The Paralytic's Offering: Worship and Disability

ABSTRACT

In this essay, the author argues that people with profound disabilities belong at the heart of our worshipping communities. Psalm 50 [49 LXX] offers us a different angle from which to consider the contribution of people who seem unable to participate in communal worship, and whose experience of God is beyond our perception. Applying the insights drawn from the psalm, the author turns to the narrative of Jesus' healing the paralytic, and argues that the same dynamic plays out in Mark's account of the episode. The contribution of people with profoundly limiting disabilities begins to emerge. The obvious need of the paralytic for the healing brought by Christ also draws his friends to Christ. The primary need of the paralytic is, as Christ shows, his need for forgiveness—a need shared by all present. This same dynamic, the author suggests, plays out in L'Arche communities: those who come as assistants discover their own need for God's love. The desire to help may have inspired the friends of the paralytic, but they are drawn into the space of revelation and forgiveness. Likewise, it was the cry for love that Jean Vanier heard, and to which he responded by forming the first L'Arche community. Those two disabled men brought Vanier closer to Jesus, and helped him create L'Arche.

KEYWORDS:

• Down syndrome
• inclusive congregations
• intellectual disability
• L'Arche
• suffering

Notes

1. Note that I am focused on intention here rather than feeling. Sometimes our hearts are moved to worship God, and feeling accompanies the intention. Gathering for worship and joining in the corporate worship of the gathered community because “it is right and just” is sufficient. Worship does not require affect, but it provides a space for it.

2. In his meditation in Journal of a Soul, Fr. Giulio Bervilacqua explains: “[Pope John's] wounds have become the wounds of the Church in Council, a Church determined to abandon all triumphal ways, and to follow the Via Dolorosa, the only road upon which the Son of Man can meet the tragic man of our own times. This is the Church handed on by John XXIII to Paul VI” (Pope John XXIII, 1964, p. xxviii).

3. The practice of mortification, though it seems to have fallen out of favor, remains a Catholic devotion. See, for example, Aquilina and Flaherty (2000); Mother Teresa urged her sisters to “Accept whatever He gives—and give whatever he takes with a big smile” (Kolodiejchuk, 2007, p. 275). The contemporary practice draws on a tradition that includes Jean-Pierre de Caussade's (1981) The Sacrament of the Present Moment and Lorenzo Scupoli's the Spiritual Combat. In his representation of Scupoli's guide to Spiritual Combat, presented for a modern audience by Jonathan Robinson (2003). Robinson commented, following Scupoli, that “the ordinary circumstances of everyday life, properly used, will provide an asceticism that is more than adequate for most people most of the time” (p. 80).

4. Thomas Merton (1983) observed this trend in the mid-20th century: “A society whose whole idea is to eliminate suffering and bring all its members the greatest amount of comfort and pleasure is doomed to be destroyed. It does not understand that all evil is not necessarily to be avoided. Nor is suffering the only evil, as our world thinks” (p. 83).

5. See Acts Chapter 5.

6. Profound cognitive impairments undermine personal agency and self-determination in a way that physical disabilities do not necessarily.

7. A New Testament scholar might sketch the anatomy of a healing differently. Lightfoot (2015), for example, highlighted the condition to be healed. The first step is not a call for help but a description of the sickness, which is followed by the healing and the confirmation of the miracle (Martyn, 1986). My reading of the passage focuses on the way it exhibits the pattern identified in the psalms.

8. See Matthew 9:32 and 12:22, and Mark 8:22/Luke 18:40. Typically, those who are unable to come to Jesus under their own power have some intermediary—the centurion with a sick servant, the father (Jairus) seeking healing for his daughter, the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman. For example, the only others who are brought to Jesus (though not for healing) are children (e.g., Luke 18:15); this is a connection I hope to explore in a future essay.

9. On the assumption that affliction is the result of sin, see Gutiérrez (1987). Gutiérrez addressed the passage in John's gospel in a note. In John 9 the disciples ask Jesus directly about this: they assume the blindness is a result of sin. Jesus breaks that linkage, explaining that the blindness is not the result of sin but presents an opportunity for the works of God to be made manifest. See, for example, Works of St. Bonaventure: Commentary on the Gospel of John (2007), Smith (1995), Countryman (1987), Keener (2003), and Lightfoot (2015).

10. Commentaries on Mark's gospel generally emphasize the forgiveness of sins in this passage. See, for example, the discussion of the passage by Donahue and Harrington (2002) and Wright (2001), the overview of the Church Fathers by Oden and Hall (1998), and the Catena in Marcum (Lamb, 2012). Moloney (2002) took a slightly different approach in his commentary: the miracle “is not an end in itself” (p. 61). Instead, the forgiveness of sins brings to the fore the question of Jesus’ identity (Moloney, 2002).

11. See note 10.

12. They are not named “friends” in the text—their relationship to the paralytic is not specified. Still, they do for him what friends ought to do, and so I refer to them as such.

13. There is a striking parallel here between the paralytic and the Samaritan woman in John's Gospel. Neither the paralytic nor the woman seems at first glance to be a likely bearer of the revelation of the Messiah. Yet, in both cases, Jesus’ divinity is revealed through them. In Mark's account of the paralytic, the revelation is more oblique. It is, however, unmistakable: that's why the scribes are so upset by it.

14. The only thing need provides is an opportunity for charity to be shown by the strong. Numerous examples may be given. Here, two wildly divergent instances should suffice (see Bunyan (1815) and Milbank (1997).

15. Personal communication, July 17, 2013.