Answering the Call of Love with Our Blessedly Diverse Bodies

Answering the Call of Love with Our Blessedly Diverse Bodies

First Unitarian Church of Oakland, July 23, 2017, 10:20

Seminarian Isabel Call reflects on the UUA General Assembly’s decision to change our public advocacy campaign’s name from “Standing on the Side of Love,” possibly to “Answering the Call of Love,” in light of learning to live with her own physical disability. It is an exciting time in the UUA, as we commit to study and conversation about replacing the words “prophetic women and men” with “prophetic people” in the second source of our living tradition and adding an eighth principle about Beloved Community, explicitly committing to dismantle racism and other oppressions. But becoming more inclusive of those who are not white, temporarily able-bodied, or compliant with binary gender norms is not just about institutional change. It's personal. Isabel shares her story to inspire each of us to answer the call to love in our own unique body.

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A few months ago I visited a Unitarian Universalist church where I didn't know many people. When I walked in, the greeter said, “is there something wrong with your leg?” I didn't know how to respond, because I am not, at all times, ready to fit myself in a box: right or wrong, injured or healthy. The story about why I walk in a way that surprised this stranger was not at the front of my mind. Nor did I want it to be.

How can we be deeply welcoming at the thresholds of our churches and communities? Not greeting people with a request for information about what's wrong with them is a start, but it's a pretty low bar. A true welcome comes from a different kind of curiosity. Our free and responsible search for truth includes understanding who is on the path with us, because who they are is part of the truth. Respecting their search for truth, we create a space for them to tell their stories.

And we learn so much when someone shares their story, especially when their life experience is very different from our own. The miracle of deep listening and being heard is why we celebrate diversity in UU communities.

Of course, we're often frustrated that we don't have greater diversity.

I imagine the greeter at the church I visited was frustrated when I didn't share my story.

Being different often draws unwelcome and unwelcoming attention, especially if you seem to be in a minority. Having a physical disability often draws me into a story that's not my own, a story of tragedy. A little over a year ago, I had a serious injury that broke several vertebrae and a leg, and punctured my lung. My spinal cord was injured and now my nerves send mixed signals to muscles all over my body, which makes it difficult to walk or move quickly. That may be permanent. In the hospital, I had a breathing tube for several weeks and my vocal cords were injured, which affects my speaking and singing voice. That may be permanent. I am no longer temporarily able-bodied.

These are true parts of my life story, but they are not the truth I'm here to search for. The eminent scholartivist Baba Ibrahim Farajaje, who died just before my entrance into disability but still teaches me through his words, wrote that “the tendency to equate disability with tragedy keeps us from struggling together for justice and access for people living with disabilities” [p. 31]. I feel this personally; seeing my own situation as a tragedy saps all of my own energy for justice work.

Essayist Eli Clare [in Exile and Pride] movingly describes the hazards of coping with disability by adopting, contrary to the tragedy story, a “supercrip” identity: supercrip, like super cripple, like a disabled Superman. Some supercrips are amazing athletes. Others are people leading ordinary lives that non-disabled people consider extraordinary because they assume disabled people aren't ordinary. Eli Clare climbs mountains despite the immense physical challenge of doing so with cerebral palsy. He says that relying on a supercrip story for self-worth would mean that “achievement contradicts disability” [p. 9], that there is a way to erase disability through effort, to overcome it. “Overcoming has a powerful grip” [p. 9], he says. Reflecting on his decision to turn around before reaching the summit once, he thought, “‘If I used a walking stick, and we picked a dry day and a / different trail, maybe I could make it up to the top of [Mt.] Adams.’ I never once heard,” he writes, “‘You made the right choice when you turned around.’ The mountain just won't let go” [pp. 9-10].

True welcome and honest celebration of diversity doesn't create tragic figures or superheros who survive whatever makes them different from the norm. And it also doesn't ignore difference. Think about colorblindness. Growing up in the 1950s, writer Jane Lazarre was taught that “‘We are all the same, there are no differences between people.’ … attributing brown skin to a Negro,” she writes, “was considered insulting, a revelation of racial prejudice in itself. The obsessive denial that race mattered was obviously a white creation” [p. 25]. The obsessive denial that race matters was something she had to let go of as she grew up to become the white mother of black children.

And it's something UUs are working hard to let go of as we grow up and embrace our multiracial, multicultural, radically inclusive Beloved community. Right here in Oakland, the Black Lives Matter banner and candle are symbols of that work. And the UUA is making some strategic changes in language and practice to let go of racism, ableism, and the gender binary.

A few words about ableism. When Eli Clare decided to turn around on the mountain, his frustration was about physical impairment. There are physical realities that make some things harder for some bodies than others. When he felt like he shouldn't turn around, but be a supercrip with better gear...that was ableism.

Ableism shows up when physical impairment is not only painful, uncomfortable, and disappointing, but detrimental to my value. Ableism shows up when I feel I have to prove my value or when I don't get valued enough by my community to be offered access to social institutions.

Ableism makes me a tragic case or a supercrip in order to avoid including who I really am. We all suffer from ableism when it makes disabled people invisible and we forget to make our communities accessible. During the bridging ceremony last month, no one remembered that it's not easy for all young adults to run to the front of the sanctuary to welcome the bridging teenagers...so I wasn't able to participate. This wasn't an intentional unwelcome. But my value was forgotten.

The UUA’s Standing on the Side of Love campaign reminds us that we are all valuable. When we get together in a big group in a march or protest or city hall meeting wearing our yellow Standing on the Side of Love t-shirts, we are telling the world that all bodies are valuable...even bodies that look terrible in yellow t-shirts. But what about bodies that can't stand?

Ableism has a lot to do with capitalism. There's an exhortation to do. There's a judgement of people based on their productivity, or their capacity for productivity. I've been aware of this and fighting it for a long time, but it was often a practice of choosing to be less productive. I've got considerably less room for that now. There's a push for standardization in our economic system, since quantity is best achieved through interchangeable parts. Now that I'm no longer temporarily able-bodied, I'm not standard anymore.

And this brings me to the struggle for justice for transgender people and LGB people. Our effort to simply be has made us the targets of forces intent on putting us in boxes: male, female, men (who must love women) and women (who must love men). Baba Ibrahim says: “Transgendered people are not in disorder. The disorder comes from a society that is limited to a binary construction of gender and sexuality” [p. 24]. And “if we challenge the notion of a heterosexual majority, if we interrupt a minoritizing discourse, if we acknowledge the fluidities and slippages of sexualities, then there can’t be a majority” [p. 25]! He defines queering as “destabilizing, interrupting the business-as-usual of conceptual and organizational assumption” [p. 18]. I love this. The destabilizing interruption of injury and disability have queered me. I understand that much of my disability is about disabling systems and structures, not my body. I am ever more strong in my solidarity with the UUs who are working to change our conceptual and organizational assumptions. Realizing that “men and women” is disordered language, the UUA General Assembly just agreed to change the wording of the second source of our living tradition to:

“Words and deeds of prophetic people
--people, not men and women--
which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.”

One of those prophetic people is UU minister Theresa Soto. Last year at GA, she sat on stage and held up a sign that said “Ouch!” every time someone used ableist language. This year, she advocated to change the name of Standing on the Side of Love. In her words,

“The definition of ableism is placing a high value on able bodies and low value or no value on disabled bodies. The “Standing” language reinforces that hierarchy by forcing the higher priority of bodies that function by standing in expected ways… One important thing we do when we stop placing external values on other people’s bodies is free them from imposed narratives. We leave people space to tell their own stories… The other way that we confront ableism… is by not making stories of able bodies the only stories.”

In a blog post where I got these words, Theresa Soto lifts up the words of another activist, Ahmie Young, who uses a wheelchair. From the first time she heard about the Standing on the Side of Love campaign, she has felt

“disinvited from participation, just by the name by which it is labeled… With this non-standing body, I have shown up and borne witness when others were too busy…. Others like me are laying their very lives on the line and rolling into congressional buildings, and facing arrest, that all may have access to health care.”

I'm moved by these words. I'm not offended by the “standing” language because I can physically stand, and I find it very empowering to do so. But this discussion makes me feel seen. Because we're learning to listen, we get to hear about other bodies, like when Sarah tells us she's not able to sit easily.

At GA, the decision was made to look for another name. We sang the hymn, Standing on the Side of Love, with new words, Answering the Call of Love, with a persuasive introduction by the composer Jason Shelton. I'll invite you to do the same in a few minutes.

Once the words are changed, this conversation will be over. New UUs singing the hymn with new words and people encountering our public advocacy campaign under a new name won't know the history. This moment is for us to grow and change and become a place of deep welcome, where it's commonplace to greet a newcomer with a deep curiosity about what brings them to us. It's not about institutional change, but rather about how this institution can support a change in our hearts.

This means letting go of the idea of “normal” … and it changes everything. It goes beyond the human body and into the interdependent web of all existence: the inherent worth and dignity of all people, and all the sacred beings that make our life possible.

Here are the words of Eli Clare again:

“The standards called normal--sometimes in tandem with natural--are promoted as averages. They are posed as the most common and best states of being for body-minds. … And at the very same time, these standards, which supposedly reflect some sort of collective humanity, are sold back to us as goals and products.” The medical-industrial complex sells us ideas of “normal weight, normal walking, normal ways of thinking, feeling, and communicating,” while multinational corporations sell us “natural beauty, natural strength, natural skin everyday.” Meanwhile, “white Western beliefs separate human animals from nonhuman nature and devalue the natural world. Coupled with capitalism, these beliefs drive an out-of-control greed for and consumption of coal and trees, fish and crude oil, water and land. … In short, the white Western world both desires to be natural and destroys what is natural, depending on the context. It makes no sense” [Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, p. 173].

I believe that as we follow this discussion, we'll come to agree on the inherent worth and dignity of all beings, not just people. All beings. This is the goal of the First Principle Project, a group of UUs who want to make the first principle of our faith less anthropocentric. At GA, they were at the top of the agenda. And they did something amazing. They stood down. Aware of the deep conversation around Black Lives Matter, and the proposal for an eighth principle that explicitly endorses antiracism and Beloved Community, they tabled their initiative so that we can have a comprehensive investigation of all our principles. The eighth principle initiative passed. This doesn't mean we have an eighth principle; it means we've formally agreed to think about it. The conversation is happening. The conversation is now.

To bring your full self into the conversation, give your body some attention as we get ready to sing together. If you're comfortable seated, please stay seated. What would it mean to Stand on the Side of Love while sitting in a chair? What would that feel like? How might you rise in spirit, without coming to your feet? If “standing” is just a metaphor, how do we do it while seated? Reflect on that for a moment. [Walk to the lower Mic, and sit down.]

When we sing, we'll use the original words for the first chorus: “standing on the side of love.” For the second and third chorus, we'll use “answering the call of love.” Don't worry, it's on the slides!

For the first verse, I'll invite you to stand in spirit, but not in body. This means: if you're able, keep your butt in your chair.

When we get to the second chorus, I'll invite you to rise in body or spirit. How do you want to rise? Are you able to stand up? Do you want to? Let your own body inform you what rising means, when the moment comes.

So now, please rise in spirit, but not to standing, and sing.


References

• Clare, Eli. “Home.” In Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 1999, 9-13. 
• Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017 
• Farajaje-Jones, Elias (Ibrahim Farajajè). “Queer(y)ing Religious Education: Teaching the R(evolutionary) S(ub)versions)! or Relax!...It's Just Religious Ed,” Fah Lecture, in Unitarian Universalist Selected Essays, 2001, UUMA, Boston, MA, 2001, 13-37. 
• Lazarre, Jane. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996 
• Soto, Theresa. “The Kindling of a Flame: What I Learned at General Assembly.” https://medium.com/@titasoto/the-kindling-of-a-flame-what-i-learned-at-general-assembly-82faf6de3f2c, Accessed 25 July 2017. 
• Young, Ahmie. “Ahmie Young’s statement for UUA GA 2017 re SSL.” https://www.youtube.com/embed//Dhgy2C6b8IQ, Accessed 25 July 2017