We have learnt from interacting with Persons affected with disabilities that they change our own perception of disability. Not that the phenomenon was unknown, but that it cannot be reduced to a one-way relationship. Persons with disabilities reveal to the healthy their own fragility. Beyond disability is a world of spiritual strength and dignity.
1. Our societies have changed their look on disabilities and are making efforts to overcome attitudes of marginalisation or exclusions of persons with disabilities. The 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a remarkable achievement in international law. National legislation very often gives guidelines protecting affected people in the fields of education, employment, access to public places and transportation. Certainly, much has still to be done. The International Day of Persons with Disabilities is celebrated every year. The point is that there is a promising ongoing change of mentality.
This change of mentality is also clear in the teaching of the Church. No longer should we consider pastoral care for – but with – disabled Persons. We receive from them as much as we may give, when interacting with them.
When we speak of disabilities, we include those originated by physical, psychological, and mental limitations. Sometimes we forget the spiritual dimension of the human being. Yet, this spiritual dimension is addressed precisely because the physical or mental dimensions suffer limitation.
Brain injuries may affect the mind and mental operations. But they do not annihilate the sphere of the spirit. The spirit is able to inspire resilience to a person with physical or mental illness. The spirit is a provider of sense and values. So the dialogue with persons with disabilities s often hifts to the spiritual level, where the identity of the human person dwells. Behind the limitations linked with our carnal condition appears the spirit. Spiritual strength is exactly the opposite of mechanical superiority. God, says the Prophet, “gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless” (Is 40, 29). Ep 3,16 states that the Spirit strengthens “the inner man”.
Our brothers and sisters who suffer disabilities and limitations in their body and even in their brain, are not deprived of the enjoyment of their spirit. The strength of the spirit always operates within the limits of our human condition, often in a situation of weakness. Persons with disabilities may be able to manifest wonder in front of the beauty of creation and compassion with those in need, and experience selfless love.
The Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013) says “the worst form of discrimination is the lack of spiritual care”. Pope Francis stressed: “We are called to recognize in every person with disabilities, even complex and serious disabilities, a unique contribution to the common good through their original life stories” (Intern. Day Disabilities 2019).
The image of the strong, healthy, powerful and generous actor offering support and help to the passive disabled persons in order to give them access to the world of full humanity has been replaced by the rediscovering of our common frailty. A handicap is the hollow image of health. It powerfully reminds the healthy ones of their own fragilities.
2. The message of the Gospel is directed to the weak, the ill, those possessed, all people who call for help. Jesus heals as a sign of the efficiency and proximity of God’s Reign. God wants his creatures healthy and happy. Jesus restores the wounded human condition. He offers to all fullness of life through a process of conversion.
St Paul, writing to the Corinthians, does not argue of this superiority as an apostle. He knows that sharing the Gospel is not a one-way operation. It questions the transmitter as well as the receiver. Paul is fully aware of his own limits and fragility. Indeed, it is from his weakness that he exercises his mission as an apostle. He does not pretend to seduce his listeners through rhetoric or illusive promises, so as to manifest the power of the Gospel. We find often in Paul a contraposition of weakness and power: asthenia and dynamis. Asthenia is what characterises the natural individual, the flesh (2 Co 11,30-12,13). Paul puts his pride in his weakness. “When I am weak then I am strong”. He recognizes that he had “a thorn in his flesh” (2 Co 12, 7), which could be a permanent physical disease. Elsewhere, Paul states that he holds the treasure entrusted to him in “earthen vessels” (2 Co 4, 7).
3. These remarks of Paul may suggest more than a confession of his own weakness. They give insight into the limited condition of all human beings. The present condition of human life in flesh is weakness opposed to the future condition of redeemed life in glory. In our world “the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness” (Rm 8, 26). In Christ, God has revealed himself voluntarily Weak. Christ, who “was in the form of God … emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Ph 2, 6-7). Paradoxically, the cross of Christ shows how “the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Co 1, 26). Moreover “God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong” (1 Co 1, 27). Promethean pretention to be all powerful and to dispose of unlimited power and strength is a permanent temptation of humanity. But it is an illusion. The Encyclical Laudato si’ (2015) 117 states: “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble”.
The challenge of disability opens us to the question of our limits. Limits are not limitations. Limitations are imposed from outside and can be avoided. Limits are inherent to a being or a system and must be respected. Transhumanist thinking promises to explode biological and mental limits. The idea of “enhanced man” suggests a rebellion against our real human condition. It is not a humanist reaction of healing or repairing damaged health or brain conditions but of creating something else, a hybrid entity connected to big data. We would lose what makes us human: our spirit and our capacity to make free choices. Our inner personality would be absorbed in electronic synapses.
Society puts limitations to our freedom as we have to respect the freedom of others. But our freedom meets its inherent limit in truth. Truth is the objective hindrance and the guide to an arbitrary use of our freedom of judgment. The ancient ecumenical councils shared by Catholics and Orthodox used to adopt a horos and canons: a definition and rules. The “de-finition” precisely puts the limit beyond which you are no longer in the truth.
Recognizing the fundamental weakness inherent to our common human condition opens a new understanding of disability and interaction with the world of disability. Human disability indeed sheds light on anthropology as well as on theology. By sharing our common wounded humanity, we may engage into communion, giving and receiving from each other, in an exchange located on the level of the spirit.
Our society relies on the increasing power of high performing technologies. This may be good, but says little about the condition of disability. Society has put forth that what is more desirable is a partnership with the disabled persons on a basis of human equality.
St Paul witnesses that preaching the Gospel in his own weakness brings more fruit than talking from learned to ignorant, from mighty to weak. Only God knows and is mighty. And he humbled himself to our condition. The apostle who teaches is himself permanently taught by the Lord. So should be our relationship with the world of disability.
Persons with disability help us stay on the ground of our own weakness in a shared human fraternity.