action to declare what she could do and what was beyond her scope of capacity. The help that Dr. Breen sought could not address this reality of inflation, it seems to me, because it is not in the parlance of a psychotherapeutic intervention as a rule. The primary language of psychology is centred around stabilizing the ego as distinct from seeing the ego as one complex among many complexes of energy that are part of one’s functioning reality. As I try to understand Dr. Breen, I see that without grounding in a fuller sense of consciousness she continued to sink into a deflation because there was no centering force that was strong enough for her to be able to say “I am doing enough.” Her striving for excellence/perfection could not tolerate the shift that needed to take place – that is to surrender in faith to something larger than herself in a conscious and reverential manner. Dr. Breen didn’t have to rescue New York City. She needed to offer what she reasonably could and believe that was all she could do. Dr. Breen sunk into deflation. Her inflation, as such, sank to a deflated sense of purpose and she felt a deflated sense of ability to act. Ultimately, Dr. Breen’s deflated sense of self persuaded her to believe that there was no way to continue to live – a deflation that, tragically, took Dr. Breen to her death. Dr. Breen was part of a Bible study group. I have wondered about her sense of truly opening to the power of healing in her Christian tradition – the power of healing that comes to save us as human beings. I have wondered about Dr. Breen’s sense of prayer. Could she or did she pray to a god that listened to her need? Could she listen to a god that would want her to be grounded in who she was? Dr. Breen was said to be an overachiever. This suggests to me that she was always in a place of seeking more – that, in and of itself, is not bad if there is some sense of being centred to return to from this road of serving, managing, and achieving. I wonder, too, about the faith community in which Dr. Breen was a part. Did her faith community have an openness to believe that the powers of the soul (in Jungian language, the unconscious that we live in all around us) are such that, while we are not puppets, we cannot live fully unless we are grounded in our humanity – living in our bodies as well as in our minds and in our sense of spirit (no matter how great our gifts). I have wondered about Dr. Breen’s sense of life and death. Emergency is an area of healthcare, at the best of times, that is charged with energies that range from a parent who is panicking about a child’s broken arm to meeting a person dealing with the sudden death of a man who was “supposed to live” at least another 40 years. Emergency units beg for adaptation to the unexpected. Covid-19 was not entirely unexpected but it did and still does require healthcare providers to adapt continually.

19 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

What was Dr. Breen’s role in the pandemic crisis? Where was there room, in her life, for the breaking through of the divine – that is, the unexpected that can’t be managed? The energy of the divine as the unexpected may well be the greatest challenge that has come to us through the present pandemic. Was Dr. Breen able to accept that life is, ultimately, unmanageable? In my work world within Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga, Ontario I have found the healthcare staff coping very well on the whole. In listening to people under tremendous stress, I have found them both rising to the occasion of caring and of feeling “snowed under” in exhaustion. I have reviewed the countless times that I have been with healthcare staff and we have talked about their factors of resiliency. They all point in the direction of trying to find their way in the unknown as well as trying to achieve a “new normal.” It seems it is our fate as human beings to try to find a normal. Dr. Breen wanted to return to some sense of normal as well as to be a healthcare god. Both were unavailable to her. Dr. Breen’s life points at what we consider to be god-like in the western world – high achiever, high-income earner, a leader at all costs, even to the sacrifice of one’s true life. Whether from a psychological or a spiritual perspective, Dr. Breen’s life suggested success was measured by these external standards. She did not appear to allow herself to really honour something larger that could have helped her put her life in perspective. To put one’s self in perspective is to realize that we, each of us as human beings, have a place in a much bigger system called the planet. The systems that we are parts of – be they family, a department, a city, a country, (and the list goes on) all ask something of us. Do we hear what these different aspects of life ask of us from a grounded sense? Can we try to find the humility to say this is my “shot” and these are my gifts to offer? I believe, firmly, that Dr. Breen was conditioned to do the right things within the unrealistic expectations of the culture(s) that she was engaged in. My challenge, as a result of the tragic loss of Dr. Breen’s life, is to ask that our mental health notions of healing look to something larger – we live in soul unconsciousness and soul will have its ways with us unless we realize we do indeed live in such unconsciousness. Realizing this is so leads to acknowledging that we need to find ways to work with the energies that we swim in. If we don’t, we may well drown in those same energies. My challenge to organized religion is similar. Religions are constructs that were, and are still, developed to help us find ways to honour and worship and live in community. Religions, however, are not bigger than soul. They are containers within soul. I realize that I don’t know the heart of Dr. Laura Breen. I realize, too, that what I am writing may not fit with what the real picture of her life was from those who knew her. I realize, finally, that what I am suggesting from a vantage point of a psychology of soul may not be the leap that is attractive. In short, what we value most, at times, may have nothing to do with what is truly going to give life to us and therefore may well block us from doing what is life-giving. I fear Dr. Breen did follow, faithfully, the gods of success, perfection, and achievement.

20 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Unfortunately, they proved unable to help her deal with her overwhelming feelings of inadequacy. Rather, they reinforced these negative feelings. As a result of Dr. Breen’s tragic death, I write in the hope that there may be an awareness that grows more deeply to appreciate that we live in energies larger than us and they will, indeed, take over if we are not aware of them. I’m truly sorry that Dr. Breen could not find a way to realize that the many gifts she was given were enough to bring healing and caring as best she could. My final hope is that we learn more of the wisdom of learning that consciousness grows as we enter into our darkness and encounter the destructiveness of an inflated sense of self.

Author’s note: I am the Professional Practice Leader for the Spiritual and Supportive Care Department within Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga. I am also a Jungian Analyst in Hamilton, Ontario. I am a member of the College of Registered Psychotherapists in Ontario and have served as a clinical pastoral educator within CASC. I am a sessional faculty member within The Toronto School of Theology at Emmanuel College and I teach a course on dreams and psychotherapy. I received my Doctor of Ministry from St. Stephen’s College at the University of Alberta in the area of theology and feature film.

I wrote this piece because I was deeply touched by Dr. Breen’s accomplished sense of self dictating the terms not only for her life but her death. The value of life cannot be measured by our accomplishments only. It is what we learn to listen to from soul and shape what we hear into a life. Soul will dictate on its own terms unless we bring our human values of caring enough for an expression of life in its fullest expressions. The tragedy of Dr. Breen’s death was that her life was considered too narrowly. I hope we can all learn from Dr. Breen’s tragic death. I hope further that physicians, in particular, while holding great responsibility for patients, can realize their god-like powers with tempered human love and attachment that can ground them.

21 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

Coronavirus and the Ability to Love Your Neighbour

Alexa Gilmour MDiv, Minister, Windermere United Church, Toronto, Ontario Elizabeth Mohler PhD Student, Western University, London, Ontario [email protected]

Abstract: This commentary offers a reflection upon Windermere United Church’s resource- sharing initiative “Neighbours Helping Neighbours” in Toronto during the Covid-19 pandemic. Members of the church community came together to help one another by delivering aid in whichever form was deemed necessary, such as helping with errands, delivering groceries, driving individuals to medical appointments, and providing a human connection through friendly callers. The interdependence model of disability is reflected upon, as well as theological reflection upon “dis-membering” and “re-membering” people with disabilities within the Body of Christ.

Keywords: Covid-19, Coronavirus, mutual aid, disability, church, Christianity, charity

When Covid-19 first hit in March of 2020, the province of Ontario ordered the closure of churches. They said we were non-essential. Thanks be to God the body of Christ always finds a way to resurrect. We may not have been able to gather for worship, but we would not be stopped from Christ’s call to feed the hungry and liberate people from social injustice and isolation. We just had to implement new programs, with Covid-19 protocols in place, that allowed us to support the vulnerable in mutually enriching ways. We weren’t reinventing any wheels. Every generation, stretching back to the book of Acts, has found its way through crises by sharing resources (Acts 4:32–35). At the small church where Alexa serves as the minister and Elizabeth is an adherent, Windermere United in Toronto, we did this through an initiative called Neighbours Helping Neighbours (NHN). As the minister, Alexa felt called to answer the growing needs for food, shelter, and mental health support, exacerbated by Covid-19. As an activist in the disabled community, Elizabeth felt called to mobilize support. Both of us were inspired by Paul’s image of a body that works together: “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor 12:26). As the NHN community formed, our capacity grew to offer hospitality to individuals living with disabilities and mental health challenges, but so too did our dependence on those members. The Covid-19 crisis has threatened the lives of people with disabilities. There are various reasons for this:

22 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary

a) Medical reasons: many people with disabilities already have a compromised immune system, depending on the type of disability, and even under normal circumstances must watch out not to catch any kind of illness.

b) Social reasons: some people with disabilities rely on the cooperation of a well- organized social network that would be available to them in times of need. During this time of physical distancing and isolation, these networks may not function as well as they would during normal times, i.e. attendants or friends may have contracted the virus and must now stay home or are in a hospital themselves. As well, those with disabilities who reside in congregate care settings may no longer have access to their advocates and support networks. An important piece of the survival chain is now missing with potentially serious consequences.

c) Ethical (or should we say unethical) reasons: many countries have developed guidelines for hospitals and medical staff concerning how to distribute badly needed medical equipment for infected patients, such as ventilators. These guidelines are generally based on the survivability of the patient and medical equipment is then distributed accordingly. Mostly the elderly and people with disabilities would then end up on the bottom of the distribution list, which would in turn directly put their lives in immediate danger. Contrary to the compassionate teachings of a Saviour who says, “the last shall be first,” some governments consider the lives of people with disabilities as a “disposable burden” or, at very least, “collateral damage.” When one member of the body suffers, cut it off.

As governments around the world restricted movements and gatherings to mitigate the spread of Covid-19, churches of all denominations were not exempt from these rules. To adapt to this new situation, many churches had to be creative in remaining connected and supportive of one another. Elizabeth knew, given her active social life pre-Covid, she had to find purpose and a way to stay connected to those she cares about and causes that meant something to her. When Alexa started the NHN, Elizabeth quickly offered leadership. NHN is as it sounds—those in need receive help from those willing to offer it and vice versa. It is a beautiful example of interconnectedness and interdependence. Interdependence is a concept in disability literature as well as in faith communities —it is about being in reciprocal, mutually-beneficial relationships, where each person has gifts to share and to teach the other. This notion of interdependence grounding NHN captured Elizabeth, she needed purpose, something to dive into and respond to the pain of our world, along with a source of connectedness. Others needed food, shelter, and a friendly voice. United, our community became an ever-evolving tapestry of work woven together by many hands. NHN embodies the interdependence model of disability by recognizing the importance of going beyond a merely social model of disability and encourages friendship — both in our broader community and in the Church. God calls us to mutual friendship, respect, love, and justice. Disability scholar Jeff McNair posits in his article titled, “Disability and Human Supports,” that government social services, where workers are paid to be caring, can never be defined as friends. Friendship cannot be defined by acts where we associate with a person with

23 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary a disability in response to their need. Rather than friendship, that is charity. Friendship is bi- directional and interdependent. The interdependence model privileges the idea that a person with a disability exists in a community to which they contribute and from which they receive assistance. The interdependence model is also experienced in healthy communities of faith. We rely on each other and there is love and friendship among all parts. We build each other up, we live together and care together, we work together and are ultimately more effective in our mission. All of us, with and without disabilities, need the love, care, and acceptance of others in the community of Christ. This community is vividly described in 1 Corinthians 12:12–28: “And God has placed in the church first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, of helping, of guidance, and of different kinds of tongues.” When each person plays their role and is dependent upon the other, we are truly a healthier and a better community grounded in our faith. The beauty of NHN is its mutuality. NHN seeks to build on existing social networks to create new pathways for social cohesion, support, and advocacy, as well as leveraging the resources within the community to protect those with compromised immune systems. There are three primary components to NHN: the help-line for one-to-one support, our mutual aid pods, and the food security programs that grew from the first two. Posters were circulated around the neighbourhood and online offering mutual aid and requesting volunteers. Individuals self-selected into the categories of helper, helped, or both. When a request comes in, Elizabeth matches the need with the appropriate volunteer. The typical needs are errands, grocery, medical appointment drivers, and friendly callers. Requests for friendly calls are especially prevalent among community members who do not have internet access. We also receive many requests for goods and services beyond the scope of NHN. While Alexa has contacts for local resources, Elizabeth provides disability-specific resources and connections such as Balance for Blind Adults and Covid-19 webinars hosted by Citizens with Disabilities Ontario. For some NHN recipients, we provide advocacy and accompaniment. The mutual aid pods were modelled on a program developed by our neighbours in Parkdale and other initiatives coming from the United Kingdom. People clustered geographically (one street or the floor of an apartment) or by shared interest (an art group formed their own mutual aid pod though they were not direct neighbours). Neighbours were asked to check on neighbours, with special efforts to reach those who were socially isolated and vulnerable. The pods were led by a volunteer with support from the church who made resources available in a shared document. A weekly pod-leader meeting provided a time for sharing resources and successes. For example, when the pod located in the social housing complex requested electronics for children to be able to attend school virtually, the more affluent pods sourced gently used electronics for their neighbours. Infused with an Acts 4 kind of vibe, neighbours found ways to give as they were able, each according to their needs and people from the full spectrum of humanity participated. One neighbour donated the materials for mask making and a newly arrived Nigerian refugee sewed them. A cyclist, off work with mental health challenges, delivered groceries to quarantined individuals on days they felt well enough to do so. Those in one-to-one mutual aid relationships reported feelings of friendship blossoming as the weeks went on. Out of the mutual aid pods and the helpline grew three locally-led food security initiatives: distribution of pre-cooked meals on Monday at five local community housing

24 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Invited Commentary complexes, a pop-up food bank, and a partnership with Food Share to deliver fresh produce to low-income families on a bi-weekly basis. Programs relied on local residents for leadership, many of whom report experiencing a high degree of stigmatization related to poverty, race, disability and/or mental health challenges. Their intimate knowledge of the community and the trust they had built up with their neighbours made the programs a success. They knew who needed what and how to provide support. Far from being “disposable burdens” or “collateral damage,” these community members were essential members of the healing body of Christ (1 Cor 12). The weaving together of gifts in this mutually beneficial way creates a stronger, more vibrant community coming out of the pandemic. When Covid-19 started Elizabeth and Alexa, like so many, found the tumultuous upheaval of lives disruptive and disconcerting. Covid-19 risked dis-membering our siblings in the disability community, who are often seen as dispensable by society at large from the body of Christ. Instead, called into action through interdependence, we have found our place and are re-membered. The body of Christ, now whole, finds within itself everything needed for the crisis of today and abundant life tomorrow.

Authors’ Note: This submission was prepared by two local community champions in west Toronto—Alexa Gilmour and Elizabeth Mohler. Rev. Alexa Gilmour is the minister at Windermere United Church, an Affirming ministry seeking to understand the church’s role in systemic injustice and live into God’s call to build compassionate equitably sustainable communities. She is the founder of the Stone Soup Network, and a member of the Canadian Sanctuary Network and Toronto’s Faith in the City . In 2020, Alexa was awarded the McGeachy Scholarship. Her research will delve into the worrying issues that keep us up at night and what we can do about them. Elizabeth Mohler has been a strong advocate in the disability community for over a decade. She uses her lived and professional experience of disability to strengthen the voices of a community whose voice has traditionally been weak or non-existent in policy arenas. Elizabeth currently sits on the board of Camp Hill Ontario and Citizens with Disabilities Ontario. She is pursuing her doctoral studies at Western University, focusing on the impact direct funded attendant services has on the community engagement of adults with physical disabilities.

25 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Enchanted Suffering: Queer Magick as Educated Hope

Jasper Jay Bryan BA, MPS, Expressive Arts Therapist Student Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada [email protected]

Abstract: Is there magick in suffering? Moreover, how can an enchanted worldview assist care providers in expanding horizons of hope for their clients, patients, congregations, or communities? Using a magickal hermeneutics, case studies of self-identified “queer witches” have much to teach us about hope. Following José Esteban Muñoz's conception of Queer Utopia

and Ernst Bloch's docta spes, these individuals demonstrate a hope that is rooted in adversity,

tended by enchantedness. As spiritual care providers, we can learn to purposefully integrate magickal principles into our work with marginalized individuals, and all of those who are experiencing suffering. We can hold magickal space---an enchanted, educated utopia---to cultivate our clients’ inner power and expand horizons of hope.

Keywords: queer, magick, spiritual care, LGBTQ, queer utopia, hope, suffering

Introduction

Loki, the Norse trickster god, was known for weaving clever schemes, trapping other gods in precarious situations. He was a shapeshifter. Loki changed his form, gender, and sex in service of these tricks, playfully challenging whatever the Vikings (and their gods) considered “normal.” He was a web spinner. His name, translated, means knot or tangle, and indeed he tied many knots in Norse mythology’s threads, often bringing about a god’s downfall – if not provoking a good laugh with his outlandish antics.1 Other pantheons have similar irreverent figures. Heretics, outcasts, oddballs, queers, witches: radicals have always tied knots in how a society thinks and feels about the way their world is, or the way it should be. One could contend that most, if not all, faith traditions – and cultures – have analogous characters in their mythos. Throughout time and place, archetypal figures have been represented as knot makers: characters, real and imagined, who challenge “straight” stories. It seems that even the straightest and best-woven threads inevitably accumulate knots, which become sites of anarchic collapse and liberatory recreation. Knots remind us that the here and now is but a point on the thread, and sure enough, tangles will

1 Heide Eldar, “More Inroads to Pre-Christian Notions, After All? The Potential of Late Evidence” in Á Austrvega: Saga and East Scandinavia: Preprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference, ed. Agneta Ney (Sweden: Gävle University Press, 2009), 363.

26 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article emerge then and there.2 Beyond a straight thread lies utopia; hope is raveled in snarls and points of disjuncture, expanding perspectives on our web’s horizons. Soon, we may spot more threads – opportunities for something, somewhere, else. Over the rainbow, and through the looking glass. The Witch is one archetype that shows up in countless cultures. “Witch” has a tangled history: it’s been a title forced upon people to marginalize and persecute them, yet also a heterodox self-identifier worn proudly by practitioners of varying spiritual traditions, most of which are marked by magickal cosmologies.3 Similarly, the word “queer,” originally a slur for gender and sexual non-conforming people, has been reclaimed as an anti-identarian identity, praxis, and worldview.4 Both point to a conception of hope beyond what philosopher Ernst Bloch terms “abstract hope” and towards a theology of “concrete” or “educated” hope (docta spes): a form of utopian being, feeling, and thinking that transcends problematic progress discourses.5 Presenting case studies of self-identified “queer witches” and tracing the history of magick, this paper attempts to expand views on hope, suffering, and utopia to inform an “educated” spiritual care practice. From a queer theoretical optic, Utopia can be a magickal hermeneutics with which to interpret histories and personal narratives. It is a flower that grows from the mud of suffering, but only when fertilized by enchantedness. It is the willful expansion of horizons beyond the “quagmire of the present”6 towards new worlds, and new modes of being. Lastly, Utopia is tangible, available to us at all moments in the form of “wishful images”7 – the arts, popular culture, fairy tales, mythology, and spiritual longings. Magick is accessible to everybody. As therapists and spiritual care providers, we can learn to purposefully integrate magickal principles into our work with LGBTQ2SIA+ individuals on the margins, and all people who experience suffering. We can hold magickal space to cultivate our clients’ inner power and expand horizons of hope.

2 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. 3 Tomás Prower, Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World, Kindle Edition (Woodbury MN: Llewellyn Publications), 2018. 4 Siobhan B. Somerville, “Queer,” in Keywords for American Culture Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 5 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, ed. N Plaice, S Plaice, and P Knight (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), 1. 6 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 7 Ernst Bloch, Jack Zipes, and Frank Mecklenburg, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

27 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Figure 1: "Jay" by Jay Bryan

An illustration of a merman jumping from a tower that is on fire, being struck by lightning, and rooted in the crashing waves below. A version of the Tower tarot card.

28 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Utopia is a Magickal Hermeneutics

What is a PROVOCATEUR? A provocateur is someone who provokes reaction in others through unconventional behaviour/performance and fantastic expression. Willing to say what others would be shot for saying, they are Picaros, confidence men, satirists, entartistes, double agents, imposters, charlatans, jokers, ringmasters, jesters, fools, actors, tricksters, and players. How does one PLAY the PROVOCATEUR? When PLAYING the PROVOCATEUR, you can play any role at any time, including yourself in masquerade… By making others aware that we are only PLAYING, we must trust that they will believe us. We become vulnerable to them, and hope that they will PLAY the provoked, and challenge their own perceptions instead of trying to dismiss us.

Who can PLAY? Anyone can PLAY.8

What does it mean for something to be “magickal”? Derived from the ancient Greek magike, the word referred to priests’ craft, but in the early Christian era it became associated with deviance, sorcery, and witchcraft. While condemned in the Torah, Judaism and Christianity’s relationship with magickal practices fluctuated from context to context, divided into benevolent (mystery and “high” ceremony) versus malevolent (witchcraft and works of the devil), sanctioned or condemned based on its contextual spiritual tradition.9 Unlike stage magic, magick is “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”10 It exists in the liminal space between free will and fate. Magick is, by all accounts, queer. In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes that:

Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.11

I argue that magick is a queer striving, a desire for then and there manifested as free will. Magick, in the form of ritual, arts, play, and creation, is the ability to imagine beyond the here and now, materializing emergent visions into action.

8 Magixnartz, “Welcome to Optative Theatrical Laboratories!” Magixnartz, accessed April 11, 2020, http://www.angelfire.com/folk/magixnartz/otlzplayidea.html. 9 Dale Wallace, “Rethinking Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in South Africa: From Colonial Coherence to Postcolonial Conundrum,” Journal for the Study of Religion 28, no. 1 (2015): 25. 10 Aleister Crowley and Leila Waddell, Magick: Liber Aba: Book 4, Second Edition (Newburyport: Weiser, 2013), 127. 11 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

29 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Magick is also play: tricks that frolic with “reality” (or our conceptions of it). The treatise at the beginning of this paragraph demonstrates magick’s playful, radical qualities. Operative Theatrical Laboratories is a performance art collective that incited spectators to act on a then and there. Their and other artists’ spirits of play have been adapted by the Radical Faerie tradition. The Radical Faeries are a group of gay magick practitioners who find spiritual meaning in sexuality, sharing values that include environmentalism, feminism, and dismantling hierarchies. Many identify as witches, and practice Pagan, Christian, Islamic, and/or other faith traditions. Members of the sect reclaim “faerie,” a common homophobic slur, playing with its double meaning – gayness and folklore – in collective spiritual practices. Faeries are tricksters from European folklore: enchanted, mischievous creatures, benevolent or malevolent, who shapeshift, appear, disappear and play with humans’ perceptions of time.12 Fairies tie knots in linearity, much like queer-identified folks, witches, artists, mystics, radical activists, and others who “play the provocateur.” They trifle with constructions of so-called “reality,” unbinding us (if only for a moment) from the “quagmire of the present.” In doing so, opportunities for hope emerge – even if hope takes the form of suffering as old worldviews collapse. Ernst Bloch would call this sort of revolutionary hope docta spes: educated, or concrete, hope. Ernst Bloch differentiates two kinds of hope: “abstract” and “concrete.”13 Our dominant, neoliberal conception of utopia is founded upon “abstract hope”: the rose-coloured progress narrative that strives for a “better future.” This striving, according to Bloch, is wishful thinking, contingent upon the ultimate obliteration of “negative” affect, conflict, and suffering – a neoliberal, colonialist, and patriarchal imperative that reinforces the status quo.14 “Concrete hope” (docta spes) is a critical alternative to such utopian daydreaming. It is a breed of hope that is already always manifesting through revolutionary praxis and human culture. Concrete hope is transcendent: a mode of being and acting. Queer theorists have used “concrete hope” in pursuit of queer futurity. Queerness, a political and philosophical orientation that evolved out of the AIDS crisis, is an embodiment of impermanence, challenging heteronormative time and space. Munoz writes that:

Queerness is utopian, and there is something queer about the utopian. Frederick Jameson describes the utopian as the oddball or the maniac. Indeed, to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and imagine another time and place is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer.15

Queer theorists ask: is there such thing as a queer future? What does queer hope look like? If there is no future, can there be hope, or utopian drive amidst suffering? Using a queer,

12 K. M. Briggs, The Fairies in English Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969). 13 Bloch, The Principle of Hope. 14 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 26. 15 Ibid.

30 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article magickal, utopian hermeneutics, perhaps we can turn to figures that live outside “straight time and place,”16 learning from their narratives to open horizons of hope.

Figure 2: "Connor" by Jay Bryan

A boy dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West from Wizard of Oz, hovering over a crystal ball. There are a raven, castle, and drawings of goddesses and witches in the background.

Utopia is the Flower of Enchanted Suffering

The Lotus grows out of the mud. Without the mud, there is no Lotus. Suffering is a kind of mud, that we must use in order to grow the flower of Understanding and Love. 17

16 Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies,” in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 17 Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2014).

31 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

We [queer witches] give sacred permission by our liberating presence, to become a unique, fluidic, expansive, and outrageous flower in the garden of life. We must become who and what we are powerfully, beautifully, and uniquely…We are the presence of the Queer-Fire that gives the permission to human-kind to explore the interior landscape and unearth the inspiration at our centres. This rainbow-colored flame is unstoppable.18

“Witch” has come to mean many things. It has been used as a pejorative label: uttered by colonialist institutions and branded onto suspect individuals who challenged social order. In cultures across history, archetypal witches were represented as heterodox figures – mainly women, and particularly old women like the hag or crone – who practiced magic, summoned spirits, put curses on people, worshipped the devil, ate babies… and so on. Even today, it’s used to scapegoat, exoticize, and persecute spiritual practices that are misunderstood, and as a tool to incite fear to justify the anxious oppression of groups of people.19 The term “witch” has been used cross-culturally to blame misgivings on “Others” – particularly women, people with disabilities, gender and sexual non-conforming people, racialized groups, and indigenous people. From the Salem Witch Trials to McCarthyism and sexist comments aimed at Hilary Clinton in the 2016 American Presidential election, North America has had its fair share of “witch” hunts.20 Witchcraft as a spirituality, like categories used to distinguish race or class, is one constructed by colonizers. In many societies, faith traditions outside of dominant institutions, and particularly indigenous spiritualities, are condemned as “witchcraft.”21 Post-Enlightenment secular discourses depicted witches as make- believe: fictional creatures who are better left in the realm of children’s tales.22 Contemporary popular culture places witches at the crossroads of demonization and invisibility. Caricatures of witches in the media perpetuate long-standing oppression, even if less apparent (but arguably more insidious) than public burnings at the stake. In the late nineteenth century, public interest in Western Esotericism rose as a rebellion against the positivist cult of rationality. By the 1920s, middle and upper classes turned to Spiritualists to communicate with loved ones who died during the war. At the same time, psychoanalysis was well-established in methods of unconscious exploration – practices that drew upon a sort of secularized Spiritualism. The Surrealists, meanwhile, created art and literature that resonated with people’s spiritual yearnings. Occultists founded societies offering spiritual community outside traditional religious institutions, first-wave Feminists sought

18 Orion Foxwood, “Queer-Fire Witchery: The Rainbow-Flame That Melts the Soul-Cage The Emerging Fluidity of Conciousness,” in Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries (Anchorage: Mystic Productions Press, 2018), 761. 19 Thomas Aneurin Smith, Amber Murrey, and Hayley Leck, “‘What Kind of Witchcraft Is This?’ Development, Magic and Spiritual Ontologies,” Third World Thematics 2, no. 2–3 (2017): 141–56. 20 Kristen J. Sollee, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, (ThreeL Media): 2017. 21 Smith, Murrey, and Leck, “‘What Kind of Witchcraft Is This?’”. 22 Edward Bever, “Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40, no. 2 (2018): 263–93.

32 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article religion devoid of patriarchal hierarchy, and interest in ancient Egypt proliferated through Europe. Margaret Murray, a contentious anthropologist, published her theories on witchcraft, inspiring the Wiccan religion – a return to fertility-based Paganism through ceremony and magick. Wiccan practitioners reclaimed “witch,” and so too did others who identified with a multitude of “New Age” Western Esoteric cults. Popular interest in Esotericism resurged once again in the 1960s as people challenged institutionalized authorities. Hippies looked to nature-based Paganism, and second-wave feminism reclaimed lost goddesses.23 In the modern West – as in pre-modernity and antiquity – witchcraft was marginalized, people were marginalized with fearful cries of “witchcraft,” and the marginalized flocked to witchcraft for respite. Today, popular culture is saturated with witchcraft, and magickal practice has piqued the interest of those seeking alternative routes to spiritual connection. Millenial women and queer folks have cultivated a postmodern witchcraft embedded in principles of radical social justice and intersectional feminism.24 Astrology, spellcasting, tarot cards, and crystals have paved the way for contemporary magickal practices: the Witch has returned, and ze is unruly. It is no surprise that queer-identified people, who also experience marginalization, have found a home in witchcraft. These are individuals who have experienced ostracization and persecution from institutional powers that be, including trauma from discrimination within their religious communities or faith traditions. At the same time, many feel dissatisfied with the LGBTQ+ community’s atheist leanings, and seek spiritual fulfillment outside of conventional faith traditions.25 Reclaiming “queer” and “witch,” like casting a spell, reroutes the oppressor’s curse back at them. It is the very suffering witches face that is the source of their power:

Down to their core, magic and witchcraft are so very queer. They are often hidden in the shadows. They follow their own rules, which often don’t align with what is commonly known or accepted. They celebrate a liminality that often makes larger society uncomfortable. They revel in style…To live magically is to embrace the symbolic, the poetic; it is to see beyond the limitations imposed upon us by the tyranny of rational thought and emerge liberated into a world populated by spirits, angels, faeries, and other fantastical intelligences that we perceive as being part of the living, conscious mechanism that is the universe. It flies in the face of convention, turns it on its head. Magic affirms that we have the power within ourselves to make changes happen. When our religions and institutions, or even our families, fail us, magic encourages us to live our own truths and to take action in the world to make those changes that are needed.26

23 David Waldron, The Sign of the Witch: Modernity and the Pagan Revival (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2008). 24 Jessica Bennett, “When Did Everybody Become a Witch?” New York Times, October 24, 2019. 25 Storm Faerywolf, “Column: Magic Is So Queer,” The Wild Hunt: Pagan News & Perspectives (September 2019). 26 Ibid.

33 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Spiritual crisis begets transformation.27 Often, magick facilitates meaning-making and post- traumatic growth.28 Queer gods and goddesses, gender-changing priestesses of lore open horizons for new types of worlds, wherein magick grows survival into resilience. As such, Utopia is not the absence of suffering, but blooms out of suffering when it mates with enchantedness: a sense of wonder, meaning, and astonishment. Writes Munoz, “astonishment helps one surpass the limitations of an alienating presentness and allows one to see a different time and place.”29

27 Kenneth I. Paragament, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy: Understanding and Addressing the Sacred (New York: The Guilford Press, 2007), 111. 28 Robert J. Wicks, “Seeing in the Darkness: Appreciating the Paradox of Posttraumatic Growth,” in Perspective: The Calm within the Storm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 124–48. 29 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 5.

34 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Figure 3: "Jae" by Jay Bryan

A beautiful woman wearing a long flowing dress, surrounded by different animals in a field of flowers. There is a pool of blood and a sky full of stars and a moon.

35 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Utopia is Expanding Horizons

Witches are creatures of liminal spaces. Witches keep one foot planted here in the everyday world, and the other foot planted in the world of spirits. This liminality, being between states, is one of the things that gives witches power. Many, but not all, queer people can identify with this as well due to our very existence.30

Witches play at the queer edges. In magickal practice and society, they dwell in liminal (queer)31 time and space:

Liminality is a position of structural outsiderhood and inferiority. To be liminal is to be vulnerable, without the protection of role or office. At the same time, liminality implies potency, the capacity to become more than one has been. The liminal person is ‘naked’...without defenses yet has…‘the power of the weak.’32

Those relegated to liminal space are divested of social status for a transitory period, and upon their return bring wisdom back to their tribe. The very same people who are forced to the margins of mainstream Western society, feared and reviled, are in historic and contemporary cultures revered for their liminality: priestesses, witches, shamans, elders, artists, healers, two- spirit people, those outside binary genders.33 This is not to romanticize violent histories or wistfully daydream of a “better past,” or to lean into Orientalist and racist exoticization. We can, however, take pause and pay homage to ancestors who have enchanted our world. As Bloch proposes, utopia exists beyond distinctions of past, present, and future. Imagining beyond “the darkness of the lived instance”34 does not mean forgetting the past. It is not, either, to evade the present moment. It is to realize that time is animated, always becoming – unfurling just out of reach. Munoz uses Bloch’s terms “no-longer-conscious” and “not-yet-conscious” to describe how Utopia rejects entirely the here and now as ontologically static, breaking free of heteronormative constructs for a present fueled by then and there. Utopia exists in the spaces between, not far off in the distance, but laced among the everyday: “the mark of the utopian is the quotidian.”35 Psychologist Kenneth Pargament, too, writes that everything in life can take on sacred qualities, and sanctifying the everyday enriches how we experience the world, looking at life through a sacred lens.36 Moreover, hope is relational, spun into moments of

30 Aaron Oberon, “A Drag Queen Possessed and Other Queer Club Magic,” in Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries (Anchorage: Mystic Productions Press, 2018), 2613. 31 Halberstam, “Queer Temporality.” 32 Stephen K. Levine, “Bearing Gifts to the Feast,” in Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1992), 49. 33 Prower, Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World. 34 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 5. 35 Ibid., 22. 36 Pargament, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy, 35.

36 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article belonging, connection, and process.37 Liminality, thus, need not be an inaccessible borderland, but can be embodied in the mundane of daily lives. Perhaps we can look to “creatures of liminal spaces” for glimmers of hope. Theologians Pamela McCarroll and Helen Cheung define hope as “the experience of the opening of horizons of meaning and participation in relationship to time, other human and non-human beings, and/or the transcendent.”38 Liminal spaces lie beyond the horizons – through otherness, magickal ritual, prayer, meditation, therapy, play, telling and listening to stories, coming of age, moments of deep grief, performance and catharsis. Being immersed in liminality, then, can surface a looking glass to peer into new horizons. Apart from imagining, educated hope necessitates action: empowered agency to enact one’s will upon the world. This can look like embracing suffering, while also summoning reservoirs of power within to transform one’s worldview, and potentially the world around oneself (as Wiccans believe, “as above, so below”).39 Magick, like educated hope, is the power of enacting one’s agency to manifest the not-yet-conscious into material being. In other words, magick is imagination made real. If we are indeed striving beings,40 in constant pursuit of sacred meanings, in accessing desire we can uproot the world we live in – tying it backwards and upside down in knots, opening new horizons to the there and then. Psychologist Viktor Frankl writes that despair is suffering without meaning.41 Perhaps magick can be seen as the process of conjuring meaning from suffering.

Hope is a White Rabbit, Golden Ticket and Ruby Slippers

Fairy tales are queer, at the very least, in the nineteenth-century usage of the term, to mean odd, strange making, eccentric, different, and yet attractive … if straight time acts like a straightjacket, the queer time of fairy tales invites participation in the realm of enchantment … it refreshes potentiality.42

What does utopia look like for us at this moment? And what does it mean for spiritual care practice? How can we empower people to bring magick out of their stories of suffering? Looking to art and literature, we can witness the queer, magickal utopian impulse manifested. Spiritual traditions and popular culture touch upon humanity’s innate capacity for hope. Of particular note are queer reclamations of “wishful images” – fairy tales, stories of the hero’s journey, myth, and spiritual quests. For many queer folks, queer readings of enchanted utopias have been wells of resilience. Otherworlds like Oz; Wonderland; sci-fi, musical, and fantasy universes turn the normative “now” on its head, offering queer schemas for new realities.

37 Pamela R. McCarroll and Helen Cheung, “Re-Imaging Hope in the Care of Souls: A Literature Review Redefining Hope,” in Psychotherapy: Cure of the Soul, (Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, 2013), 107. 38 Ibid., 106. 39 Waldron, The Sign of the Witch. 40 Pargament, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy. 41 Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). 42 Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill, Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012).

37 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Provocateurs – Disney Villains, Willy Wonka, the Wicked Witch of the West – resonate with marginalized people as some of the only mainstream representations of queerness. Enchanted fantasylands are blueprints for worlds outside straight time and place: one, perhaps, just on the horizon (or over the rainbow). Art serves a utopian function.43 Even if utopia is beyond here and now, its horizons can be glimpsed in magickal aesthetics. Expansive hope narratives give insight into how we, as spiritual care providers and therapists, can encourage people to summon “wishful images.” Through storytelling, potentiality unfolds — described by Giorgio Agamben as enduring indeterminacy in affect and methodology (dwelling in the subconscious region of the “not- yet”).44 With its postmodern bent, the therapeutic uses of enchanted hope are especially compatible with humanistic therapies such as narrative, existential, expressive arts, and relational psychotherapies. Narrative therapy teaches that cultural stories can help people express experiences that are too raw to verbalize, holding space for meaning while avoiding re-traumatization.45 It is therefore necessary to pay attention to the stories people hold close: when clients speak of magickal worlds in film, television, books, and so on, it invites us into their worlds of play. Magickal play is no less meaningful than “serious” spiritual practice; after all, “play is serious learning.”46 Play therapy, too, can be seen as a type of magick, providing a liminal holding space for transformations to occur.47 Stories aesthetically and affectively reveal peoples’ vulnerabilities, deepening the potential for creating new meaning in difficult circumstances. Narrative therapists seek out “sparkling moments.”48 Such moments are enchanted knots in a client’s story that, when collaboratively untangled, reveal more helpful alternatives to problem- saturated narrative threads.49 If we dig through stories with our clients to find the magick, we can name the many ways they cultivate resilience, in metaphors and language that resonate with them. Moreover, channeling the utopian impulse in therapy through play, sanctification, and the arts can make magick happen. A story, when it’s told, is an act of magick: a spell that expands horizons to the boundless then and there.

43 Bloch, Zipes, and Mecklenburg, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. 44 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 3. 45 David Denborough, Collective Narrative Practice: Responding to Individuals, Groups, and Communities Who Have Experienced Trauma, (Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications, 2008). 46 Leslie Irvine, “The Power of Play,” Anthrozoos 14, no. 3 (2001): 151–60. 47 Ibid. 48 Denborough, Collective Narrative Practice. 49 Ibid.

38 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Figure 4: "Tallan" by Jay Bryan

A person in vivid rainbow colours with long hair, and pink lips. A collage with illustration. There are psychedelic mushrooms, flowers, lotuses, and the Cheshire Cat in the background. There is a golden ticket from Willy Wonka, and the words "We're all Mad here". The star of David hangs on their neck.

39 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Conclusion

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.50

Queer magic is too often invisibilized and propagandized by colonialist doctrine. It is thus necessary to read first-hand narrative accounts if wisdom is to be gleaned. Magickal stories, fiction, and nonfiction open us to spiritual knots that challenge crises of “stuckness” brought about by goal-oriented versions of hope. Rather than a rose-coloured abstract hope, nuanced and more sustained hopes can flourish from suffering. It can be argued that hope is not separate from suffering and, further, that suffering mobilizes hope in the form of radical consciousness, particularly when brewed with enchantedness. Dominant “regimes of knowledge”51 are but one reality that simply does not work for everybody, particularly those without access to neoliberal currencies of here and now.52 In spiritual care and psychotherapy, as we open our own horizons to the magickal potentiality of new kinds of realities, we can “watch with glittering eyes” clients’ stories unfolding before us. With a magickal hermeneutics, we can hope to encourage every person to draw upon their unique resilience. Enchanted acts within a therapeutic context will imagination into being. When we dream of new worlds together, magick opens horizons towards then and there: Utopia.

Author’s note: I wrote this piece in the midst of a gender transition, separation from my partner, and the beginning of a worldwide pandemic. Drifting through in-between space, I wondered

what it would be like to dance the line of here and there, now and then, hope and suffering. It began as an art project. I realized that I happen to know quite a lot of ‘witches’ (including myself) in various pockets of queer subculture. I asked some of these inspiring folks if I could have an hour long Zoom chat. They spoke about their spirituality, queerness, and how magick manifests in their life. I asked things such as what traditions they draw from, how they find or make magic in suffering, what mythological creature they relate with the most, and “what is your living utopian fairy tale in a dystopian now?”

The conversations inspired a series of portraits. Each portrait is an aesthetic response to each queer witch’s lived experience and perspectives. Enchanted Suffering is a continuation of the art, exploring more deeply theologic al motifs of enchanted suffering and queer utopia. Grounded in 50my “10 own Fantastic hope, Roald it also Dahl tended Quotes Toto Celebrateit throughout His Birthday,” the creative Huffington process. Post, September I had tasted 2013, enchantedness accessed October in 27,my 2020, art and https://www.huffpost.com/entry/roald spiritual practices, but the intentionality-dahl- of this process held me as I ventured deeper. quotes_n_3909289?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQA AAF6The -visualQo9xdLp8VRI4HUbm8UuJarZphVf art, writing, relational dialogues- and my own embodied spiritual practices all speak jAcyjjsZ_LA_ZevRg27PUMwvMexfayFhLYxxOjvXAFanTfJDlyWKEwG7sohrWpUwith one another and continue to create a magickal vision of hope- in real time. Constantly 4q07zDpGygqrFmAgkvTQU4qD7k2msqP8LBCTI3UCeIPyDq_RGlu83VtqbckhXNrBT4X2M3wdYC1k.evolving, I hope to expand upon this project so that, like hope, it is always in-between: 51 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Vintage, 1980).transforming and shaping itself into what we need in times of suffering. 52 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 5.

40

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Christian and Secular Perspectives Regarding Student Suicides at the University of Toronto: Impact on Student Bodies

Alex Jebson MDiv Blythe and Brussels United Churches, Ontario, Canada [email protected]

Abstract:

Approaching the topic of student suicides from the perspective of the student body at the

University of Toronto, examples of secular and Christian examinations of the suffering and potential avenues of hope are offered. Suffering for the student body is the result of external trauma, compounded by the disruption of a cultural narrative for young students, a lack of institutional acknowledgement, and little spiritual resources to draw from, risking further isolation and feelings of helplessness. Hope can be found in discerning justice for the deceased, restoring a sense of agency to the student body through activism and institutional reform. From a Christian perspective, a collective narrative of lament, wisdom, and hope can help affected students, offered in liturgical formats. A sample liturgy of lament and hope is offered.

Keywords : suicide, student body, University of Toronto, liturgy, mental health

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, [God’s] mercies never come to an end.1

In January of 2019, a fellow chorister and I were in the music library at Trinity College at the University of Toronto (U of T), located right beside the chaplain’s office. We were sorting music when the chaplain came into the room in a flurry. She quickly explained that a student had died by suicide in the residence the next building over, and that she needed us to help

1 Lamentations 3:19-22

41

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article prepare a space for a student drop-in within the Divinity Common Room, and if we were able, to stay and help provide a “pastoral presence.” She was unsure how many students might come, but gathered that more than one person would be needed. We prepared the space, making a more private area with some candles, and hastily made signs to help direct students. We ended up staying several hours, until around one o’clock in the morning. There were never more than a couple of students present at a time, so the chaplain was able to address everyone who came in. My friend and I remained, trying to be non-anxious presences and to give our two cents when asked. We bore witness to people who were uncontrollably sobbing, those who were feeling guilty about having not reached out or gotten to know the student better. We discovered that the student was in one of the most high-stress programs on campus. We talked to people who were feeling angry but were unsure of where to direct this anger. There were many who felt completely lost and hopeless. Early in the evening, a concert being held in the chapel echoed down the hallway, and more than one student noted the disconnect in hearing life go on for some while their lives screeched to a standstill. This student’s death was one of three suicides that occurred on the U of T campus in 2019, with three others occurring in the previous year.2 These statistics are reported by the campus police at U of T, and only account for student deaths that occurred on campus. The university does not publish the identity or cause of death for the students unless given permission by the family, and is determined by the office of the Vice-Provost and affected faculties to let others in the university community know of a death occurring.3 Each one of these student deaths was a tragedy, and the experience of suffering by the student body was intense and compounded with each death. As many identify their time at university as a precipice, a stepping stone towards what is expected to be a long and fulfilling life, the impact that a death has at this stage can feel extra painful, that it was “far too soon.” While there are several aspects to such deaths/suicides that can be compassionately explored to find sources of suffering and hope, my focus will be on those grieving in the aftermath of the death, particularly that of the student body. I will be approaching this analysis of suffering and hope amongst the student body from a social sciences and a Christian perspective, with the understanding that the student body is a pluralistic entity; these areas of focus reflect my areas of interest as a United Church of Canada Ordained Minister, rather than trying to represent the entirety of the student body. For the secular approach, I will be primarily analyzing trauma symptoms and potential changes of relationships to institutions and to communities, with hope being found in expressed agency and justice meaning-discerning. From a Christian perspective, I will use the work of psychologist Kenneth Pargament to look at suffering through the lens of the seemingly meaninglessness event of a young person dying. Hope in a Christian perspective will be explored primarily through a liturgical lens, with an analysis of how healing liturgies might help Christians discern hope in times of community loss and trauma.

2 University of Toronto Campus Police Services (St. George Campus), Annual Report - 2019 (Toronto, University of Toronto, 2020), https://campuspolice.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2019-Annual-Report-to-the- UAB.pdf. 3 Andy Tageki, “The Breakdown: U of T’s Policy on Reporting Suicides,” The Varsity, March 31st, 2019, https://thevarsity.ca/2019/03/31/the-breakdown-u-of-ts-policy-on-reporting-suicides/.

42

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article Each suicide on this campus was felt deeply by the student population. The trauma was external, meaning that the disruption of attachment (in these cases, attachment as relationships with other students) resulted in the experience of trauma.4 Many of the emotions and thought processes that I bore witness to in the stories above are common in the wake of an unexpected death, particularly in the case of a young person dying. Shock is usually the first response to suicide, often coupled with denial as a way to limit the pain and a recognition of the inability to immediately make sense of such a dramatic change. Shame and guilt over not seeing the signs and being able to stop them are also common, as is trying to identify a particular incident in the past that would have caused it.5 In the U of T suicide cases, there was often a feeling of remorse from friends who did not notice anything amiss, and there was usually recognition of the extreme pressures that the student environment promoted, especially at a larger university such as U of T.6 Part of the suffering in cases of student suicide is the disruption of the cultural narrative of hope, particularly prominent in North America. It is a narrative of complete human agency, or progress, and of unlimited potential.7 In this framework of hope as optimism, a student death by suicide cuts short expectations of an optimistic future. Questions of the price of success arise, as do fears of one’s own limitations. For those with no alternative concepts of hope proffered, hopelessness and apathy will be likely responses. As an external form of trauma, the suicide of a classmate can also bring forth a decreased trust or hypervigilance about one’s environments and institutions, despair, hopelessness, and helplessness, as well as increased anxiety or vulnerability.8 This perceived lack of agency and growth of resentment from within the student body as a result of these suicides were most poignantly pointed at the university itself, a natural response in the suffering from suicide trauma, as there is a desperate seeking out for a party that could have and should have prevented it.9 For the majority of the incidents involving suicides, the university took hours, if not days, to acknowledge that there had been a death on campus. In almost all cases, the university failed to explicitly state that the students had died by suicide or the academic and social pressures from campus that had contributed to these suicides.10 In

4 Klinic Community Health Centre Trauma-Informed: The Trauma Toolkit – Second Edition (Winnipeg: Klinic Community Health Centre, 2013), 35. 5 Alan A. Cavaiola and Joseph E. Colford, Crisis Intervention: A Practical Guide (Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc., 2018), 255–256. 6 Shanifa Nasser, “'It doesn't feel human': Students angry U of T not acknowledging campus suicides,” CBC News, March 18th, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/university-toronto-suicide-campus-1.5061809. 7 Pamela McCarroll, The End of Hope: Narratives of Hope in the Face of Death and Trauma (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 9, 12. 8 Klinic, Trauma-Informed, 65-66. 9 Cavaiola and Colford, Crisis Intervention, 256. 10 The Varsity Editorial Board, “Enough is Enough, This is an Emergency: U of T Must Immediately Address Its Mental Health Crisis,” The Varsity, September 30th, 2019, https://thevarsity.ca/2019/09/29/enough-is-enough-this- is-an-emergency-u-of-t-must-immediately-address-its-mental-health-crisis/.

43

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article feeling abandoned by the institution and a lack of agency in having the narrative of strained student health, the student body was enraged and dismayed.11 Another risk associated with the suffering arising from these suicides is the risk of students becoming more isolated and developing suicidal thoughts. In many institutional approaches to dealing with trauma, the attempt is to focus on the individual, repressing or “curing” the symptoms; in reality, it is a social experience, and suffering is compounded when one feels alienated and isolated, outside of the expectations of the institution.12 In the case of the student body, each individual student deeply impacted may have delved into their vulnerability and feeling of helplessness by isolating themselves from others. This is particularly concerning in cases of suicide responses, as many emotional responses include experiences of depression and potentially suicidal thoughts.13 The response from students can also be negatively impacted by the university’s “Mandatory Mental Health Leave” for suicidal students when other forms of assistance have not been effective; the threat of perceived failure and the removal of oneself from potential relationships of support within the campus setting can discourage students from speaking out about their responses to student suicide.14 There are also spiritual dimensions of suffering that emerge from student suicide. One of the shared concerns between secular and Christian suffering is the withdrawal from community. One of the Christian understandings of healing is reintegration into community, an understanding of making space for pain and encouraging wholeness.15 To be isolated in times of pain goes against what the Judeo-Christian tradition understands as necessary for any sense of closure or healing. To be isolated from the community also limits the logistical supports needed during a time of mourning and suffering. In the case of university students who are active in the Christian faith, they may be cut off from their childhood communities of faith, and have yet to integrate into a Christian community on campus or in the city. One spiritual contribution to suffering that would be prevalent in these cases is what clinical psychologist Pargament would label as “small gods”; an understanding of God that is too narrow or shallow to be able to properly integrate the experience of shock and despair.16 A lack of knowledge of the rich support and tensions within the Christian tradition surrounding death and tragedy means that students often draw upon more surface understandings of their faith tradition. Quite often, in terms of tragedy and death at a time and in a method not compatible with most people’s conception of properness (i.e. “gone too soon”), many may

11 Rose Gulati, Arjun Kaul, and Gina Nicoll, “Calling U of T Out for Another Death at Bahen Centre,” The Varsity, March 26th, 2019, https://thevarsity.ca/2019/03/20/calling-u-of-t-out-for-another-death-at-bahen-centre/. 12 Ronald B. Miller, Facing Human Suffering: Psychology and Psychotherapy as Moral Engagement (Washington, American Psychological Association, 2004), 57. 13 Klinic, Trauma-Informed, 65. 14 Ilya Banares and Simrit Khabra, “U of T Approves Contentious University-Mandated Leave of Absence Policy,” The Varsity, June 27th, 2018, https://thevarsity.ca/2018/06/27/u-of-t-approves-contentious-university-mandated- leave-of-absence-policy/. 15 James F. White, Sacraments as God’s Self-Giving (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 95. 16 Kenneth Pargament, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy: Understanding and Addressing the Sacred (New York: The Guildford Press, 2007), 136.

44

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article draw from a general surety of God’s providence and will found in every situation. This could compound suffering rather than alleviate it.17 Generally, the experience of trauma from a colleague’s suicide can be expressed spiritually in three ways. Firstly, it can be in terms of divine struggle, where one doubts God’s existence or love for humanity. In the worries that one was not able to do enough to prevent the suicide, they also might discern that God is likewise judging them for their failure to prevent it. Secondly, the feelings of guilt and meaninglessness manifest in intrapsychic doubts about life and faith. Finally, there can be interpersonal struggles in terms of disagreements with friends and families regarding theological interpretations of the death, or feelings of abandonment from church communities who fail to adequately support those experiencing trauma and suffering.18 The expressions of trauma, both secular and spiritual, constitute suffering in themselves and can also compound when dealing with the suffering of others or numbing and isolating in response to the trauma. In discerning areas of potential hope for the student body, both secular and Christian responses heavily emphasize narrative and community. I will stress again that the pluralistic identities of the student body mean those general arguments for hope can only go so far. However, current actions by the student body and university administration do point towards some hopeful response and meaning-discerning. The initial response of the student body at large was that of shock and anger. Validating anger as a natural response to such trauma ensures that one’s feelings are not being suppressed, and that one is not being asked to move to other stages of grief before they are ready.19 Recognizing one’s anger as an individual or group is one of the first steps of re- establishing a sense of agency, and it is the first kernel of hope that can be found in post- traumatic growth. It also orients dialogue in the meaning-discerning of such tragedy, refusing to symptomatize the valid and natural expressions of pain; by refusing to suppress anger, it can also help avoid later revictimization.20 This validation of anger as a response frames the major experience of hope that the student body at U of T experienced in light of these events: the seeking of justice and institutional change to avoid these tragedies in the future. In the face of death, a community may not be able to – or want to – find meaning in the person’s death itself, but wish to adopt a mission or preventative program in light of it. Part of community care in the face of death is encouraging further education and engagement from the community.21 This is one of the greatest areas of hope within a communal setting. One can think of community as ground or soil, in that it is composite and it nurtures whatever grows out of it. Communities do not exist for the sake of existing, but to provide some response to a need.22 Authentic community is

17 McCarroll, The End of Hope, 77. 18 Pargament, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy, 213. 19 Cavaiola and Colford, Crisis Intervention, 258. 20 Miller, Facing Human Suffering, 41–42. 21 Margaret Kornfeld, Cultivating Wholeness: A Guide to Care and Counseling in Faith Communities (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998), 202–203. 22 Ibid., 17–19.

45

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article healing, which in times of tragedy can provide an anchor for individuals and also hope for future reintegration and wholeness. For the student body at U of T, this hope found in institutional change and justice came from protesting and forcing a more transparent and honest dialogue to occur at an administrative level. Multiple protests occurred in the wake of the deaths, aimed directly at those with whom they wanted to engage in dialogue.23 In light of the suicide that occurred in the fall of 2019, protest turned to advocacy in the form of UofThrive, with more explicit goals surrounding mental health in the university setting.24 From this initiative sprang a joint admin- student task force to reform mental health services in the university, the results of which were published at the beginning of last year.25 This evolution of justice initiatives came as a response to bearing witness to one person’s suffering and the suffering that the students felt in light of it. This is a common response on a community level and can help those suffering from trauma to not be completely disconnected or have a perception that there is no goodness to be found.26 This social justice initiative is also indicative of meaning-discerning occurring amongst the student body; the drive to have someone’s suffering not be “in vain” can help develop meaning and hope not just for the individuals involved, but for the communities which they inhabit, becoming a generative and regenerative hope.27 There are some cautions that should be mentioned here. As it is a diverse group being analyzed, it should be assumed that not everyone had hopeful feelings about expressing their agency. For some, cynicism was the prevalent feeling regarding student action, but it was considered “better than nothing.”28 It should also be stressed that while anger and desire to reform institutional practices so that tragedies are lessened in the future are hopeful actions, one should not completely vilify the university administration. In calls for a greater humanity from the institution, one should also offer humanity towards those within the administration as well. As all are heavily shaped by their environments, all are affected by the tragedy and by the systems that govern academic and societal expectations. In recognizing the inherent humanity and vulnerability of all parties involved, a more generous field for forgiveness can be created and relationships can be nurtured.29

23 Nasser, “It Doesn’t Feel Human.” 24 Muriel Draaisma and Ali Chiasson, “U of T Students Demand Change in Wake of Suicide on Campus,” CBC News, September 30th, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/students-university-of-toronto-uofthrive- uoftears-student-suicide-1.5303564. 25 Geoffrey Vendeville, “We Heard the Call for Change: Task Force on Student Mental Health Issues Report and Recommendations,” University of Toronto News, January 15th, 2020, https://www.utoronto.ca/news/we-heard- call-change-task-force-student-mental-health-issues-report-and-recommendations#Recommendations. 26 Pamela McCarroll, “Love Rages and Weeps: Suffering and Holy Possibility,” Concilium International Journal of Theology 3 (2016), 14–15. 27 McCarroll, The End of Hope, 75. 28 Jack O. Denton, “’This Happened so Close to Home: Students Call on Administration to Take Action on Mental Health,” The Varsity, March 26th, 2019, https://thevarsity.ca/2019/03/18/this-happened-so-close-to-home- students-call-on-administration-to-take-action-on-mental-health/. 29 McCarroll, “Love Rages and Weeps,” 21–22.

46

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article One potential community approach which has elements of both secular and spiritual hope-fostering is the concept of “collective narratives.” Like justice-oriented and agency- restoring concepts of hope, collective narrative practices address the social forces behind trauma, and do so in a fashion which encourages a conscious discussion concerning collective healing.30 This approach goes beyond the agency of reclaiming one’s voice, encouraging interaction with society and healing methods of communication. These narratives are intended to both recognize the trauma and the resiliency/hope found in response to such trauma.31 One particular aspect of collective narrative practice is the definitional ceremony, in which people have the opportunity to respond to the narratives told by others.32 Meaning-discerning is incorporated into such a ceremony and the time of reflections afterwards. The applicability of collective narrative practices promoted by the likes of Dr. David Denborough, contributor to the Dulwich Centre and educator on narrative therapy and community work, also translates into the religious realm. The concept of a collective narrative is not strange to most Christians. As people who proclaim to be part of one ecclesial and spiritual Body of Christ, we are baptized or “grafted” into a narrative that has been going on for thousands of years in human time, and infinitely in God’s time. We can see ourselves as part of Creation and part of a spiritual family, responding to the testimonies of others in compassionate and transformed ways. One of the primary facets of the faith, Scripture, can be perceived as a collective narrative document, with many voices telling and retelling the trials and skills that are developed through God. Most Scripture is effectively responding to trauma in some way, either personal, systemic, or communal. Much of the healing that occurs within this narrative is done through community, and the interweaving of our voices with the great I Am and the cloud of witnesses that go before, beside, and beyond us. Further Christian responses of hope can be found in the seeking of justice and in accepting that humanity cannot understand the entire universe or its reasoning. However, the final source of hope I wish to explore from a Christian perspective is liturgy, particularly in the form of healing liturgies, which often include acts of anointing and community solidarity. Healing liturgies are inherently communal; the biblical precedent from which these liturgies evolved, names elders as participants. The varied ways in which healing and wholeness can occur include the healing that comes from the affirmation of one’s continued inclusion in a faith body and the support that comes from that body in times of trouble.33 Suffering is not avoided; in fact, sometimes experiencing the suffering is integral to the healing process. Healing brings the person through their pain into a state of renewed relationship and identity with Godself, even when one’s new health state isn’t the same as it was before.34 While particular liturgies and services may be crafted in the wake of a suicide, the general trend in liturgical scholarship is that they should not be segregated from congregational life, but be an integral part. One should also use all congregational tools available to educate

30 David Denborough, Collective Narrative Practice: Responding to Individuals, Groups, and Communities who Have Experienced Trauma (Adelaide, South Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications, 2008), 23, 43. 31 Ibid., 41–42. 32 Ibid., 56. 33 White, Sacraments as God’s Self-Giving, 95. 34 Abigail Rian Evans, Healing Liturgies for the Seasons of Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 1–2.

47

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article parishioners about the role of healing and liturgy in Christian life.35 Many elements of such liturgies can provide hope in terms of a place where questions and laments can be raised, and an alternative version of hope to a progress-culture narrative can be expressed. In the silences where no words are enough, in the chance for communal words where one can find their voice in the solidarity of others, in the broken bread providing wholeness and oil providing comfort and community; all of these are rich in symbolism and communal response that may not alleviate all suffering, but can give food for thought in later times of meaning-discerning. The key to these liturgies providing hope is that they involve several narratives, including one’s own and Christ’s.36 These and similar types of liturgies ensure that the one experiencing suffering as a result of trauma can still see themselves as in relationship with God, and provide them with resources within the faith tradition to challenge any “small gods” interpretations that may not be currently addressing their pain and questions. Affirming righteousness in questioning and complaining to God, while suggesting a way that hope and praise might be “lived into” one day. There should not be a denial of either pain or perceived meaninglessness of a life lost, but perhaps the finding of ways in which the memories and uniqueness of the person gone (the way in which God fashioned them) can be celebrated in community settings.37 At the end of this article is an example of a liturgy embracing grief and offering suggestions of hope. It is a “Longest Night Service” that I wrote for my previous church appointment in the winter of 2019. It emphasizes the appropriateness of grief and expressing it at Christmastime, the witness to the narratives of pain and hope found in the Christian tradition, and the ability to express one’s pain and hope symbolically and explicitly. My hope is to offer this as just one example of the liturgical breadth in the Christian tradition to address, express, and help navigate pain and loss. The complexity of suicides and their impacts on those communities in which they occur means that this analysis can only present a small picture of suffering and a few resources of hope and resiliency. The importance of community, the ability to express one’s suffering, and the ability to discern meaning through institutional reform and institutional resources are key issues relating to student suicides that should be explored further. This will undoubtedly be a long process, and hopefully the reforms suggested by the task force will cultivate a healthier mental and spiritual environment within the university community. Thanks be to the God who suffers and heals with us.

APPENDIX ONE: SUFFERING AND HOPE LITURGY

Epsom-Utica United Church Longest Night Service

Welcome and Introduction

35 Ibid., 2–3. 36 Armand Leon van Ommen, Suffering in Worship: Anglican Liturgy in Relation to Stories of Suffering People (New York: Routledge, 2017), 123–125. 37 McCarroll, The End of Hope, 70-71.

48

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 3 A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5 Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isa 40:1, 3-5)

The Lord be with you. (And also with you). Good evening, everyone, and welcome to this Longest Night service of lament, grief, and hope. We recognize that it may have been difficult to summon the strength or vulnerability to be in a community of faith today. Know that everyone’s presence is welcome and cherished. Know that, despite the flashing lights and joyous choruses of Christmas, we are all broken, and have gone through many a mournful moment. Yet in this brokenness, in this grief, we hold and bear up one another more wholly as a community. Through this service, we pray that in this space, in the embrace of the God who knows and bears our pain as fully as we do ourselves, that lament is not just acceptable, but can be embraced in the bleakest moments of our lives. Lament is an integral component in the tradition of our ancestors in Scripture, and in the expressions and practices of our contemporary Christian siblings. This does not mean that we actively seek pain or despair. What lament offers is a way to express our pain, our insecurities, our questions of God; and finally coming to lean on Christ to discover how we might move through grief into a place of comfort, renewed strength, or railing against the bleak night. You will find in this service a mixture of familiar and anchoring words and tunes that have been a part of our tradition of grief here for generations. You may also hear words that are new, or have not been heard in a long time. And beyond worship today, you may feel moved to find ways in which other cultures and generations of God’s peoples have found relief and strength in God. Grief and hope are voiced in numerous ways. Express yourself however you feel moved or need to respond. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, we find the God revealed through Christ Incarnate wailing those same notes, those cries and prayers and moans. While we explore and dwell in the many ways that our faith conditions us to respond, please know that each of your needs and relationships with God is unique; each response to cry and comfort is known best by you and the God that fashioned and holds you. There is no judgement or critique here. Participate or engage as you are able and feel moved to. (pause) And now to help bring ourselves into community and witness in the name of God and the love God gives in times of trouble, we take a moment of silent prayer (silence for approx. one minute).

49

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article Call to Worship

One: We come seeking our God who hears all cries, who knows all pains. Many: O come, O come, Emmanuel, sharer of pain. One: We come seeking our God who blesses those who mourn, who breaks the snares. Many: O come, O come, Emmanuel, holder of community. One: We come seeking lighter yokes, burdens eased, tears wiped away. Many: O come, O come, Emmanuel, bringer of hope. All: Let us worship and share our pain and hope with God-with-us, Emmanuel.

Opening Prayer

All: Love-giving and pain-bearing God, We ask that you make Your compassion and concern known this evening. Grant us the strength, hope, and peace that you bestowed upon our ancestors. Keep our voices strong to sing to you our pain and praises, our shoulders sturdy for others to lean upon, and our eyes looking for the hope you inspire. In the name of Jesus Christ: the babe, the wounded, the source of all hope, Amen.

Hymn: VU 436 – Abide with Me

Scripture: Job 3:1-10

After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. 2 Job said: 3 “Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A child is conceived.’ 4 Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, or light shine on it. 5 Let gloom and deep darkness claim it. Let clouds settle upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. 6 That night—let thick darkness seize it! let it not rejoice among the days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months. 7 Yes, let that night be barren; let no joyful cry be heard in it. 8 Let those curse it who curse the Sea, those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan. 9 Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none; may it not see the eyelids of the morning—

50

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article 10 because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, and hide trouble from my eyes.

Prayer of the People and the Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray. Compassionate God, you have heard our cries, our curses; saw the tears run down our cheeks. Yet we know Your presence here. It appears to us at times as though Your creation is devoid of the divine. Words fail us in times of global uncertainty, personal strife, and senseless horror. Yet with what words we can muster, we commit them to prayer for those around the world that are of great concern to You, Lord, and ourselves. Lord, in your mercy… hear our prayer.

Loving God, we pray for those whose presence we dearly miss this Christmastime. For those whose names are remembered in our hearts, help us cherish and celebrate the memories through the pain. Where we still hear their voices, let them inspire our voices to sing of hope and love. Lord, in Your mercy… hear our prayer.

God of patience and assurance, we pray for the losses that have been experienced this year. The loss of relationship, the loss of stability, the shaking of our foundations. Keep us steady during rocky times, knowing that You are the chief cornerstone and the calmer of storms. As you came to us in times vulnerable and unstable, so help us feel your presence in these unstable times. Lord, in Your mercy… hear our prayer.

Comforting God, we remember the emotions that we and so many others feel this season: grief, disbelief, anger, mournfulness. Lord, hold these valid emotions, and in Your time, through the care of Your peoples, help these emotions find loving expressions. Help us also feel gratitude and support through the good times and bad. Lord, in Your mercy… hear our prayer.

We continue our prayers in the words so lovingly taught by Your Risen Son, who exemplified relationship with you, loving God, as a mother loves her child, Our Father, who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thy name…

Scripture: John 11:1-3, 17-21, 33-35

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. 3 So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.”

17 When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. 18 Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, 19 and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. 21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

51

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article

31 The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 32 When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34 He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus wept.

Grief and Comfort with Christ

Jesus, God-with-us, came into a particular time and space. He was born in a place of struggle and promise more than two thousand years ago, which we will celebrate in a week’s time. And as God being borne with us offers that hope, we must remember that Christ lived a life experiencing pain and suffering, just as we do. Jesus’ life is often pigeonholed in our songs and words as “meek, gentle, mild”, never experiencing grief or woe. But this denies the life that Jesus lived, and the comfort and embrace that Christ gives us by experiencing such things with us here and now. Jesus was a fussy baby at times, crying and causing His parents to lack sleep. Jesus knew the confusion and grief of a life in upheaval as his family fed to Egypt as refugees. Jesus sang the psalms of lament, which we have with us to this day. When friends passed away, Jesus wept. Jesus grew up in a context and culture based around the experience of lament, comfort, and struggling in relationship with God and the world around them. Take comfort in this, that God dwells in lament and grief with us, and shows us comfort and hope through it. We do not move easily or freely out of grief. We are weighed down by stones in the pit of our stomachs, hurts and anxieties that slow us down. We are slowed by the stones strewn about the path to healing, causing new pains on the journey. We see the stones hurled at outcasts, the stones marking the places where loved ones lie. The stone rolled in front of the rock-hewn tomb, seeming to snuff out all hope. But we know that even if we can’t find the hope or joy now, we will find it soon, with God’s wondrous works. But for now, it takes a tangible reminder that the Spirit is at work, drawing us to the Christ that bears pain for and with us, and the God of creation and nurturing that mourns and cries our tears. Hear again Isaiah’s words, awaiting Jesus: Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

3 A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5 Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,

52

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isa 40:1, 3-5)

I invite you now to acknowledge and dwell amongst these stones in the presence of the Lord of life, all aspects of life, including grief. In a moment, I invite you to come forward as you feel called or moved to do so, take a stone from the bowl, a stone that represents the reasons that brought you here this evening. You can take many stones, if you wish. We must also remember those who are not able to be here in person this evening. Place your stones in the manger, for we know that from here springs a companion in pain, and a light in the bleakness. Bear this load with Christ, and with all those gathered here. Dwell, remember, share, move slowly into and from this place.

(people put stones into the manger, perhaps while Alex sings MV 74 to Kingsfold. Put the rest of the stones in to represent the pain felt by others who are not able to be here this day).

Scripture John 16: 16-24

“A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.” 17 Then some of his disciples said to one another, “What does he mean by saying to us, ‘A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’; and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?” 18 They said, “What does he mean by this ‘a little while’? We do not know what he is talking about.” 19 Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Are you discussing among yourselves what I meant when I said, ‘A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’? 20 Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. 21 When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. 22 So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. 23 On that day you will ask nothing of me.[c]Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.[d] 24 Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.

Responsive Prayer: (Revelation 21:1-6)

One: From the promise and pain that comes from a new birth, comes the promise of a new heaven and earth, found through death and life beyond death. Many: A new city, a renewed way of living, we pray for, O God. One: Where God’s home is amongst all Creation, all mortal things, Many: Where God will dwell with us. One: Where all will be known as God’s beloved people, Many: Where tears are wiped away, we pray for, O God. One: Where death will be no more,

53

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Research Article Many: Nor sorrow, nor crying. One: Neither shall there be any more pain. All: For all these things we have gone through with You, O God, and we pray that one day we know true peace in you. And in this time, we pray for Your presence and guidance. In the name of Jesus Christ, through whom all things are made new, Amen.

Hymn: VU 182 – Stay With Us

Benediction

Do not be afraid to lament. Do not assume that your grief is not worth sharing. Your pain is known best by you and the God that bears it with you, but this community here is eager to sustain and support you however is deemed most needed. And when you are ready to leave the dwelling place of lament and trod the path of healing, seek out others who are loaded down or blocked by stones of grief. Dwell with them a while, and then help them back on the path. A path walked by us and by God, walking to Bethlehem in pain and hope, and walking into our lives promising rejoicing hearts and pain that turns into joy. As Christmas approaches, may we listen to the angel who proclaims, “Fear Not and Good News,” a holy family born of struggle and joy, and a God who embraces us completely. Peace be with you all. Amen.

Author’s note: I originally wrote this article in the Spring of 2020, just as we were starting to experience the lockdowns and restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, I have also graduated from my MDiv program at Emmanuel and am in student ministry in a congregational setting. And yet, even with the change in location, institutions, and life structure, I find that the trauma and grief that many are experiencing as a result of this pandemic are akin to the responses to student suicide: a disruption to the cultural narrative of progress, increased isolation, and a feeling of a lack of agency. And while the full ramifications of the pandemic on school and congregational life are not yet fully realized, I can see kernels of hope- discerning. There is the seeking of justice and community in intentionally caring for the most vulnerable in these times. There has (hopefully) been the time and supports in place for people to discern what “small gods” they had been relying on, and where they might deepen things. And in the many delays and restrictions around funerals and group mourning, I can see liturgies of lament and healing having an important role in the months and years ahead. May we know God’s comfort and the presence of others in the times to come.

54 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no.1, Spring 2021 Research Article

Embodied Spirituality: Maternal Reflections on the Intellectualization of Worship and the Embodied Leadership of People with Intellectual Disabilities

Laura MacGregor PhD Martin Luther University College [email protected]

Abstract: The intellectualization of worship in many mainstream churches denies embodiment as a source of spiritual wisdom, and as a result excludes the meaningful participation and leadership of people with intellectual disabilities. Drawing on personal experience as the mother of a child with profound intellectual disabilities, this paper will explore how an intellectual lens of faith, as demonstrated by theologians such as Henri Nouwen and Hans Reinders, has colonized the embodied spiritual lives of people with intellectual disabilities. A refusal to explore embodiment as the foundation of a Divine relationship has meant that the spiritual lives of people with intellectual disabilities are often viewed as passive or childish. Concluding thoughts will include a brief discussion considering how the embodied leadership of people with intellectual disabilities might serve to enrich the spiritual experiences of all bodies.

Keywords: embodiment, worship, intellectual disability, ableism

Introduction

It usually happened about fifteen minutes into a worship service. The organ music had ended, and the congregation had settled into the pews to recite prayers, read the Bible, and listen to the sermon. As if on cue my son, Matthew, began to get antsy. The barrage of words and ideas failed to engage his spiritual life. As a result, Matthew routinely made his displeasure about being excluded known. Eventually, I would pack up our belongings and quietly make our way out of the sanctuary. Over time Mathew and I simply stopped attending worship services and engaged our spiritual life in other ways. My son, Matthew, lived with profound physical and intellectual disabilities until his death at the age of twenty-one. Sadly, most of the world saw my son as a collection of deficits rather than focusing on his many gifts and abilities. In particular, Matthew was non-verbal. His lack of speech combined with an intellectual disability often supported the false assumption that Matthew could have only a passive spiritual life.1 Yet those who were attentive to my son’s unique form of communication knew that Matthew enjoyed a rich and active Divine relationship. For Matthew, the Sacred was not

1 Hans S. Reinders, Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 377f.

55

an elusive idea but an embodied experience. Matthew encountered the Spirit through music, nature, and bubbles floating through the air. The seemingly mundane became transcendent. Matthew encountered God with the sensation of a breeze wafting across his face, or when he embraced his own liturgical dance. Matthew’s encounter with the Divine was a full-body experience. Touch, sounds, smells, tastes, and people all formed the foundation of his understanding of God. And for those who were attentive to his teaching, he offered meaningful leadership in the area of embodied spirituality and worship. Yet the worship practices of many mainstream churches privilege the spiritual lives of people who worship God with words and ideas, usually at the expense of embodiment.2 My son’s preference to encounter God via his body meant that worship practices usually excluded him, and that his spiritual life was viewed as passive, childish, and unsophisticated. Drawing on my experiences as Matthew’s mother, this paper will explore how our intellectualization of faith at the expense of the body prohibits the full and meaningful participation of people with intellectual disabilities. This paper will conclude with a brief discussion of how the embodied leadership of people with intellectual disabilities might serve to enrich the spiritual experiences of all bodies.3

Cogito Ergo Sum: I Think, Therefore I Am

In 1637 Descartes published his Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings and influenced how the body would be understood for centuries. In his book, Descartes literally redrew the boundaries of the body imposing a distinct separation between the body and mind.4 For Descartes, the body was a mechanistic vessel of bone and muscle that contained and transported the vastly superior mind.5 The mind was an indivisible and separate entity capable of self-awareness, intellectual ability, and the proper understanding of God.6 For Descartes the mind, rather than the body, defined a “thinking thing” or person.7 Western philosophy has been dominated by Cartesian dualism ever since.8 Correspondingly many of our social institutions, including many mainstream churches, prioritize the intellect and in doing so limit the full flourishing of people with intellectual disabilities.9

2 Erik Carter, Including People with Disabilities in Faith Communities: A Guide for Service Providers, Families, and Congregations (Baltimore: Paul H Brookes, 2007), 10–13. 3 I am indebted to (name removed for blinded review) for her generous feedback during the writing of this paper. 4 Rene Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), 66f. 5 Ibid., 66. 6 Ibid., 38. 7 Ibid., 31. 8 Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 4. 9 Keith Dow, “Toward Accessible Faith & Flourishing: Reconsidering Greek Intellectualism in Western Christian”, Theology, Journal of Disability & Religion, (Feb, 2021): 2. DOI: 10.1080/23312521.2021.1881023

56

While mainstream churches embrace practices that emphasize the intellectualization of worship, Margaret Miles reminded us in Christian Baptism in the Fourth Century: The Conversion of the Body that many early Christian communities embraced embodied practices as the foundation of spiritual change.10 For example (adult) baptism in some early Christian communities was not an expression of a specific belief, but rather the first step of a spiritual transformation.11 Unlike many contemporary Christian communities that expect comprehension of a spiritual practice as a prerequisite for participation (i.e.: communion), “the literature of Christian devotion…reveals that most historical people thought it obvious that changed ideas follow, rather than precede, changed behavior.”12 In other words embodied practices came first, conversion and belief followed. Historically the body and embodied experiences, not the intellect, were an important source of spiritual meaning and change.13 In contrast to our early Christian ancestors, contemporary Christian worship practices have strayed widely from embodiment as a foundation for faith. For instance, the order of worship service in my faith tradition emphasizes reading Scripture, reciting prayers, and meditating on a sermon. For an hour each week the congregation listens to the ideas of the leaders of our faith community. Embodiment enters worship only periodically when we sing songs, greet a neighbour, and to a lesser extent baptize a baby, or take communion. As an unspoken rule, during worship we do not encounter God through dance, art, or sensory play. Children’s programs engage the senses in sand or water play, skits, art, and action-oriented music, but only rarely do adults participate in these activities. For adults, worship is a serious intellectual activity. The preference to worship God with our minds rather than holistically often prohibits the participation and leadership of people with intellectual disabilities. Research indicates that for many people with intellectual disabilities, as well as their families, churches continue to be an exclusive community.14 While there are many reasons for this, the hyper-intellectual focus of worship at the expense of embodied spirituality plays a significant role. Even more troubling is the fact that at times the intellectualization of worship has been the rationale for explicitly excluding people with intellectual disabilities from meaningful spiritual rituals.15 For example, parents of children with intellectual disabilities have noted that their faith communities have excluded their intellectually disabled children from rituals such as communion and

10 Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1989), 24. 11 Ibid., 31. 12 Ibid., 24. 13 Ibid., 25. 14 Erik Carter, Including People with Disabilities, 6. 15 S. Speraw, “Spiritual experiences of parents and caregivers who have children with disabilities or special needs,” Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 27 (2006), 213–230.

57

confirmation because their child, in the church’s view, failed to comprehend the meaning of the ritual.16 In recent years a number of scholars have begun to critically examine how Christian theology intersects with disability, and in particular intellectual disabilities. For example, Molly Haslan in A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disabilities observed that most theorizing of disability and theology emphasized physical disability with little attention offered to people with intellectual disabilities.17 Even those authors that considered people with intellectual disabilities emphasized cognitive agency.18 Tom Reynolds in his book Vulnerable Communion helpfully explored an inclusive imago Dei through the lens of relationship and vulnerability,19 however as noted by Haslan he assumed an intellectual capacity to differentiate the self from the wider world, something my son could not have done.20 Similarly, numerous theologians have de- emphasized intellect and agency by considering interdependence and relationship with God21 and within communities.22 Unfortunately, such authors tend to view a person with an intellectual disability as a passive recipient of God’s love, rather than an active participant in the Divine relationship.23 Many mainstream faith communities are beginning to notice the absence of people with intellectual disabilities in their sanctuaries. Unfortunately, too often strategies for inclusion assume a token veneer of welcome without critically examining the barriers and theologies beneath the surface that prevent the meaningful participation and contributions of people with intellectual disabilities.24 Churches often dehumanize people with intellectual disabilities by using them as inspirational tools to sustain the spirituality of others,25 maintaining them as objects of charity by engaging in ministry to rather than with,26 or infantilizing their gifts of embodied spirituality as childish. For many faith communities the practice of “inclusion” maintains an us/them divide that perpetuates existing power structures, practices, and beliefs that isolate people with intellectual disabilities rather than creating communities of belonging that value diverse spiritual lives. Disability theologians are beginning to consider the church’s

16 Ibid., 225. 17 Molly Haslan, A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability: Human Being as Mutuality and Response (New York, NY: Fordham University, 2012), 2. 18 Ibid., 2–9. 19 Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008), 180–188. 20 Haslan, A Constructive Theology, 2–4. 21 Reinders, Receiving the Gift of Friendship, 377. See also, Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimaging Disability in Late Modernity (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2007), 279, and Henri Nouwen, Adam: God’s Beloved (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997) 50–56. 22 Jean Vanier, Becoming Human (Toronto, ON: Anansi, 1998), 35–68. 23 Reindeers, Receiving the Gift of Friendship, 377. 24 Erin Raffety, “The God of Difference: Disability, Youth Ministry, and the Difference Anthropology Makes.” Journal of Disability & Religion 22, no. 4 (October 2, 2018), 378. 25 Vanier, Becoming Human, 37. 26Carter, Including People with Disabilities, 11.

58

hyper-intellectual culture and its corresponding exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities27 but meaningful inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities in faith communities continues to be rare.28

All are Welcome?

While many churches strive to be inclusive, numerous barriers exist that prevent the full and meaningful participation and leadership of people with disabilities. A recent study indicated that many religious leaders believe they lack the necessary training to include children with disabilities in the life of their church.29 Erik Carter in his book Including People with Disabilities in Faith Communities: A Guide for Service Providers, Families, and Congregations noted physical, attitudinal, communication, programmatic, and liturgical barriers that often explicitly and implicitly exclude people with disabilities in faith communities.30 Church buildings, while often historic and beautiful, are frequently physically inaccessible.31 Many financially strapped congregations view the cost of eliminating physical barriers as too costly. Churches may be unwilling to direct scarce resources to improve accessibility, often citing that people with disabilities do not attend their church. That lack of access might contribute to the absence of people with physical disabilities is conveniently overlooked. Poor physical accessibility and an unwillingness to explore strategies to improve access to an aging building led our family to leave a church we had attended for years. Even more troubling is the fact that, for many congregations, conversations about welcoming people with disabilities rarely stray further than discussions of physical access.32 Many churches consider the presence of ramps, large print bulletins, elevators, and accessible bathrooms, as sufficient reason to post a blue wheelchair symbol on their church sign and declare that all are welcome. Absent to their discernment about disability and welcome is a robust examination of their attitudes, theology, and rituals.33 While there is no doubt that a barrier-free environment is crucial, physical barriers are often only one reason people with disabilities feel excluded by church congregations.

27 For examples see: Erin Raffety. “From Depression and Decline to Repentance and Transformation: Receiving Disabled Leadership and Its Gifts for the Church,” Theology Today 77, no. 2 (July 2020): 117. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040573620924558; Erin Raffety, “From Inclusion to Leadership: Disabled ‘Misfitting’ in Congregational Ministry.” Theology Today 77, no. 2 (July 2020): 198–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040573620920698, and John Swinton, “Disability, Vocation, and Prophetic Witness.” Theology Today 77, no. 2 (July 2020): 186–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040573620920667. 28 Carter, Including People with Disabilities, 6f. 29 Jared Stewart-Ginsburg et al, “Sanctuaries, ‘Special Needs,’ and Service: Religious Leader Perceptions on Including Children with Disability.” Journal of Disability & Religion 24, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 413–30. doi:10.1080/23312521.2020.1776188. 30 Carter, Including People with Disabilities, 10–14. 31 Ibid., 20. 32 Ibid., 9. 33 Ibid., 9.

59

Ableist theologies that celebrate blind people who suddenly see,34 paralyzed people who walk because of sufficient faith35 or communities that view people with disabilities as props for others’ spiritual growth, can be deeply alienating. Such attitudes were particularly hurtful and contributed to our withdrawal from organized religion. However, for my son, one of the greatest barriers to his full participation in a faith community was the assumption that cognitive capacity was a prerequisite for an active faith. Intellectual ableism is discrimination that marginalizes people with intellectual deficits by prioritizing cognitive capacity and ignoring embodied wisdom.36 Because of our society’s hyper-intellectual culture, intellectual ableism can be prolific. And unlike obvious examples of exclusion for people with physical disabilities such as the absence of a ramp or elevator, intellectually ableist practices are often invisible to those who do not spend time with people with intellectual disabilities. Even within disability rights discourse people with intellectual disabilities are located on the margins. People with intellectual impairments are often paradoxically too disabled to be included in disability rights discussions that value self-determination and expression, while their advocates are correspondingly excluded for being too able-bodied.37 As a result, people with intellectual disabilities remain some of the most isolated people in our communities, including church communities.38

Embodied Knowledge

In a world where words and ideas are ubiquitous, it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, for many of us to set aside our intellect and consider embodiment as a source of wisdom. One of the most illustrative examples of carnal knowledge that I have read was a story told by Karen Armstrong in her book Through the Narrow Gate. Armstrong described her struggles adapting to life as a novitiate in a strict, pre-Vatican II convent. Cartesian dualism was a foundational belief of the order. The body, with its fickle passions, was to be completely subjugated by the mind. For example, the nuns were required to engage in trials such as eating food they disliked even if it made them ill,39 and practice self-flagellation.40 One day during a silent retreat, “a long disembodied sound broke into the waiting stillness, agonized, fighting for breath, on and on with a will of its own.”41 Armstrong was surprised to discover that she was the source of the

34 Kathy Black, A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), 58. 35 Ibid., 111. 36 Stacy Clifford Simplican, The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 2015), 8–11. 37 Ibid., 94. See also, Anita Tarzian, “Disability and Slippery Slopes.” Hastings Centre Report 37, no. 5 (September, 2007). 38 Carter, Including People with Disabilities, 6. 39 Karen Armstrong, Through the Narrow Gate: A Former Nun Reveals the Intimate Details of her Life Within the Enclosed World of an Austere Religious Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 80. 40 Ibid., 173. 41Ibid., 242, emphasis added.

60

disruption. During a protracted period of silence, she collapsed. Despite years of believing her body was subservient to her mind, her body emphatically asserted control and stated she was not called to be a nun. I often return to this story when considering how our embodiment informs our experiences and worship. While philosophers and in particular phenomenologists have long studied the acquisition of knowledge and the construction of meaning, it was Merleau-Ponty who argued that it was impossible to consider the acquisition of knowledge without considering embodiment as a conduit.42 More recently, emerging work in carnal hermeneutics has argued for a return to embodiment “as text”;43 the body is an essential contributor to the discovery of meaning, and without the inclusion of embodiment any discussion of knowledge is incomplete.44 Similarly, the work of postmodern feminists in the field of disability studies problematizes the longstanding boundaries of Cartesian dualism by emphasizing bodies that are relational, porous, leaky, and even cyborg. For example, bodies may have extensions such as wheelchairs, glasses, prostheses, or even other bodies, such as service animals and caregivers.45 Despite this emerging (re)turn to the body, worship practices continue to emphasize spiritual connection as an intellectual experience.

Colonizing Embodied Spirituality

Church communities and theologians have frequently romanticized the spiritual experiences of people with intellectual disabilities. Because our friends with intellectual disabilities may struggle to describe their spiritual lives in ways valued by their broader community, people with more dominant voices may colonize their stories. The colonization of a story is when one with greater power claims the story of someone who is vulnerable.46 In the case of people with intellectual disabilities, their stories have often been used as fodder for another’s spiritual growth. For example, Henri Nouwen in Adam: God’s Beloved, described his spiritual transformation as a result of caring for Adam, a non-verbal adult who lived with physical and intellectual disabilities.47 For fourteen months Nouwen was responsible for Adam’s morning care. Initially, Nouwen was overwhelmed, at times even annoyed, by his caregiving responsibilities.48 Yet over

42 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,C. Smith, trans. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 81. 43 Richard Kearey and Brian Treanor, “Introduction: Carnal Hermeneutics from Head to Foot,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 2. 44 Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 17. 45 For example see Margrit Shildrik, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997). 46 Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, & Ethics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1995), 10–12. 47 Nouwen, Adam, 45. 48 Ibid., 42–45.

61

time Nouwen grew to value his morning responsibilities. Nouwen stated, “the one or two hours a day with Adam…became my quiet hours, the most reflective and intimate time of the day.”49 Eventually Nouwen viewed Adam as his spiritual mentor and guide, particularly with respect to spiritual direction in the areas of vulnerability, relationships, and dependence on God.50 Nouwen’s use of Adam’s story for his own spiritual transformation is only one example of his colonization of Adam's spiritual narrative. Equally concerning was Nouwen’s intellectual colonization of Adam’s embodied spiritual life. Rather than considering Adam’s active relationship with God through the lens of Adam’s embodiment, Nouwen imposed his own intellectual faith upon Adam’s story. During the hours that Nouwen provided care he wondered, “(c)ould Adam pray? Did he know who God is and what the name of Jesus means? Did he understand the mystery of God among us?”51 Despite Nouwen’s assertion that Adam was his spiritual mentor and guide, he failed to embrace Adam’s leadership. Nouwen did not consider Adam’s embodied spiritual life and how Adam’s relationship with God would exist beyond the humanly imposed boundaries of an intellectual faith. Nouwen further wondered if Adam could lead him “into prayer.”52 Nouwen believed God was asking him, “Can you believe that I am in deep communion with Adam and that his life is a prayer? Can you let Adam be a living prayer at your table?”53 This particular description of Nouwen’s understanding of Adam’s spiritual life is illuminating. Note that Nouwen believed God wanted Adam to lead him into, not in, prayer. This statement suggested that Nouwen did not believe Adam had an independent prayer life. Rather, Adam was a conduit for Nouwen’s prayers. Further, Nouwen believed that Adam’s life was a prayer and that God was in communion with Adam. But again, note that Nouwen did not consider Adam capable of prayer, or that Adam was in communion with God. Through Nouwen’s exclusively intellectual lens, Adam remained a passive participant in his relationship with God. Nouwen failed to consider Adam’s embodiment as the source of a meaningful spiritual life and active relationship with God. Hans Reinders in his book Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics, drawing on Nouwen’s work, continued with the suggestion that people with profound intellectual disabilities lacked an active faith. Reinders argued “a profoundly disabled person …has no relationship with God in the sense of a human act on her part.”54 Reinders suggested that people who live with profound intellectual disability cannot actively return gifts of friendship and therefore passively receive the gift friendship, both human and Divine.55 Reinders noted that the inability of people with profound intellectual disabilities to actively return the

49 Ibid, 48. 50 Ibid., 48. 51 Ibid., 55, emphasis added 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Reinders, Receiving the Gift of Friendship, 377. 55 Ibid., 377f.

62

(intellectual) gift of friendship is a “sad fact” of their life. God is with them, but people like my son, Matthew, or Adam, according to Reinders, lack cognitive awareness of a Divine relationship and therefore cannot actively participate. Unfortunately Reinders, like Nouwen, considered the spiritual lives of people with profound intellectual disabilities from the perspective of his own intellectual faith. Neither theologian considered that a rich and active Divine relationship could live and thrive beyond words and ideas. The hyper-intellectual focus of Nouwen and Reinders is unsurprising. For those of us who engage both the world and faith through the dominant lens of words and ideas, it is very difficult to imagine experiences and relationships that are wholly embodied. As the mother of a child who lived with disabilities similar to Adam’s for twenty-one years, and who spent considerable time “listening” to my son’s leadership, I struggled with theologians’ assumptions that people with intellectual disabilities lacked an active and meaningful spiritual life. Daily life with my son told me otherwise. I chafed at the suggestion that my son was primarily a passive recipient of God’s love. I was angered by the hubris of theologians who interpreted the spiritual lives of people with intellectual disabilities through the lens of a faith that prioritized the mind at the expense of the body. I not only knew that Matthew had an active and meaningful relationship with the Divine, but that his spiritual leadership had the power to enrich our collective, holistic spiritual journeys if we would only follow his lead. Matthew’s sense of God was an embodied, sensory feast. He did not seek to define God, nor did he strive to understand the “right” parameters of faith. He did not need to search for an elusive God, nor did he struggle with reconciling his faith with outside influences and agendas. For Matthew, God was not an idea to grasp, but a wholly encompassing relationship in which he engaged with abandon. As someone whose “head” often complicated her faith, I envied my son’s ability to revel in the constant presence of the Divine. For Matthew, the Sacred was everywhere, and in everything. Nature, music, people, bubbles wafting through the air, the laser show at every OHL hockey game, for Matthew all of these were holy moments. God was ubiquitous. I often wished I could set aside a lifetime of theological “shoulds” and follow my son’s spiritual lead. Christian communities do a disservice to our friends with intellectual disabilities, not to mention ourselves, when we ignore embodiment as a deep source of spiritual wisdom.

Concluding Thoughts: Embodied Spiritual Leadership

As Louise Gosbell reminded us in her reflection exploring embodied worship and the inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities, “the Christian faith is by its very nature, embodied.”56 At the very heart of the Gospel story is the Divine taking on human form.57 God becomes flesh in Jesus, and yet we have set aside the embodiment

56 Louise Gosbell, “Embodied Worship: Reflecting on the Inclusion of People with Disabilities in Church Communities,” Practical Theology 12 no. 3 (2019): 251. 57 Ibid.

63

in our mainstream worship. Gosbell continued by arguing that embodied and sensory religious practices should not be confined to children’s worship, but “reflect the fullness of our bodily experiences of life as believers.”58 And if the Word becoming flesh is central to our faith, then it follows that embodiment must play a role in our faith and in our worship. I regularly teach a university class on embodiment and worship. As part of our class discussion I ask students to describe a moment of deep communion with God. Students describe creating art, singing, meditating, and spending time in nature, service, and community. Rarely have students shared a story of meaningful worship that happened in a church. Most of their experiences of deep connection with God are activities that would include diverse bodies with diverse abilities. Every year I listen to the students’ stories of an embodied connection with God and wonder why our faith communities insist on worshiping in ways that not only exclude people with intellectual disabilities but also separate all of us from a more fulsome embodied connection with the Sacred. I am frustrated by our churches’ unwillingness to recognize and embrace the leadership of people with my son’s spiritual gifts who would lead us all in a meaningful spiritual journey of drumming, painting, nature walks, and sensory play. The Bible is rich with stories of embodied spiritual journeys. Yet the Cartesian dualism that is pervasive in our worldview discourages all us of from embracing our body as a valuable source of wisdom, including spiritual wisdom. People with intellectual disabilities have much to teach us about the body as the foundation of an active and meaningful faith. But to benefit from their leadership we must set aside our intellect and accept embodiment as a valuable source of spiritual wisdom. The embodied worship of people with intellectual disabilities is not “less than” the idea- laden spirituality of the mainstream, and churches should not ask people with intellectual disabilities to accommodate to our stilted, intellectualization of worship, or worse, dismiss their spirituality as childish or passive. Rather than the stuff of Sunday school, or token attempts to include people with disabilities, locating our bodies at the center of prayer and worship might offer all of us deeper understanding of an embodied God. People with intellectual disabilities have important leadership to offer faith communities if we could only set aside our sense of intellectual superiority, as well as our insistence on colonizing their spiritual experiences. So as is often the case when I write, I conclude this paper not with a succinct summary, but with questions. Embodied worship is messy, chaotic, and exciting. It also has the potential to create worship opportunities that radically include all participants. Embodiment should not be confined to Sunday school activities for children, or segregated environments for the “differently abled”, but rather be included as an integral part of faith and worship for all bodies. I am aware that what I am proposing will challenge all of us to boldly rethink how we worship. But I wonder how we might welcome the leadership and embodied wisdom of Matthew and Adam into the life of our faith communities? What does worship that celebrates the wisdom of all bodies

58 Ibid., 252.

64

look like? Feel like? Sound like? How would a worship service of painted sermons, drummed prayers, danced hymns, and gardened meditations meet the spiritual needs of all of God’s bodies?

Author’s Note: Some papers write themselves, and then there are those articles where one fights for every word. I wrote this paper a few months after Matthew died, so I suppose I should not have been surprised that writing this paper was a struggle. But as the paper slowly, even painfully, unfolded, I discovered that writing about radically re- imagining inclusive worship became deeply meaningful; even hopeful. While I know that many communities are grieving the loss of shared worship, song, and connection, I see Covid-19 as a valuable opportunity to creatively shift how we “be” and “do” church in bold ways that will embrace the participation and leadership of those whose gifts have long been marginalized. I am hopeful that congregations will embrace the challenge, and I am so grateful to be part of the ongoing conversation. And I will admit that I am also broken-hearted that change will come too late for my son.

65 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

“Doing Church” During COVID-19: An Autistic Reflection on Online Church

Krysia Emily Waldock PhD candidate Tizard Centre, Canterbury, United Kingdom [email protected]

Abstract: This creative piece illuminates an Autistic perspective on faith and church attendance during the Covid-19 pandemic (March 2020-onwards). Autistic people may be stereotyped as less likely to be religious, or have a belief system, yet we can have a belief system much in the same manner as a non-autistic person. It is also emerging that Autistic people are also disadvantaged in the current climate of a global pandemic. For me, this piece is asserting the Autistic voice in a creative manner, where both researchers and the general public can journey with me in my story of online church during Covid-19 in how church is “done.” This includes the notion of being an “outsider,” an “edge walker” and being “deviant.” Some academic, biblical and creative references are included, but only to uplift and help express the voice of the author. The author also has lived experience of mental distress (depression and anxiety) which further shapes this creative piece. This was written in October 2020 and is a snapshot regarding thoughts and experiences of online Church.

Keywords: autism, autistic identity, Christianity, church, Covid-19, exclusion, disability

Introduction

In the words of Melanie Yergeau,1 I do not wish to start like “a typical Autism essay.” I won’t be listing what Autism is or what the statistics are. Being Autistic and having faith are acutely personal parts of my life; placing them into a rubric of a typical Autism essay would be highly insensitive. I am an Autistic, it is part of my identity in the same manner as being a Christian. This is a personal reflection on attendance at church during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a creative piece, intertwining my experiences, words and feelings together. I am based in the United Kingdom, so contextually my story is situated there, but may resonate with others in different locations and cultures. I have placed a few references throughout this piece, but my story is not an academic essay, or a piece of research. It is personal, complex, intersectional, and contemporary. I highlight certain words in bold in the quotes below which are particularly pertinent.

1 Melanie Yergeau, “Circle Wars: Reshaping the Typical Autism Essay," Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2009). 66

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

I have a slightly complicated relationship with church attendance. Like other research studies have found in regards to other Autistic people, I like to attend church and my faith is important to me.2 But like many disabled people, I have experienced barriers and negative events which have deeply hurt and scarred me.3 I persist though. For me at least, I know it’s a lack of knowledge, power imbalance, and a culture of “this is the way we’ve always done it” which has led to exclusion and my needs as an Autistic being ignored and neglected. I have been spoken over and misinterpreted, but now I know Jesus is not what I see in front of me in those situations.

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.4

I chose this text as for me, it shows the social justice side of Jesus, whereby the majority culture who is not being Church and using Church space as Jesus proclaimed is literally “overturned.” These ongoing, pervasive and inescapable microaggressions have worn me down and frustrated me. Then March 2020 happened, and we know the path that Covid-19 took. The world we knew changed overnight, and that included how we “do church.” However, it also opened up a whole new possibility of “doing church”: online church.

Online Church: The Outside Outsider

“England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales Inside, Outside, Inside, ON!”5

We were now outsiders. Outsiders to the buildings. Outsiders to ways of meeting and being a community that had previously not been imagined. A virus stopped us from coming together. We had to rapidly adapt – before my eyes I saw church leaders and friends scrambling to arrange a new way of doing and being Church. Zoom accounts set up and services streamed. Buildings closed. Meetings rescheduled and weddings postponed. The physical space that we “did Church in” was changing, one that could purport to be more inclusive. Yet I was still an outsider; the outside-outsider. How you might ask, can I be an outside-outsider? It is completely possible, it’s someone who is unlike the other people who may be considered different, or “deviant.” They are outsiders, not only in what they seem like or appear as, but more importantly through how they feel. You may feel as if you sort of are a part… then you realize you are not, or someone says something that makes you question it. You

2 Eleanor X. Liu, et al, "In Their Own Words: The Place of Faith in the Lives of Young People with Autism and Intellectual Disability" Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 52, no. 5 (2014): 388–404. 3 Naomi Louise Catherine Jacobs, “The Upside-down Kingdom of God: A Disability Studies Perspective on Disabled People's Experiences in Churches and Theologies of Disability”PhD dissertation, SOAS, University of London (2018). 4 Matt 12:21, NIV. 5 Chinese Jump Rope Rhyme, Traditional. 67

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission feel as if you are sliding about on ice and you cannot get your balance. This is why I chose the Chinese Jump Rope Rhyme. I remember it from my childhood. The rope you think you have jumped on, and flattened to the ground with your foot … it is not always flattened with your foot. Just like the person jumping rope, I thought I had my foot in the church, but then it would slip away. I thought online church would be amazing. There are many aspects I have enjoyed and benefited from. For example, I have enjoyed being in a space that does not overwhelm my senses and being able to listen, be and focus. I have been able to listen to a wide variety of people preaching on different topics. I have been able to have time to process what I have heard and think about questions. I have been able to avoid having panic attacks all weekend about stepping into a space that raises my anxiety so high: in regards to being near people who have gaslit me; in regards to my sensory needs and experiences; or who have twisted my words.6 I have avoided awkward questions and having to give answers full of emotional labour in regards to access requirements. So, as you can see, there are a plethora of positives. People have often described this as the way I should partake in church: if you listen online, you’ll be over there and we can continue to act and practice as we were. It’s felt as it’s been promoted for a dual way of doing church, but with neither side touching. “Doing Church” online has such potential, but we must ensure that we do not end up inadvertently segregating people based on their needs, and therefore dividing a community. I cannot help but feel many see this as a stop-gap, rather than evaluate those who cannot join in, and/or who have been hurt.

Being the ‘Edge Walker’ During a Pandemic in the Church

They have been set on the margins of the Church because the Church does not know what else to do with them. In doing so, the community is no longer composed of people with all their richness, weakness, and poverty; of people who accept and forgive each other; people who are vulnerable to one another and to God.7

Set on the margins. Because people don’t know what to do with people like me. Except with me, I wasn’t gently placed on the margins, I questioned and struggled being placed there. Who defines these margins? Why have they been defined so? It sounds like these margins have been arbitrarily constructed by those who “do church,” and that disabled and neurodivergent people had not been involved in this conversation of where this “margin” should go, or more to the point, if there should actually even be one. The fact that there are margins disconcerts me, even more so when small adjustments which could help the church be so accessible are seen as an inconvenient add-on.

6 “Gaslighting” is the act of undermining another person’s reality by denying facts, the environment around them, and/or their feelings. 7 Brett Webb-Mitchell, Unexpected Guests at God's Banquet: Welcoming People with Disabilities into the Church (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994), 79. 68

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Being set on the margins during a global pandemic is a new experience. People can now see and experience how it feels not to be able to attend church in person. Many see online church as temporary, until we can get back to “the way we were doing things before.” Being Autistic is not temporary. I have been, and always will be Autistic and my sensory and communication differences are not going to be prayed away.

For people with disabilities, the body is the center of political struggle. In challenging society’s definitions of our bodies as flawed, dangerous and dependent, people with disabilities initiated a social movement that stressed positive self-image and self-help.8

For the Autistic person, this means our bodies and neurology are at the center of a political struggle. This has not stopped amidst a global pandemic. It has genuinely hurt me that people have not seen this time as a way to see the exclusion that many others have been experiencing all along. This is a true and real opportunity to re-examine what church should be. I came across the word “edge walker” from my friend and colleague, Fiona MacMillian.9 However, I can say in that moment that I heard it, amongst fellow edge walkers, that a lot made sense. It gave me agency in being able to define my experience. Margins can be physical. Margins can also be emotional and psychological. Margins may also be defined by ideas external to the Church, external to Christianity and certainly external to the radical ideas of loving without judgement.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.10

The example above demonstrates love without judgement or misunderstanding. It demonstrates true and complete acceptance and openness, which is a key element of love. I believe many of the barriers I have faced have been socially constructed – for example “you shouldn’t need someone to sit with you,” or “why do you sit outside in the foyer,” or (my favourite) “why don’t you go find another place to attend.” This was the margin I sat in previously, of physical exclusion. The margins I continue to sit in are the attitudinal barriers and psychological mind games of invalidation of my needs. They are not to do with the essence of being a community and sharing beliefs grounded in an open table. My question is: how do we “do church,” and set a table without making assumptions about how to get to the table?

Conclusion

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.

8 Nancy L. Eiesland,The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 49. 9 “Edgewalker” is a term first coined by Dr Judy Neal. 10 John 3:16, NIV. 69

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

He’s the King, I tell you.”11

Sometimes we need to put our heads above the parapet to imagine ways of doing things right and that can be dangerous or scary. I believe we are being shown new ways to “do church,” to be a community. I also believe that there are great benefits to embracing change. Sometimes doing the right thing is not safe, where “safe” refers to our own comfort zone, openness to being challenged and openness to learning about others’ lived experiences. There have been so many positive aspects to “doing church” online, that we need to consider how we bring these elements into whatever space we “do church” in. Some examples are Church bursting outside of the traditional four wall structure, with home groups and informal groups being seen as church, and online streaming considered as a new medium which some churches wish to continue post-pandemic. Certainly, in regards to the Autistic community, many of us chose to meet in “metaphysical” spaces (e.g., online). The precedence of online church allows us to meet in spaces that meet our needs and that are not limited to geographical boundaries. I hope this short, creative reflection is useful to those who read it. I haven’t got answers, but hopefully, I have provided some questions.

Finally, for my fellow edge walkers:

Life will be brighter than noonday, and darkness will become like morning.12

Author’s note: Online Church is still the main way I access church. I have seen amazing growth in how people do church online, which has really encouraged me. In the months after I wrote this, the UK has been in two subsequent lockdowns which has solidified the need for a “Church without walls” which has, in my opinion, dramatically shifted community boundaries and group dynamics. This creative piece still reflects how I feel about online church, with the caveat that I hope churches are harnessing this potential for the future of church and gathering, rather than seeing it as a short term “stop gap” that lacks validity of being a “Church.” To end in the words of Matthew 18:20 (NIV), “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

11 Clive Staples Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 75. 12 Job 11:17, NIV. 70

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Prayer in a Time of Pandemic

Matthew Arguin BA, MDiv Anglican Diocese of Huron [email protected]

Keywords: poetry, Exodus, Moses, mental health, fear, leadership, Christianity

Lord, if you will not go before me, do not send me up.

If I go alone, I’ll be lost. I’ll lie to those around me trying to find a way out.

If I go alone, I’ll be afraid Of the desert of my people of myself

But if you’ll go ahead of me Lord, I might be able to make sense of this. Might be able to enjoy the manna, and not fear the snakes.

If you’ll go ahead of me Lord I’ll see waters rise and armies crushed I’ll see the sick healed and a people chosen.

If you’ll go ahead of me Lord I will strive to hear your voice and speak to you of what’s in my heart.

We may even fight, get hurt. But I won’t let go until you give me a blessing.

71

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Author’s note:

This poem was written in October of 2020, reflecting on Exodus 33:15, as Moses pleads with YHWH to go before the people of Israel as they make their way to the promised land. The COVID-19 pandemic means that many of us are in the midst of a new and unknown reality. What does that mean for our mental health? In particular, what does it mean for those who find themselves leading faith communities? This poem seeks to express some of the emotional turmoil involved in these questions and how we--like Moses--might respond with honesty, affection, and hope.

72 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Stings like a Sunburn A Sermon for Emmanuel College Chapel During the Covid-19 Pandemic

HyeRan Kim-Cragg PhD, Timothy Eaton Memorial Church Associate Professor of Preaching Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada [email protected]

Abstract: A sermon on Song of Songs 1:5–6 and Matthew 20:1–16 is offered that reflects on the life of migrant workers in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reflections on how the COVID-19 virus has exposed racism, poverty, and social inequity in Canada are also presented. An invitation to examine these issues on structural levels from immigration law to corporate profit-driven policies is given.

Keywords: Song of Songs, Covid-19, migrant workers, Canada, racism

Texts: Song of Songs 1: 5-6, Matthew 20: 1-16

Prayer of illumination

Come, Holy Spirit, open our minds, hearts and souls to all that these words of life offer us.

I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has gazed on me. My mother’s sons were angry with me; they made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept!

Unusual times call for unusual Bible passages. There is much that makes this passage and the Song of Songs unusual. For one thing, it is not usually preached. What a joy it is, therefore, to meditate on it with you today. The text poses a very basic question: Who is the “I” when it is said, “I am black and beautiful”? The passage is clear: The “I” is a woman, and she is black and beautiful. We know right off the bat that she has a strong sense of identity. This woman knows who she is. Yet, she is not free from societal prejudices and racial discrimination. She is targeted: people gaze at her because she is dark. Society puts her down because she has darker skin. Sadly, there is no surprise in this. Racism is blunt, it stings like a sunburn. Verse 6, “Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has gazed on me,” suggests that a kind of racial prejudice people played out in different ways. Her skin is exposed to the sun which suggests that she works outside. The next line gives a more fulsome picture. She works in her

73 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

mother’s sons’ vineyard. She is a laborer, like a peasant, working for someone else’s farm. There is a power differential at play. There is an inequity. These sons were able to belittle her and subjugate her to work for their benefit. And this exploitation is common in the world of the Hebrew Bible, as maternal brothers exercise control over their sisters in patriarchal families. But, as I’ve said earlier, there is something quite unusual about the Song of Songs. Unlike many books in the Bible, scholars have noticed that female voices make up more than 60 percent of the text. According to the biblical scholar, Athalya Brenner, the female voices in the Song of Songs are “bolder, more playful, more outspoken, serious, and artistic than the voices attributed to males.”1 A female voice is prevalent in the entire book of the Song of Songs. The poem sings of the different world, dreaming racial justice, labor equity, sacred dignity and seeking relationships of love. Song of Songs is not only a beautiful poem but a powerful text to preach about the plague of racism. The sad fact, though, is that the chapter 1 of Song of Songs is excluded in the revised common lectionary. Why do you think this text failed to be included in the lectionary? Perhaps, because it was talking about erotic love with physical and sensual expressions too scandalous to be included? Or because it gorgeously features the outspoken woman of color who said she is black and beautiful? Or because it discloses the economic exploitation of the system that benefits the wealthy and the privileged? Or perhaps because this poem is not deemed “theological enough” since God does not appear at all in the entire book? The stakes are high when we do not use the text like the Song of Songs for preaching. Preachers who follow the lectionary all the time are spared from having to deal with the text that addresses the issues that were critical in the biblical time and are critical now. Summer is a good time to pick up books that you don’t usually read. I wonder what books you have discovered. I, myself, had an opportunity to read a book by Noor Naga. The title of the book is Washes, Prays. The author Naga was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and now lives in Alexandria, Egypt. In this book Naga’s protagonist is Coocoo, a young poor immigrant woman living in Toronto. Washes, Prays is a work of art that captures the spiritual longing and romantic love of one who is a devote Muslim involved in an affair with a married man. She bargains with God to end her poverty and loneliness and asks, “What does it mean to pray while giving your body to a man who cannot keep it? How long can a homeless love survive on the streets?” Coocoo reminded me of the woman in the Song of Songs because her story is a story of love under the stinging glare of stereotypes. Naga’s work makes room for female desire, companionship, and the consolations of faith. She also speaks of the hard reality of life, “Hungry bodies weigh more than full bodies because need is heavier than greed, heavier than the smugness of satisfaction.” Jesus was interested in hungry bodies and the working conditions of exploited laborers. Today, we read one about the vineyard workers who were all paid the same no matter how long they worked. What the landowner did, does not conform to today’s capitalist logic. The longer you work, the higher your wage should be. The faster your job is done, the more reward you should receive. Yet, the kingdom, of God, realm of God does not follow that logic. In fact,

1 Athalya Brenner, “Gender and Class in the Song of Songs,” Bible Odyssey, accessed September 23, 2020, https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/gender-and-class-in-the-song-of-songs.

74 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

the up-side-down optic is proclaimed. The last shall be first. Yes, oh yes, we as disciples of Jesus also dream of the world, where the last shall be first. But the Covid-19 world exposes the world otherwise. In Toronto, for example, Black and racialized people make up 83% of the reported Covid-19 cases, and the number is growing. Windsor area has the highest rate of COVID in the province of Ontario. Why is that? I had to ask myself so I did some research and found out that it is because of migrant workers in Leamington. Every year 50000 migrant workers travel from Mexico, Jamaica, the Caribbean, and other parts of Asia to come to Canada to harvest fruits and vegetables. My family saw some of these workers harvesting peaches in the Niagara region this past summer. We bought several baskets of fresh peaches and plums. Many of these laborers end up in Leamington, the Tomato capital of Canada, and the greenhouse capital of the world. This year, about 1500 of them caught Covid-19, and three have died. The problem isn’t the migrant workers, it’s the employers, the national borders, the labour laws, and the unjust power wielded over the lives of migrant farm workers on a daily basis. The invisible Covid-19 virus has exposed racism, poverty, and social inequity in Canada. While the Covid-19 global pandemic is unprecedented in our generation, the correlation between the medical disease and the disease of racism is nothing new. This racist system is what makes us sick. Even if there is a vaccine for this coronavirus, unless we mend the system, there will be people who are pushed to the last/continue to get sick and die. If these social ills are invisible to us most of the time, it is because we benefit from them. If we can afford having sumptuous tomatoes, sweet corn, and peaches without even thinking of those who work under the heat of the sun, despite getting sick with Covid-19, we, you and I, are complicit and complacent. If we can enjoy a summer’s worth of fresh meals at the price of these workers, we may be like the mothers’ sons in the Song of Songs. We may be the ones who complain about other workers who came later in the day at the vineyard in the parable of Jesus. A story from Leamington may help to see their lives close to our heart and find how God is at work. Joan Grey throws a party for the migrant workers every year. She books a local hall, recruits volunteers to prepare meat, rice, and beans. At the party, the gospel music is playing, workers are playing games; they laugh, they cry, and they tell stories. One migrant worker said, “This is a feeling like we are back home. I get to see a lot of black people and say, Oh I feel like I am home. I am in Jamaica.” Grey said loud and clear, “All these beautiful vegetables and fruits that we have on our table, where did it come from? These are migrant workers who are working to pick it. They give to us and we should give back to them.” As I listened to Grey, I also learned about the living conditions of migrant workers. Some of them have been coming for more than 25 years, season after season. When they come they sleep in bunkhouses. Or 16 people rent one house that has mold and cockroaches. The annual party helps to humanize their otherwise dehumanized life.2 This small but mighty act of kindness is good, but the problem of migrant workers is systemic. It stings like a sunburn. We must confess this as sin and examine the issue on

2 “A Thank You Dinner for the Forgotten Migrant Workers who Pick Canada’s Food,” CBC Radio, accessed September 23, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-for-september-8-2019- 1.5270500/a-thank-you-dinner-for-the-forgotten-migrant-workers-who-pick-canada-s-food-1.5270515.

75 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

structural levels from immigration laws to corporate profit-driven policies. For this, I would like to invite you to watch the following documentary: “Migrant Dreams” featured on TVO.3 The documentary was created by Min Sook Lee who is an Associate Professor at OCAD University. The documentary powerfully exposes the plight of the migrant workers, who themselves speak the truth. The second link is found on Scholar Strike Canada, on Sep 9. It would actually be good to watch the session “Scholar Strike Canada: Migrant Workers in Canada: Unfree Labour on Stolen Land”4 along with the documentary. How else God is inviting us to engage with this issue that stings like a sunburn as we wrestle with sacred texts, confront the various forms of oppression, and study in a theological school? Preaching outside the lectionary and preaching more boldly and explicitly on racism are great starts, and may lead us to create a ripple effect to the whole life at Emmanuel. We have a part to play in combating racism institutionally. This semester we have been going through a college-wide and community-wide consultation. Next week there is a Town Hall meeting, regarding a document to articulate our commitment to make racism and other forms of oppression visible while we work towards dismantling them. And this document uses four words as a guide: “Dignity, Equity, Accountability, Responsibility” with an acronym of DEAR. What do we hold dear? The woman from the Song of Songs knows what she holds dear: “I am black and beautiful.” Let us hold ourselves and one another “dear,” as well. It is my prayer and hope that as we do this work, this hard labor, together, we will remember this woman in the Song of Songs. May the hokmah, the wisdom of God that went into the Song of Songs, continue to teach us about sacred dignity and just equity. May the parable of Jesus continue to challenge us, holding ourselves accountable to the exploitation of the migrant workers, and encourage us to take responsibility in mending and healing the world that is wounded by racism. May it be so! Amen and thanks be to God.

3 “Migrant Dreams (Feature Version),” tvo Documentaries, accessed November 11, 2020, https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/migrant-dreams-feature-version. 4 “SCHOLAR STRIKE CANADA: Migrant Workers in Canada: Unfree Labour on Stolen Land,” YouTube, accessed November 11, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHkm6xzqk_U.

76 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Author’s note:

I was always intrigued by the Song of Songs. It is an unusual text to be included in the Bible when one thinks of its main theme which is erotic love. As a feminist scholar, I admire the female voice, affirming and claiming her desires in the Song of Songs. It is precious, evocative and imaginative.

That is why I often wonder who wrote it and how it came to be included in the Bible during the canonization process. Given the fact that most Christian leaders who participated in the process of choosing which books would be included in the authoritative scriptures would have been male, I wonder why and how it rose to their attention and gained their approval. I think it was a kind of miracle that it was preserved in both the Jewish and Christian Bibles. In addition to the unique subject matter of this text, I was also drawn to the fact that the main character in the Song of Song is a racialized woman for whom her dark skin is an important aspect of her identity. Where else can you find such references in the Bible? Nowhere else. I would say this is the most prominent anti-racist biblical text.

Race is a social construct and a product of the modern European colonialism. Thus, the Bible as an ancient text does not mention this word, ‘race’ let alone ‘racism.’ However, we know that it does not mean that the world of the Bible did not have prejudice based on religious and ethnic difference or that such prejudices were not rooted in systems of power.

It often takes a careful and close reading to see it, but it is there. Even where the Bible itself does not express overtly racist views, its interpretations over the centuries have been shaped by racist and white supremist bias. I wonder too, if the decision to exclude from the

Revised Common Lectionary (RCM) of all but one passage from the Song of Songs can be attributed in part from an aversion to discussions of race and sexuality. To be fair the Song of Song 2: 8-13 is included in the lectionary but it is one of the least challenging passages in the book.

77 Black Lives Matter A Prayer

Miriam Spies PhD Student Emmanuel College, Toronto, Canada [email protected]

Keywords: Black Lives Matter, prayer, racism, liturgy, Christian

Transforming and transformative God,

Help us.

We try to follow your ways, the ways of Jesus. And yet we do harm.

Some say Black Lives Matter while describing ourselves as a white church, dismissing indigenous, black, brown, Asian leaders and disciples in our history and in our midst today.

Some name steps to take without first listening.

Some tell stories of doing good, of learning how we are complicit and uphold systems of oppression, and feel good to have finally noticed, feel proud that we are acting.

Some move to quickly hope, to the promise of resurrection and new life, without experiencing the failure and grief of Good Friday in the depth of our bodies.

Some call voices of others “courageous” and “prophetic” without digging into what people are begging us to understand.

Some lead worship services as if hymns alone can teach us how to live, and while part of the gospel, they are not its entirety.

Some are scared of doing or saying the “wrong” thing and do not participate.

Some are scared of using their privilege in naming when things are not happening in a good way.

Some are scared of being in those spaces, scared of being retraumatized, ignored, hurt, unable to fully breath.

78

Some name how the church and other structures have been racist, ableist, homophobic, while not naming that we make up search committees, we participate in defining who a leader is, and our anti-bias trainings are not enough and are failing people.

Some invite us to Jesus’ table, the table of reconciling love, without turning over our lives so that the last may be first, the “weakest” be the most valuable at that table.

Help us.

Help us not to offer cheap grace, but to embrace the cost of discipleship.

Help us not to expect easy mercy, but to live with unknowing.

Help us not to use minority people as inspiration, but to listen and turn in repentance.

Help us not to offer words of pride, but to adopt a posture of humility.

Help us stay with this discomfort, this pain, this failure.

In Jesus’ name, the name of the Palestinian young man, the name of the Crucified One, the name of the Disabled God, the name of the broken resurrected body, we pray.

Amen.

Author’s Note: I wrote/prayed this prayer following a national denominational meeting where people seemed to rush to “do” something in support of Black Lives Matter movement. In this rush, people hurt one another, naming ourselves as a “white church”. It was a prayer of lament. Months later, these words still ring true, and there is power in staying with lament. Biblical prophets exposed truth, named lament, and reimagined alternatives where God restored relationships with God’s people. May our laments expose the truth of harm as we seek to imagine and live into right relationship.

79 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Love/Hate A Poem

Michael Walker ThD Knox College, University of Toronto [email protected]

Keywords: disability, poetry, Christianity, God, cerebral palsy

I love my body. My thin arms can lift

One hundred pounds without much ache or strain.

My core is strong; my feet are light and swift

Enough to lope along to Joy’s refrain.

I hate my body, for my back’s not straight;

Some days, the only thing I feel is pain.

I hate my halting right leg, and my gait

Will slow me as I walk on through the rain.

I live in paradox, and feel unsound;

Sharp love and hate are so conjoined in me

That my emotions cast me to the ground.

I do not know how all these things can be...

I must seek stillness in my body’s strife,

And wrestle, from my paradox, my life.

80 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Author’s Note:

Ironically, I wrote this sonnet, with a slightly different rhyme-scheme, in October 2014, shortly after a day at the gym at the University of Toronto where I did forty chin-ups (four sets of ten repetitions, as I recall, at a 110-pound counterweight). The sonnet describes my relationship to my body, rather fully…

I love my body because it is strong, slender, and sinewy. That said, I also experience spastic cerebral palsy, scoliosis, and all that those conditions entail. Thus, often I hate my body, because I will walk into walls, nearly fall while moving towards a goal, lose my grip on an object, or – as in this case – simply be slowed down as I go for a walk in the rain. As Bonhoeffer asserts, the suffering God can help; that said, I sometimes wonder whether God sees my pains, and whether S/He really wants to alleviate them. That’s where the paradox comes in, in stanza three. My contemplative nature (my need for “stillness”) allows me to reconcile, or at least exist in creative tension with, the pain I experience as a person with multiple disabilities.

81

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

How to Mend a Broken Heart Art Quilt on Burlap and Cotton Fabric

Amira Ayad MPS, PhD Spiritual Care Practitioner, Scarborough Health Network, Ontario, Canada [email protected]

82

Author’s note: At a certain point in my journey, my art became a living document of my life, a visual autobiography. My journals and canvases became an open field for exploring, venting, and acknowledging my feelings. And, sometimes, my art was reflecting the deep heartache I was physically and emotionally enduring. With time, I intuitively developed a way to weave my narrative into an expressive art journaling practice, a practice that I later further developed and have been teaching my clients in retreats and group therapy. My work integrates expressive art tools as a means of facilitating the expression of emotions that might be inaccessible through spoken words.

83 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Building Blocks

Megan Wildhood (she/her) MSW Student [email protected]

Abstract: This short story is narrated by a young woman of Polish descent who is experiencing the aftermath of multiple strokes and aging parents who are considering moving back to their country of origin from where they settled in New York City to raise her and her older sister. She navigates complicated family dynamics, including sororal strain born of jealousy that has been present much longer than the narrator’s disability and coming of age, late-bloomer style, while dealing with the effects of mysterious strokes. She begins to question her regimen of therapy, therapists and “self care” and imagine what kind of life she might build for herself if she could have things completely her way. But, with old-school cultural concerns coming at her from the family angle and paternalistic advice coming at her from the medical angle, finding her own voice proves harder than “simply” overcoming aphasia.

Keywords: stroke, Poland, therapist, New York, fainting couch

When I was 26, I had my first stork. Stroke. I was living in the mansion my parents left – not so much “for me” as “behind” when they went back to Poland like they’d always wanted – in Queens. “Corner of 8th and 56th,” I remind my Tuesday therapist. “Lots of black brick, potbelly stove my dad put in himself.” “You need a project.” He holds his hands on either side of my face like gutter bumpers for bowling. “Focus.” My doctor’s orders, though. Workout your brain without using your mind. Because clearly, I thought my way into blowing a blood vessel. “You know, something with your hands.” Gerald rubs his chin in remembrance of a goatee. “I’m not so crafty,” I say, shifting around on the squeaky leather couch cushion. “Catty.” Gerald frowns like he disagrees. “Craftsy.” He smiles like he disagrees.

I started teaching my father to drive when I was 14 and he was 50. He asked me and not Lorn, my 20-year-old sister. Me. Used to throw me high into the air because he knew I could fly. Knew I could do anything. He was just there to catch me till I learned. But then he learned the driving age in New York State was 16. We waited but, the moment it was legal for me to drive, I was, in Tata’s words, “typicating the teenager.” Exhibit A of a googolplex of reasons to avoid association with parents. What I was really doing was

84 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission sneaking out to friends’ houses to read – the only effective use of the revolving door of thoughts – while they partied. The parents thinking I hate them gets Dad’s pouty phase. The parents thinking I’m not an expected American teen would get me on a shrink’s couch and we’re a decade out from me being ready to raise my hand, state my name and admit I have a problem. Then the Iron Curtain fell. I was 20 but still (Exhibit B) “on foal’s legs.” We hadn’t finished our driving lessons but by then, he didn’t trust me. He said he was hungry for home – he and Mama hadn’t been in Warsaw since just before Lorn was born – but he’d lost faith in me. It was my wobbly horse poles, I’m sure. At my age, a Poland-raised girl would be fat with at least her second kid, chasing chickens to boil whole and hanging laundry to dry on the lines you shared with the neighbor or some shit. My name sounds like motherhood would be a joke on me (Exhibit C – who names their precious baby Maja?). Anyway, he went back with Mama, only half knowing how to drive, leaving all his faith in me behind. Ah well. More for me.

“I think I need a hobby,” I tell my Friday therapist. “A project, yes. You do tend to think a lot,” Perri nods slowly, like she’s thinking. Her nods bounce her on the springy cushion one away from the more subdued square I’m sitting on. She’s the only one who sits on her couch at the same time as clients. “I mean, to pass the recovery...” Bowling pins capsize somewhere in my temperate lobe. Where the stroke was, I think they said. “Time.” Perri’s learned quick when to tack on the end of one of my sentences and when to hang out. “Don’t you live in a large house? Surely, there’s some upkeep work.” It’s true. I am staying in a big house. All kinds of crap in here I don’t know about. I get off the Number 62 Couch as it’s still coming to a complete halt – that bus never really stops – and walk the six blocks to my front door. Start at the bottom then work my way up? Topsy-turvy it? Upside down, I decide. Work it like a fall. The back bedroom at the very top of the last flight stairs is plugged with the sharp light from the round hole of the window. I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to climb stairs, so I go slow. Slow enough that it might not look like anything’s happening, even in a stop-motion viral. “Whoa, stop the time.” Dust glints as my breath pushes it around in the sunbeam. A long, faded blue checkered couch with a queen’s-throne back on one side and no armrests sits in the middle of the room, a cursive note in thick Sharpie on hand-lined parchment propped against its hollowed back. It wouldn’t have been my parents’ fault had I not learned enough Polish (Exhibit D) to read it; they wouldn’t have believed what the real problem was that I couldn’t remember. I pick up the note and it’s like the damn Dust Bowl in here for a minute. Typicating an abandoned, aristocratic bedroom. The handwriting is Mama’s – “For Repair.” It’s odd that I manage to pull off the Polish, even more that Mama the minimalist wanted anything saved. The few boxes that are in the room are labeled with Tata’s square, shouting letters. BOWLS. KITCHEN. DICTIONARIES. Suddenly, splotchy water insults the couch. The dust balls up like an island around a burgeoning ocean. This couch is in bad shape, but the crying spiels started before the strokes. I fold Mama’s note not carefully and hand it off to my pocket.

85 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

“How long was this one?” Monday’s therapist, the original one, hired to halt the waterworks, thinks the strokes are a new symptom. I’m a regular magnet for symptoms of a ghost disease. At least it’s an interesting one. Researchers want to pay me for the permission to study me, one instance of a damaged mindbody. Videos, interviews, chart-notes access. It’s because I fit the Sexy Sad Girl protocol and they have the final say on my care since they’re stepping on the bill, but my other option is the streets; all this house, this big faith my parents had in the country, family, me specifically, would go to waste. “Fifteen.” I say. The turquoise tassel on one of her couch pillows comes off in my fingers and falls to its pieces. I wrangle my fist between the cushions and try to release all the strings but it’s tight and sticky. Hannah looks at me like “yeah?” My parents have been gone for fifteen years.

Exhibit E: imagine you’re at a restaurant and your dad asks to substitute their beef for mutton. They, of course, don’t have mutton because you’re at a burger joint in the pit of The Apple but your dad explains what mutton is like that’s the problem. The poor, zitty-faced kid behind the counter leans to the side to look at you, the raving man’s family, as if there’s something you can do. “You think a different answer will come from behind?” Your dad grabs all three of you in a hearty bear vice and, as he’s clapping your lungs out, says, “We’re Poles. And how do you know we’re good Poles?” He tosses his head back and mouths along with one of you, whoever’s turn it is, as she drops her eyes to her saddle shoes and says, “We make a consensus.”

My senses, especially touch, say the upholstery definitely needs to be redone and the cushions are unaired but maybe it’s just a stuff-and-cover job. It takes me a week and a half to find a sewing kit with a thick enough needle – all the store-bought ones snap on the first stab and nearly poke my eye out. Surprise, surprise, there’s a mundo one on the bookshelf in the corner of the same room the fainting couch is in. The new fabric – purple velvet because why not, and also it was, believe it or not, the cheapest at AnnJo’s Fabrics – is quite snazzy already. ‘D’ likely be more so without the family-size holes the needle is punching in the perimeter. This is going to be more than taxidermy. Velvet is thick and so is the checkered stuff so it’s hard to get through – Until it’s not. I’m almost on the final whoosh of the backboard when I yank the velvet just lightly and the checkered stuff pops from the base and the velvet lunges toward me and the chances of catching my balance are forever low, anyway. But that damn spring leaping out and shoving into me sure doesn’t help. You wouldn’t expect so much power, but I drum my damned head four feet from the couch on the bare concrete regardless. I remember.

Maybe my father asked me to teach him how to drive because Lorn actually did have two kids by the time she was 20. Chickens, too. She boiled them with the laundry in her futuristic, blast-off dryer. My brother-in-law was as old then as I am now. My mother wanted him to know about Poland, so she nagged my father until he promised to polarize him.

86 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

“In Poland, we name our demons,” he told Jason, who had no context for my father’s newborn interest in educating him. Could have been “In Polish.” But I learned no names for his screaming nightmares that perforated the childhood I grew up in. Actually, it was that I had to figure out the nightmare part of his screaming on my own that left so many holes. That’s why I got into more therapy. That, and I didn’t know the words, the names for things.

That and the friends I might have time for without the revolving door of medical stuff would probably direct me that way if I ever expressed interest in social contact.

I open my eyes; it’s the same cracked dark as on the closed side of my lids for a minute. I’m watching a freezing-scared woman get stuck into the infinite cave of whirring and weeping and pulling of teeth that claims to image everything inside you. They’ve let Jeanne in and she’s singing nursery rhymes to the woman in sort-of Polish. Polish if it was cantered by a Clydesdale. Jeanne took up learning Polish when I became her client three years ago; she speaks it as well as my dad drives. Unless my dad’s gotten behind the wheel ever again. She wanted to quit when she learned there were seven genders and as many cases. Don’t blame her: the average Pole can drive a car in America before she’s fluent in her own language. “I have fate in you.” I didn’t expect to make a big deal of it. I didn’t think I really did. I leaned into the couch, its back like folds of a satin wedding dress, beads and ribbon and lace festoons and everything. “Your think so many,” she said in Polish. She’s still batting those translator dictionaries; she’s brought one here to look up words like “magnetic resonance imaging,” “stroke,” “again” to the woman getting her brain’s picture taken – not on its good side, looks like.

Gerald brings a square Get Well balloon and a card with a sparkly daisy on it. “Mom wants it better.” “You mean you?” “Hmm.” I hum a music-box song Mama used to sing. It sounds made up, like I made up the whole memory, when it’s in my voice. “She left a note.” My voice doesn’t sound like my voice. Something cool on my forehead. “I’ll be back next week, Maj.” That must be the woman lying here in my body.

“How long was she unconscious?” Hannah points to where some people still wear watches. “I’m sorry, ma’am, we can only release that information to friends and family.” The nurse in the room checks the woman’s pulse on the wrist. “Did she say fifteen? Did you ask her?” Hannah taps her wrist. “Ma’am, as I’ve said, we –” “Can I have an information-release form, then?” She shifts her weight so far to the right I’m afraid she’s going to pop a hip socket.

87 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

“Tie down the string and redo the stitching? Can I do that?” “Are you in pain?” Perri taps my shoulder, then my knee. I shake a swimmy head, which feels like kittens and moonbeams, so I keep shaking until it lifts off and lapels the room. It got this way before, the head. I was in Katie May’s basement, unbeknownst to her, reading a heavy book. It smelled like earth and sweat and stung the eyes a little, but the book started to make sense. And then, briefly, the world did, too. Why I snuck out of my house – the one I’m staying in now, but the top two stories had been roped off – and into my friends’. Why reading and not drugs, if there’s actually a difference. The crying. Why? Now, I couldn’t tell you. “Maybe let’s reconsider this want you have of trying again when you’re feeling a little more feeling.”

They release the woman, Maja, from the hospital after four Wednesdays. Maja wanders downtown. Maja craves that soiled smell of books in the basement. Maja shivers. I am Maja. Maja, me, I. I rummage around in my purse for the houses while squinting at the rows of keys. I must not be at my block yet. I’m not lost for long. Upstairs, the fainting couch’s spring still shivers, like it just freshly pushed me. The only way to tie the spring down is to strip the couch to the bone. I check the calendar. Holes. Perhaps I need a Wednesday therapist.

Samantha has the squared-off face of an athlete, a lock jaw and ears so small they seem pinned back. She’s the only one who takes knots. Hannah used to, when I started with her in the ‘90s. It makes sense with Sam, though. Even I need a list of therapists, which I hand her to photocopy.

Hannah - Mondays Gerald - Tuesdays Jeanne - Thursdays Perri - Fridays Dishes unload Water Grocery shopping Laundry??? Unshake horses Chickens

Samantha’s also the only one without a couch. She points at the names and looks at me. “Therapists.” “Yours?” Same tone. She looks down to write. “Mmm.” “Former?” “No.” “They know about each other?” Flat as paper. “Not sure. I haven’t said anything.”

88 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

“And how come so many?” Her pen stops, quivers. “How come you got so few couches?” is the thing I use my mouth to say. “I see.” She writes for a long time. “Guess I have no faith in myself is what I meant.” She keeps writing. When she’s done a hundred years later, she says, “I think it shows how much you do.” She looks up and melts all the ice. “Mmm?” “I mean, that’s a sizable investment you’re making in yourself.” I see if I can shift in this Poang chair nonsense without causing it to groan. Fail. “I had thought of that, but it’s not my money.” She raises an eyebrow, raising her glasses. “It’s America’s.” Her smile is small, more like pushing the corners of her lips in like buttons. “Would you like to disclose your disability?” “I want to talk about a couch.” “Is your chair uncomfortable?” “My mother wants me to fix this old fainting couch she’s kept for Lord knows how many years in the spider room.” Samantha’s pen twitches like a horse haunch under a fly. “Help me follow your relationship with your mother.” I pull the note up from my jacket pocket, smooth it on my knee, my shoulder blade, on myself and hand it to her. She copies the letters on her yellow pad actually pretty closely and looks up when she’s done. “For Repair.” “Your mother’s handwriting?” “Yeah. Might as well have taped it to me.” “How did you learn about this couch?” is what she says, though her lips started in the M position. When I tell her, I’m just a girl wandering around a house my parents are going to come back to – not today, not even maybe soon, but sometime, I’m sure – and I’m the most-alone version of myself, prowling the home I grew up in as if I might fall through the floor at any moment. “You think you’ll do the repairs?” Pen is poised. “They’re kind of kicking my ass,” which the Poang chair complains under every move I make. “That’s not the point?” She winces and stands up, quickly walks to her bookcase, which has zero justice on it and pulls a door stopper down from a high shelf. “I apologize. We can get into my psychological philosophies some other time.” She dings the service bell on her desk, leans over her chair and sets the book at my feet: The Handyperson’s Right Hand.

From Jeanne’s office on the 17th floor of a downtown skyscraper, the streets looked machine-stitched into the city. People dread through it like it can hold. I usually stare out the

89 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission window for the first ten minutes of my session until Jeanne walks in after start time. Today, I lean into it and time my head on the inside pane just as she clicks closed the door. “No!” Jeanne leaps and bounds over to me and basically drags me to her poofy sofa. Bowling ball droppings clang out my sight in parts. When I can see again, Jeanne’s waving her hands over me and whispering. “Praying,” she says when she sees my eyes. “Never knew you were the type.” She leans over and grabs a fake turkey feather, fans up my left side, down my right and up my middle three times like a GIF. “Religion is the most important thing in my life,” she says, surprised. “But I don’t take it seriously.” My head feels like an echo tower even after the chants and banishings and Hail Marys, so she lets me stay flat out till the end of the session. “Faith on the other hand.” She taps a pencil eraser on her front tooth. She has impeccable nonchalance. She knelt on the floor and brushed her hand over my hair, my tricep, my humanness. Not even bladder spasms could compete with this motherly pawing, but by the time the clock is over, I had to pee so bad that the release felt like a stick.

“I still support having a project,” Gerald says. “Well, mine isn’t a person.” The anger leaves hot coals on my lips. He bounces back, like what I said is a rogue spring. But he’s smiling, the way you would if your face was behind a mask, and closes us up for the day with “don’t be so sure.”

Getting the checkers off is like opening a birthday present. It pushes me a little, then gives way to a satisfying slice and out pops the rift. Or clouds made of thin wire. I’ve got a dictionary and the Hand Book and waste a clock pawing through the dictionary before randomly opening it to a page on stuffing. “Tufting” apparently is what crumples all over the room instantly and needs to be replaced. After I get to the end of it, there’s not a lot, I start pulling out overalls like scarves from a magician’s top hat, different fades of blue and gray, different sizes. Coins drop from one of the pockets. Copper 3s and 1s, 5s on silver and on gold surrounded by silver, 1s and 5s of brass. Several sets of fifteen.

“So, I’d like to know,” Hannah says, plucking her glasses from her face, “more about fifteen.” “Can it be as simple as I miss my parents?” “Certainly. Is it?” When you go to therapy, you give permission for this kind of thing. This nothing-is-as- its-seems creeps through your subconscious till something shiny happens. “Of course not.” “Can you reach them?” The shakes. “All I know is I’m sad about the passage of time.” This is the last session I have with Hannah before she suffers a career-ending injury. It’s probably a breach of confidentiality that I know this but her longest client, which I’m a little hurt isn’t me, died of suicide by impact – the guy sat on the 6th level of a parking garage on 2nd

90 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Avenue before springing off and cracking the right lane below like a bowling ball. That last part I know from the news. I put keys in the fridge, shoes in the tub; I am back to being new at being born.

The notes in the pockets of most of the overalls are handwritten receipts – a quart of milk for 3gr! – or things to remember to tell “Jula.” In a different hand, there’s a deeply creased list of boy’s names – Rudolf, Zenon, Dana. Mom’s dad’s dad was Rudolf, I think. Got a girl cousin Dana. Some of the coins are rubles, which Poland used in the 1800s. Being anxious that I didn’t live centuries ago – happens often – makes me feel like a cavity. Just a hole that hurts, giving nothing back but ache.

“I also pulled out a, the word, this word is for an ironic thing to find in a fainting couch.” I pat my stomach, but that’s not right, either, quite. Gerald colts his head. “Are words getting harder to reach?”

Batting. How you get home runs. Soft stuff for a couch. Handy, but mine’s not ready for that. It might not ever be – it’s been down to the studs for weeks because I can’t figure out how to get the springs back in - whack! You’ve got to tighten the mini-chain-link fence stuff just so across the frame. I’ve got this cool spiral bruise on my thigh from another spring that leaked because the fencing wasn’t pulled right maybe? Also, splinters. It’s probably important to my mom to have her exact fainting couch from a thousand years ago, or however long but Samantha’s Handybook doesn’t tell you how to fix things older than fifty. Farther away from the end of the world than it is now, anyway. They did springs differently then.

Sometimes, you just want to tell your therapists everything shut up in your mind behind with the locked words you don’t have the unlockers for. Jeanne sticks with learning Polish because there’s research showing exposure to a foreign language decreases stroke risk later in life. Also supposed to increase stroke patients’ healing. But it’s not Polish that’s foreign; language is a second language now. I think she also does it because she suspects Maja misses her Mama.

Maja got released from the hospital too early. Happens with women, especially women in pain. There’s research on that, too – even female doctors take women less seriously. When Maja’s brain sprung a leak for the third time, it’s now “to be expected” with “someone in her condition.” That’s some astronomical faith in a transient condition. Or a big lack of it in the conditioned. She was wandering downtown when it happened even though it was Friday and Perri’s office is in Brooklyn. “Do you remember being confused?” A nurse with a blurry face shines a laser in Maja’s eyes. She does but she cannot say so. I could but I apparently cannot work this mouth. She remembers thinking the source of her confusion was too many couches.

91 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

A calendar later, I watch Maja look for a place to follow the doctor’s orders and rest. I wonder where we are, why she looks around an ancient mansion filled with room and cranny and creak, how she got into this time machine. One banister has miniature eagle wings hand whittled all the way up it on both sides. Maja counts them by touch as she climbs the case; I somehow know before the end that there will be 15 a side. The room right across from the top of the stairs is the only one with the light already on. It’s got boxes in it; the walls are covered in an empty bookshelf. No resting furniture. Except then, off center on a golden area rug, someone has started to raise a couch. The frame needs sanding and the springs need taming. But whoever got this far knew what they were doing.

Author’s note: Building Blocks breaks the "write what you know" rule in nearly every way; I am not Polish, I did not have a stroke when I was 26, I don’t live in New York City and never have and, until the past couple of years, I was not a look-on-the -bright-side kind of person. There's a debate in literature right now about who should be allowed to write what and for good reason: cultural appropriation must be reckoned with as so many are calling for humanity to face the scourge of centuries of racism. What is also true is that fiction provokes empathy, a necessary ingredient for unity that honors diversity. Writing what I didn't know spurred me to educate myself and further confronted my privilege as a white person. I also found surprising common ground between me as an Autistic female who also identifies as invisibly disabled (Autism is a disability, so this is an additional identity for me) and those who have experienced brain injuries.

Building Blocks is also the result of me finding freedom from me there's-a-gray-cloud-for- every-silver-lining approach to life: Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic has a line that continues gonging through my heart; this is how it caught in my memory: "I once asked my students if they loved writing. They all emphatically said yes, absolutely. Then I asked them if they thought writing loved them. Not a single one said yes.” In that moment, I was transfigured (in my writing life anyway…) from Megativity to a lover wanting to dance with words; Building Blocks was the first short story I’ve written with a positive ending.

92 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Finding Belonging in the Margins: A Reflection on Disability and Community

Jasmine Duckworth Christian Horizons, Ottawa, Canada [email protected]

Abstract: My childhood memories of spending time in the Deaf community and my experience of acquiring a disability as an adult are paired with a theological reflection using John Swinton’s description of how Jesus shifted the margins of society. There are three principles we can learn from Jesus’ example: spending time with people as they are, seeing all as gift, and embodying the roles of both host and guest. These three practices are illustrated by a community of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that I have had the privilege of meeting with weekly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Keywords: margins, disability community, gifts, belonging, guest

As a small child I attended a church where members greeted each other as family and cared for each other similarly. As a result, I had many “aunts” and “uncles” who I sat with during services. I remember being very small and sitting with these family-like friends as I watched my mother at the front of the congregation. My mom would interpret for the deaf members of the church. They had their own pastor and building for the morning services, but on Sunday evenings we were all together. The deaf members all sat in one section of the sanctuary, on the right and close to the front, so they could see the ASL interpretation. One perspective would be that this group was separate and on the margins of the congregation, but from my perspective I was in the centre, surrounded by community. I was safe and loved and cared for. I was both on the margins and in the centre. As an adult, I worked in the field of disability for about a decade before becoming disabled myself. After my initial diagnosis and onset of symptoms, I felt pushed to the margins of my life and my community. I couldn’t work, I had to give up my volunteer roles at church, and my social life quickly evaporated. In this time of crisis and solitude, I turned to spaces where disabled people congregated. I found a vast and vibrant community. I found communities within communities, a rich network of lives supporting one another with information, encouragement, and practical help. As I moved to the margins, I realised that the margins had shifted. Once again, I was in the centre surrounded by community.

93 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

This shifting of the margins isn’t unique to disability, and it isn’t unique to humans. Theologian John Swinton states that the Church often looks at the example of Jesus and mistakenly believes that “the task of the church is to reach out to those on the margins and bring them into its loving heart.”1 Swinton points out that “it is certainly the case that Jesus sat with the marginalised and it is also true that he offered them friendship, acceptance, and a valued place within his coming Kingdom…[I]n sitting with such people, Jesus, who was and is God, actually shifted the margins.”2 There are three principles we can learn from Jesus’ example if we want to participate in shifting the margins around us, for those who may be struggling to find a place of belonging. First, Jesus sat with people exactly as they were. He did not require people to reform or to change themselves. Swinton writes that “Jesus offered no ‘technique’ or ‘expertise.’ He simply gifted time, presence, space, patience and friendship.”3 This is a radically different approach than employing the medical model and trying to bring a disabled body or mind back to a societally-approved standard of “normative.” Jesus’ commitment to meet people where they were at is also a departure from the social model which aims to remove societal barriers in order to bring a person on the margins back into the centre of society at large. Jesus entertains neither of these philosophies. He simply sits with people where they are and how they are. Second, Jesus sees all as gift. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas posits that the lives of people with disabilities, rather than being an anomaly, are a reminder of what it means to be human. Swinton sums it up well: “We are all creatures wholly dependent on God and on one another; all that we have is gift.”4 It is true that all we have is gifted to us from God, but it is also true that all we are is offered as gift to one another. God created us each, fearfully and wonderfully.5 God knew what our lives would entail before we had even lived one day.6 God prepared good works in advance for us to do.7 Disability advocate Judith Snow captures similar sentiments in different language: “all gifts add to the mosaic of the potential available community.”8 She says that all people have at least two gifts that they bring to any situation: presence and difference. Each person enters a context as their own unique self, offering one half of a meaningful interaction. Throughout scripture we see Jesus meet people where they’re

1 John Swinton, “Doing Small Things With Extraordinary Love: Congregational Care of People Experiencing Mental Health Problems,” ABC Religion and Ethics,accessed October 29, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/doing- small-things-with-extraordinary-love-congregational-care-o/10098938. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 John Swinton, “Who is the God We Worship? Theologies of Disability; Challenges and New Possibilities,” International Journal of Public Theology, 14 (2011): 273–307, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270014936_Who_is_the_God_We_Worship_Theologies_of_Disability_ Challenges_and_New_Possibilities 5 Psalms 139:14 6 Psalms 139:16 7 Ephesians 2:10 8 Jack Pearpoint and Judith Snow, From Behind the Piano: The Building of Judith Snow’s Unique Circle of Friends and What’s Really Worth Doing and How to Do It: A Book for People Who Love Someone Labeled Disabled (Possibly Yourself) (Toronto: Inclusion Press, 1998), 3.

94 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission at, recognize the unique presence they bring, and then partner with them to be the other half of a meaningful interaction. It may seem odd to say that Jesus relied upon others for the impact of his ministry. Throughout the Gospels, though, we regularly read of encounters where Jesus’ teaching and ministry were specifically tailored to or in response to the unique needs or questions of people he met. Third, “sometimes Jesus was a guest in people’s houses; sometimes he was a host. The constant movement from guesting to hosting is a primary mark of the hospitable work of the Incarnation.”9 If we position ourselves to always be in the role of host, what does that say about our opinion of those we are sitting with? If we are uncomfortable being a guest in someone’s space, do we truly believe that person to be our equal? True community requires each member to have rights and responsibilities, to serve one another in mutuality. Swinton posits that “when we take time and allow ourselves to move from host to guest, we gain the opportunity to learn some beautiful and important things.”10 As a child, it was easy to live out these principles Jesus embodied. I had no preconceived ideas about ability or disability, I simply sat with the friends that my mother sat me with. I was beginning to become aware of my dependence and was grateful for the gifts of presence and difference in the adults around me. “Guest” was a familiar and comfortable role for me as a four-year old child. Life has a way of tarnishing that child-like vulnerability and openness. We are socialized to believe that productivity, contribution, hierarchy, power, authority, and ability are all qualities we should value. We forget the lessons that Jesus taught: sit with people where and as they are, remember that all is gift, be grateful to hold the role of guest. Thankfully, entering into disability spaces has reillumined the importance of shifting the margins of community to nurture spaces of belonging with all people. I have always been grateful for the rich communities of people with disabilities who have surrounded me throughout my life, but never more than during this Covid-19 pandemic. When the province of Ontario closed down and most of us went into isolation, part of my role at work was to connect with the people who use our services through Zoom. As part of fulfilling our vision to nurture communities of belonging I met with several groups of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities to help them stay occupied and connected to each other through weekly video calls. As the months progressed, these video calls have become a lifeline for many, including myself. Although I started out in the role of host, the dynamic is always in flux. More and more, I am finding myself in the role of guest. What a sacred position it is to be blessed by the deep welcome extended to me. Once again, I find myself on the margins of society. As the world moves through the Covid-19 pandemic, my health conditions mean that I am one of the more vulnerable. As I isolate and step away from the spaces I normally inhabit, I find myself surrounded again by care and support and in the centre of a thriving community of people who welcome me as I am,

9 John Swinton, “Doing Small Things With Extraordinary Love: Congregational Care of People Experiencing Mental Health Problems,” ABC Religion and Ethics, accessed October 29, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/doing-small-things-with-extraordinary-love-congregational-care-o/10098938. 10 Ibid.

95 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission recognize and value the gifts each of us bring to the group, and shift seamlessly from acting as both guest and host. May I remember to do the same.

Author’s note: I consider myself very blessed and fortunate to have grown up in communities that include people with disabilities. I have learned so much from my disabled friends: how to communicate without spoken language, how to adapt, how to advocate for yourselves and others, how to laugh at adversity, how to revel in routine, how to rest well, and how to find joy in small things.

I also learned how to accept and embrace my identity as a disabled person. As difficult as the onset of my illness was, and as much as I mourned the abilities that I lost, seeing myself as “disabled” was easier to accept because it carried no stigma. I see many of my chronically ill peers struggling with that identity shift and I am so grateful for my disabled role models who introduced me to the richness of this community.

96 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission Theological Reflections on the Film Mad to Be Normal: Thoughts on Psychiatrist R.D Laing and Connections to Liberation Psychology

Michael J. Sersch MS, CSAC Gundersen Health System, La Crosse, WI [email protected]

Abstract: This creative reflection uses the film Mad to be Normal, about R.D. Laing, as an opening into the liberation psychology approaches of Martín-Baró. Examples from the author’s own clinical practice as well as personal experiences from life in the Catholic Worker community are reflected upon.

Keywords: R.D. Laing, liberation psychology, Catholic Worker, therapy, spiritual care, Mad to Be Normal

“To love someone (or something) ‘entails letting be, entails seeing and wanting it to be and cherishing it for itself as it is.’”1

Introduction

This reflection will attempt to use the lens of liberation psychology in contextualizing a recent biopic, Mad to Be Normal2 within a larger conversation involving mental health and ethical practice, particularly the Catholic Worker movement and the work of the co-founder, Dorothy Day. This will include my own perspective as a mental health practitioner, former Catholic Worker, and a child of a person who lived with psychosis. Mad to be Normal is about the Scottish renegade psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-1989). The film follows him for a few months as he develops a romantic relationship with “Angie,” a much younger student who becomes enraptured with Laing during one of his charismatic lectures. She quickly moves into a therapeutic community with Laing, his colleagues, and his patients and lives there until dangerous behaviour by one of the residents drives her away. “Angie” is a composite character who stands in for the multiple romantic loves of Laing’s life.3

1 R.D. Laing, as quoted in D. Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crises of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard, 2000), 37. 2 Mad to be Normal, C. Arden et al. producers, R. Mullan director, motion picture (United Kingdom: Gizmo Films, 2017). 3 P. Bradshaw, “Mad to be Normal Review: Tenant Returns as a Very Different Doctor” The Guardian, Friday 7 April, accessed October 19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/apr/07/mad-to-be-normal-review- david-tennant-rd-laing-elizabeth-moss

97 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Laing was well known in his lifetime, a controversial psychiatrist and a bestselling author who advocated a form of loving acceptance with those with whom he worked. As can be seen in the introductory quote, he wrote about the love for one’s fellow human that changes one’s life. This loving, or caritas, can be both liberating and challenging; love in this sense is where Laing succeeds, whereas he struggled with maintaining a reciprocal and respectful romantic love his entire life.4 In my work as a mental health practitioner, I have a liberationist perspective. This worldview is reflected in the theological writings of thinkers including the Peruvian Catholic Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez5 who advocated “a preferential option for the poor”6 and the North American United Church of Christ minister Fredrick Herzog, who felt we can only ground intellectual labor in our specific lived experience.7 Liberationist perspectives are further informed in mental health by the martyred Spanish Jesuit Ignacio Martín-Báro,8 who focused on the psychology of social transformation (as opposed to simple self-adjustment to unjust situations), a line of thought that no doubt led to his assassination in El Salvador by a US-trained death squad.9 It is the insights of Martín-Báro, which couples liberation theology and mental health practice, that helps guide my thinking about Laing and my “reading” of the film Mad to be Normal.

Laing’s Life and Work

Laing’s early work, both in direct therapeutic care and in his writing, consists of a scathing social critique with deep empathetic regard for those who are suffering and the belief that it is worth interrogating psychotic symptoms for underlying issues.10 However, his later writings are filled with non-scientific approaches such as “re-birthing” which offered workshop participants the opportunity to participate in a simulated reemergence from the birth canal; he was increasingly seen by many as an outdated relic of the late 1960s countercultures. Some of his insights have been dismissed by the advancement of science, such as his work connecting schizophrenia to family upbringing, a theory that has been totally discredited.11 Burston notes, however, that this was not a medically known fact during Laing’s career and Laing was hardly

4 E. Day and G. Keeley, “My Father, R.D. Laing: ‘He Solved Other People’s Problems – Not His Own’” The Guardian, Sat 31 May 2008, accessed July 29, 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/01/mentalhealth.society 5 Gustavo Guitierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. C. Inda and J. Eagleson (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1988). 6 M.C.L. Bingemer, “The Witness of Dorothy Day and the Future of Liberation Theology” Diálogo 16 no. 2 (2013):9, accessed July 28, 2020 https://via.library.depaul.edu/dialogo/vol16/iss2/3/. 7 F. Herzog, Theology from the Belly of the Whale: A Fredrick Herzog Reader, ed. J. Rieger (Norcross, Georgia: Trinity Press, 1999). 8 I. Martín-Báro, I. Writings for a Liberation Psychology, eds. A. Aron and E. Mishler, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1996). 9 Loyola University Chicago, “The Salvadoran Martyrs: Ignatian Heritage Month” accessed August 3, 2020, https://www.luc.edu/mission/ignatianheritagemonth/thesalvadoranmartyrs/#:~:text=WATCH- ,The%20Salvadoran%20Martyrs,were%20advocates%20for%20the%20poor. 10 Burston, The Crucible. 11 E.F. Torrey, Surviving Schizophrenia. 7th Edition, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2019).

98 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission alone in the belief that families cause schizophrenia.12 His personal failings (he was married four times, drank too much, fathered ten children he did little to raise, etc.) certainly have contributed to his declining value in society at large, including today’s mental health community.13 As Mad to be Normal shows, Laing’s romantic relationships with women – in this case, “Angie” – do not reflect the same respect and deep listening that he showed his patients. However, in discounting or ignoring Laing’s work, we miss his larger social critique. Often, Laing is too easily dismissed, and with some distance, we can re-evaluate the prophetic insights he offered, such as caritas for those he worked with, while still recognizing his all too human failings. I do not mean prophetic as in telling the future here; rather, the prophets (especially in the Hebrew Scriptures) are very fallible folks who still called out a society’s shortcomings, such as Jonah who was swallowed by the whale so that he did not have to preach in Nineveh. What is particularly prophetic and challenging in Laing was his willingness to live and work with his clients. Laing collaborated in forming the Philadelphia Association, an aptly named group that continues to attempt to live out “brotherly love” in the work they do. The Association has developed alternatives to standard treatments for people with schizophrenia, including collaborative housing with “staff” and “patients” living together and working to form egalitarian relationships without medication and restraints. The Association is still in existence with two community homes for those “suffering and confused.”14 The most famous community home of the Association was Kingsley Hall, which had previously been a soup kitchen. Kingsley became a location for Suffragists to meet, as well as the temporary home for Mahatma Gandhi before becoming a treatment community.15 It is at Kingsley Hall that Mad to be Normal is primarily set. During his career, Laing argued explicitly for therapists to be both empathetic and fully present to patients. He wanted them to also avoid judgments, diagnoses, excessive interpretations, and participation in the fantasies and familial patterns of the patient.16 Laing encouraged a direct person-to-person seeing of the Other beyond labels, a radical re- humanizing that ran counter to the Freudian professional reserve of his time, and importantly, from the time-limited managed care of our own. This approach has parallels, such as Martin Buber’s emphasis on the I and Thou dynamic which was influential in existential therapy17 and Carl Rogers’ use of “unconditional positive regard” in the counseling relationship, a cornerstone of the humanistic approach.18 While Buber and Rogers are often invoked in the psychiatric field, Laing’s understandings are rarely seen in many contemporary writings.19 This is unfortunate in that Laing was able to connect the psychosis of the individual with larger forces. For example, Laing20 writes of a young woman21 (who is seventeen years old and he, unfortunately, calls her

12 Burston, The Crucible. 13 Day and Keeley, “My Father.” 14 Philadelphia Association, “Activities,” accessed July 28, 2020, https://www.philadelphia-association.com 15 Kingsley Hall, Kingsley Hall Community Centre, accessed July 28, 2020, http://www.kingsley-hall.co.uk/ 16 Burston, The Crucible. 17 M. Buber, I and Thou. trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Schribner & Sons, 1970). 18 Carl Rogers, A Way of Being (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980). 19 Burston, The Crucible. 20 R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Penguin, 1960). 21 Ibid., 12.

99 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission a “little girl”) who thought she had a bomb inside of her and connect her delusion with the threat of nuclear war from people in power.22 That ability to connect the individual lived experience with the larger social forces – in this case, the bomb inside the woman and the bomb out in the world – is something lacking in many forms of therapy, with the exception of liberation perspectives.23 Perhaps the most famous moment in Laing’s career was when he encountered a woman who had not spoken in months while institutionalized in the infamous “padded room.” She refused to wear clothes and would rock incessantly. Laing chose to join her in the room, stripped down naked, and rocked with her until she began to speak.24 The scene is shown in Mad to be Normal, although in the film both characters remain clothed; Laing simply removes his shoes as he enters the padded room. That directorial liberty allows the scene to lose any sense of eroticism while emphasizing the potential for a sacred encounter. Much like Moses, who is told to remove his sandals in the presence of the Divine (Exodus 3:5), Laing’s removal of his footwear is the beginning of the ability to fully encounter the Other. It is in that encountering that allows for healing; in this case, the patient’s speech is heard by a caring person who is present. Such respectful presence and social critique are well modeled by Dorothy Day,25 a Catholic activist and writer who was a co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Among many other activities, she developed houses of hospitality where volunteer staff and those in need of housing lived together in the community. The psychiatrist Robert Coles26 tells the story of first meeting Day at a house of hospitality as Day was in conversation with a woman who was both very drunk and clearly homeless. After Coles waited politely to introduce himself, Day asked if he was waiting to talk to either one of them. The respect for the Divine in the Other was an insight Cole experienced at that moment. He contrasts this with his experience traveling the streets of New York on his way to meet Day when bystanders literally ignored a woman who had just died on the street. Often our daily life involves ignoring those around us; it is the saints and prophets who call us to experience, to literally witness, our neighbours. Day extended that radical presence to her neighbours.27 She argued that “by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute...we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.28 I lived in a Catholic Worker community for three years and have remained connected to the wider movement with varying degrees of involvement since then. While Day’s work with houses of hospitality predates liberation theology by decades, a number of people have

22 See also: I. Chernus, Nuclear Madness: Religion and the Psychology of the Nuclear Age. (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1991). 23 I. Martín-Báro, Writings for a Liberation Psychology, eds. A. Aron and E.G. Mishler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 24 Day and Keeley, “My Father.” 25 D. Day, Loaves and Fishes: The Inspiring Story of the Catholic Worker. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2003). 26 R. Coles, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Cambridge: Da Capo, 1989). 27 D. Day, “Love is the Measure.” The Catholic Worker, 1942, accessed October 19, 2020, https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/425.html. 28 The Catholic Worker Movement, accessed October 19, 2020, catholicworker.org.

100 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission pointed to the connections between these movements, such as Bingemier.29 A challenge I have experienced in my work with clients is the true difficulty in connecting with the Other. Day often quoted Dostoevsky’s character Fr. Zosima, “for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”30 The work of being attentive without judgment, which Laing and Day both advocated, is incredibly challenging on a daily, or even minute to minute, basis. In clinical practice, this is further complicated by the recent adjustment to phone and virtual visits due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Being unable to share physical space with a client, it is easy to lose a connection, which Laing so clearly advocated for. Psychotherapist Lillian Comas-Díaz indicates that the act of telling our stories is a liberating process.31 To be heard by an attentive Other, particularly one who is socially invested in a role of power, can be a beginning of a liberative act. The hearing and valuing of the Other, the prioritizing of individual goals while not ignoring the larger lived context, is what I strive to do when I attempt to be present to the client in front of me. Through this act of mindful presence, I become a witness to the client’s story; their experience is recognized as valid, sometimes for the very first time. Such an experience invokes the power of Laing in the padded room with his frightened patient and of Day in conversation with the intoxicated woman – powerful moments of deep listening and solidarity that extended into their work within the larger society. It is important to acknowledge the power dynamic in the client/provider and guest/worker relationship which can lead to well-intended but problematic decisions. Isabel Wilkerson, who has written on the US phenomena of caste, gives a specific example: Mahatma Gandhi had worked to rename the lower caste in India, a people formerly known as “untouchables”, as Harijan or “people of God.”32 At first glance this seems like a wonderful idea. However, Gandhi is the one who made the change, a change that the community did not ask for or necessarily want. A criticism Wilkerson notes from within the community was that this was a paternalistic decision and was a term that has since been replaced by Dalit, referring to broken/scattered from the Sanskrit. Similar examples of paternalism can be found in both mental health care and houses of hospitality. Laing, who attempted to break down barriers in his clinical practice, struggled to integrate equality with female partners, as demonstrated in the relationship with “Angie” in Mad to be Normal.

Conclusion

I begin therapeutic relationships with clients acknowledging the power imbalance between us and inviting clients to challenge this imbalance as they are able. There are times that my patients can challenge me when I have fallen short, such as being inattentive in a

29 For example, see: Bingemer, “The Witness.” 30 See: L. Dykstra, “A Harsh and Dreadful Love,” Sojourners, September/October 2008, accessed August 3, 2020, https://sojo.net/magazine/septemberoctober-2008/harsh-and-dreadful-love. 31 L. Comas-Díaz, “Liberation Psychotherapy” in Liberation Psychology: Theory, Methods, Practice, and Social Justice, eds. L. Comas-Días and E. Torres Rivera (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2020). 32 Isabel Wilkerson, “America’s ‘Untouchables’: The Silent Power of the Caste System” The Guardian, July 28, 2020, accessed February 26, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/untouchables-caste-system-us- race-martin-luther-king-india

101 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission session or failing to recognize them or the power imbalance that is present in the room. When I have the presence and humility to thank them for this act of bravery, itself a form of loving correction, our relationship can delve deeper and real work can begin. These examples of therapeutic break and repair are often the most challenging and exciting times of practice. Hopefully as we continue to work together we can ask the larger questions, including how we are to connect more deeply with those around us. While I cannot invite folks to literally live with me like Laing or Day, I hope that everyone who comes into my office feels the acceptance and deep listening – the presence of caritas – that is transformative, yet I know I often fail.

Author’s note: I am in the dark, fumbling for the light switch. My hope is that this is a piece of a larger project, “reading” film and thinking of the liberating project. I am not sure where this will take me. In the process of writing, my own practice and my own consuming of mental health services change. I find myself wanting to explore potential for liberating practice on a regular basis, and yet stymied by the reality of day-to-day practice. Sitting with the discomfort and exploring it, while I fumble in the dark, often seems the only thing I can do.

102 The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Yee: Turn Eyes Into Ears A Poem

Jizhang Yi MDiv, PhD Student Trinity College, Toronto, Ontario [email protected]

Keywords: poem, anxiety, fear, God, water, rain

Yee went running alone at the beach in a chill rain

till sweat warmed the raindrops on contact immediately

as they merged not to be distinguished upon his skin.

Yee still held fear of the waves involuntarily

after he laid his body down at the edge of them.

Staring into the sky and closing his eyes gently,

Yee could feel and enjoy the mildness of the cool rain.

Listening to the sounds of rain composed from heaven,

Yee was grateful to glorify the Creator's name,

who’d already rescued him from death in the village.

Then Yee stood up and plugged into the white surf nimbly.

Yee had become the one that he was destined to be,

in spite of the hardships as long as he stood with Thee.

Yee swam towards the bright wonderland over the sea.

103

The Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability 1 no. 1, Spring 2021 Creative Submission

Author’s note: This poem metaphorically depicts how a person overcomes his fear and anxiety by inwardly and faithfully relating oneself to the One. The person was seriously scared of water, which is symbolic of his fear of the storm such as failure, death, or perhaps COVID-19. Being conscious of one's inner self, he reverently prays for God’s mercy. By turning eyes into ears, he listens to Jesus’ word through the rain, “Don’t be afraid; just believe” (Mark 5:36). Jesus reminds of a time when he was once lost in the woods and faced by two wolves. He survived because Jesus calmed his storm when he had faith. His faith grows intensively, and he was called to follow Christ. Thanks to the continuous work of the Holy Spirit, he eventually overcomes his fear. As the disciples follow Jesus into the boat, he leaves the beach behind to follow Him.

104