“We do not discover who we are, we do not reach true humanness, in a solitary state; we discover it through mutual dependency, in weakness, in learning through belonging.” (Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, French for Noah’s Ark) a network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities)
I’ve been reading a book called Searching for Dignity: Conversations on human dignity, theology and disability. The chapter I’ve just finished was by a man called Thomas Reynolds. In it, he talks about the way disability can unsettle us, how it can be viewed as the way some people are seen tobe “lacking something basic to what is understood as human”, how it can be seen as something which has gone wrong. His proposal is to change the way disability is thought about – to completely shift the conversation.