Disabilities and Possibilties

Twenty-eight years ago, I got a taste of what discrimination feels like.  I’d just graduated from Harvard Divinity School, was newly ordained, and hoped that some church might want to call a promising young man like me to be their minister.

But I was also coping with what doctors call end-stage kidney disease.  For reasons unknown, my organs were in irreversible failure.  And I felt that I needed to be honest with hiring committees.

I had interviews with several.  I told them that within a year or two I would be on dialysis and that, unless I were able to obtain a kidney transplant, I would be tethered to a machine three times a week for hours at a stretch.

At that point, most search committees thanked me and mentally ruled me out.  Who wanted an invalid as their pastor? 

Fortunately, one congregation took a chance on me, the First Unitarian Church in Seattle, Washington.  One member of the search committee there was Cathy Covert, one of the brightest, most competent and compassionate people you might ever want to meet, but who also used a wheelchair after experiencing adult onset polio.  Having direct experience with a disabled individual, I think, enabled folks on that committee to look past my health issues and consider me as a whole person—with multiple gifts and many skills rather than a single limiting condition.

As it turned out, I was on dialysis less than three months after the church hired me.  But I continued to work and the entire congregation was wonderfully supportive that initial year, until I received a kidney transplant that restored me to good health. 

For me, it was the beginning of a long, productive career—that might have turned out very differently had no one offered me a break.

I share this personal information on the 20^th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Long ago, strangers were willing to look beyond my diagnosis and give me a chance at employment.  Today, we can celebrate that more and more churches, businesses and non-profits are doing the same, and America is better for it.  Because treating people fairly is not just the right thing to do, or the caring thing.  It’s also the law.

Reading the Bible Again (For the First Time)

Most Americans, I suspect, think they are pretty familiar with the Bible. After all, it’s a major sourcebook of Western civilization. And many of us remember the stories we heard in Sunday School: Adam and Eve, the talking snake, and the rest.

But Biblical illiteracy is rampant. Even fundamentalists, who insist that every word of the document is inerrant and divinely inspired, have a hard time naming the five books of Moses from the Old Testament or the four gospels from the New.

Barna, Gallup and other respected polls show many Americans imagine that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife! How well do you know the Good Book?

Listening to National Public Radio this morning, I heard a commentator make reference to what he called “Biblical” terms like “hellfire” and “damnation.” Skeptical (and somewhat familiar with scripture), I wondered if those particular terms ever appeared inside its pages.

Here’s the answer, according to the online concordance Bible Gateway, which searches over 100 versions of holy writ by keyword. Neither damnation nor hellfire are words you’ll ever find there.

Nor will you find any reference to the “trinity” in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures. There are no hits for “immaculate” or “infallible” or “literal” in the Bible, either. And of course, there is no mention of “incarnation” or “transubstantiation.”

Most of the central dogmas of the church are missing. They were invented centuries after the canon was closed. But surely the moral teachings of the Bible are timeless and clear?

Uh-oh. There are no references to “homosexuality” or “abortion” or “stem cells” in the Bible at all. The labels “Democratic” and “Republican” don’t make any appearance.

Perhaps we should have less preaching and pontificating about the Bible and a little more study of the document! Read accurately, within its own historical context, it is unlikely to support any of the narrow religious or political agendas that are promoted in its name.

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Now and Then

Be here now!   Ram Dass, the psychedelic guru of sixties, gave that advice decades ago, and it’s never really gone out of style.  So a more recent spiritual guidebook is called The Power of Now.  Then there’s Simple Zen: A Guide to Living Moment By Moment.  Another author preaches The Naked Now: Learning to See As the Mystics See.  Enlightenment, judging by the book titles at least, means not living in the past or getting tangled in worries about the future. 

With no sense of the past, however, there would be no real reason to experience remorse or feel regret for mistakes made, no real incentive to atone or make restitution for misdeeds.  Moral categories of guilt and forgiveness fall by the wayside. 

Sometimes we should feel sorry for things we’ve said and done, in my opinion—and try to behave better in the future than we acted previously.

Wallowing in the past can be unhealthy.  But amnesia about our personal and collective history can also be debilitating.  Should America forget its history of slavery, or Germans just drop Auschwitz down the memory hole?  As William Faulkner said of the South, where the shadow of the Confederacy and Jim Crow still lingers, “the past isn’t over; it’s not even the past.”

Whatever enlightenment means, it must imply more than living in a perpetually sunny present moment   It must entail being able to see the Big Picture—where our lives unfold through good times and bad, where nations err, tragedies occur and crimes are committed, but where failures need not be endlessly repeated, not at least if we remember what needs to be changed and resolve to reform.

“One day at a time” may be a helpful philosophy for some.  But I think it takes three days to make us fully human: yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Together they give the present instant—this brief interlude between eons gone by and endless years to come—its fullest savor.