Facts: I was born with a genetic disability. A disorder, as some may call it. It’s in my DNA. The mutation affects my mind and, consequently, my body.
I’ve spent many years educating myself about it. I earned a graduate degree in Education. I became a Reverend.
I’ve spent decades researching my diagnosis and an enormous amount of time, money, and energy working with professional counselors, taking classes, trying different approaches, and learning how to function in a world that often has a very specific idea of what “normal” looks like.
Supplements and pharmaceuticals have been part of that journey, too.
Many people with mental and physical disabilities do some version of this. Some turn to substances when they don’t have access to better answers.
I’ve listened to enough of their stories to understand that there is usually a why behind behavior that other people are quick to judge.
I’m not the Judge of someone else’s life path. I’m an observer. I ask questions. I don’t offer many answers—and I don’t offer religion as an answer, either.
I’ve learned that most people already know, somewhere inside themselves, what answers belong to them.
People with mental disabilities are often treated very differently when their experiences become difficult for society to understand. Some end up in hospitals. Some end up in jails. Some spend their lives being told that their minds are broken, sinful, dangerous, possessed, or in need of saving.
That is why I’m careful with theological certainty.
Any understanding of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is about faith in the uncertain. It belongs to each experience, history, interpretation, and faith.
A Majority Faith in Certainty doesn’t have to become mine.
If the theology that people with mental disabilities don’t need to be “saved” is true, perhaps I never needed to be saved in the way they mean it. And perhaps neither does anyone else simply because their brain works differently.
When I read the Bible, I’m often more interested in the space between the words than in memorizing the verses.
I pray gratitude. I don’t spend much time asking God to change people, change circumstances, determine heaven or hell, or conform the world to my expectations.
Thinking about God is a mental exercise. It is a tremendous amount of thought. And for some people, spiritual or religious thought can interact with their mental health in complicated ways.
That doesn’t make their experience evil.
It makes it human.
Sometimes what one person calls spiritual, another person calls manic. What one person calls demonic, another might understand as depression, trauma, fear, or anxiety. Those interpretations are not interchangeable—and none of us should assume that our interpretation gives us authority over someone else’s mind.
I don’t need to convince anyone that my understanding of God is correct.
I want the same freedom from everyone else.
And if there is a God, then God created the whole of human experience: love and hate, fear and courage, grief and joy, darkness and light.
Perhaps one cannot fully understand one without encountering the other.
That is the mystery I’m interested in.
Not certainty.
I live
and I have
NO FAITH.
*
*
Except in Cats.
I definitely
believe
in cats.
And dogs.
And humans.
They’re everywhere.
Leave a Reply