Tenderness and Disability
There is a mystery behind people with disabilities. I find that in many ways, they are a presence of Jesus. We see their fragility, their pain — and yet at the same time, we can say that they speak of God. As we enter into relationship with them, they change us.
I spent a year living in community with a man named Andrew. One day, he went to see a cardiologist. When he came back, I asked him what had happened. He said, “The doctor looked into my heart.” I said, “Well, what did he see in your heart?” Andrew said, “He saw Jesus, of course.” Then I said to him, “What does Jesus do in your heart?” And Andrew said, “Jesus rests there.” In French, the phrase is “Il se repose” — the sense is “He takes his quietness there.”…
This is what all the mystics say. It’s what the Gospels say. Jesus comes to live in our hearts. Etty Hillesum, [a young woman] who died at Auschwitz, said this sort of thing too. She said, God can’t do very much for us now, but we can do something for God. We can give God our hearts, because He needs to have places where He can dwell in this world, in a world where He is being rejected.
For a lot of people, to have a child “like that,” with a disability, means that they have done something wrong or have some evil in their genealogy. So the rejection of the child may be in one sense a defence of their own integrity. Also, some people don’t want others to know their child is Down syndrome because they are afraid that it will make it more difficult for their other children to get married. So for the majority of people, it is a shame. But actually, being with the disabled can heal us.
I once asked our community psychiatrist, “What, to you, does it mean to be human — a pure human person?” And he said, “Tenderness.” Tenderness is deeply respectful of the other, not possessing in any way, but giving the other security.
The disabled have something to bring to others. There is something very particular in their kindness, in their affection. I spent a year living at la Forestière with the most severely disabled members here, and I would give them baths. It is a great mystery to touch the bodies of those who are so fragile and who don’t communicate verbally, but who somehow still communicate with all their body. Their bodies say, simply, “Love me.” It’s something that rises up from within them, and that is what touches me most deeply.
St. Paul says that God has chosen what is weak and foolish to confound the intellectuals and the powerful. He wasn’t speaking about the intellectuals and powerful outside the church: he was speaking about the intellectuals and powerful inside the church.
The church frequently intellectualizes faith. But to love is to let the other rest in your heart, as Andrew put it. How many people would say that? And yet it’s right at the heart of the mystery of all the Gospels. The whole vision of Jesus is there: to live in us as we live in him.
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