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I was taking slow breaths to prepare myself, grateful that my toddler was keeping a quiet attitude of wonder as we neared the end of the Communion line, when suddenly I felt a tug on my elbow. Startled, I turned and looked up into a disapproving glare.
“You need to stand up. It’s not reverent to receive Communion while sitting.”
I stared at my fellow parishioner, dumbfounded.
This person frowned at me and then returned to the Communion line.
I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Surely, surely this person didn’t think that I needed to get up for Communion? To stand up—out of my wheelchair?
Moving on autopilot, I rolled myself forward. I saw them in my peripheral vision start moving toward me, presumably to tug on my arm again. I twisted toward them, told them, “I’m good,” and angled myself away.
I received Communion, my daughter received her beloved blessing, and we wheeled away, directly to the cry room. It was there that waves of understanding started to pummel me and I started shaking.
“Why you crying, Mama?” my daughter asked.
What was I supposed to tell her? Because my body still isn’t welcome at the parish where we’d been members for over a year?
I knew I would have to explain it to her eventually. After all, my fellow parishioner was making the message loud and clear.
•••
I’m a sociologist, and how we teach children to act in the world is the quintessential basis of what I study. Being brought places is how children learn how to act. The key is to ask what they will learn.
The lessons we teach in some parishes are not coming from God. Here are three such lessons my daughter and I have learned from attending Mass as a disabled adult and a typical toddler:
1. “Mass is about making sure other people get what they want from an experience.”If a parishioner needs quiet in order to have the type of prayer they seek, it’s a baby’s responsibility to be more quiet in the way they inform their parents that they are hungry. If a parishioner likes the uniformity of a congregation moving in unison, it’s the responsibility of the teen with autism to set aside any processing techniques that involve movement. If a parishioner likes a particular definition of reverence that doesn’t allow for sitting, we have to leave our wheelchairs at the door. Other people’s ability to experience God the way they want to is more important than our ability to have our needs met.
2. “Church is a place where our focus is on avoiding the attention of the people around us.” Our goal in church is to get out without anyone noticing us: without someone staring, without someone making a comment about our behavior, without being asked to leave. Church is a place where our attention should not be on what happens at the altar but on what happens in the pews directly around ours. Have people turned toward us disapprovingly? Are we quiet enough, non-annoying enough, small and unnoticeable enough? When we get home, that’s when we can turn our focus on Christ.
3. “We are not the acceptable Catholics.” When we miss Mass because the elevator at the church isn’t working; when we’re late because the special access door was locked and no one knew where to find the key; when we’re hushed by someone four rows in front of us because a plastic doll head made a noise on the wooden pew, we learn exactly what role our fellow parishioners believe our bodies are allowed to play in the body of Christ. When people tell me and my daughter that it’s just too expensive to put in a ramp, or just too hard to convince older parishioners that crying children should be allowed in church, we learn exactly what our bodies are worth to a parish. (Did you know that churches in the United States don’t need to adhere to A.D.A. requirements? And many of them choose not to?)
God’s people do not want us here. That’s what we learn. Your body can’t possibly be a part of the church militant. Other people with other bodies are given this same message: bodies whose skin color is unwelcome, bodies that draw our attention to them, bodies in whom it is difficult for some of us to see the image of God. Bodies who do not match the too-common image of a risen, white, blue-eyed, light-haired Jesus whose mangled and disfigured hands are painted over to be made palatable.
Some of us unacceptable bodies may have a chance of someday becoming acceptable Catholics. My daughter is among them. As long as we make sure that her normal toddler behavior goes away and her typical human development hurries along, that we get her to mature faster than biology dictates, she’ll likely be able to achieve status as an acceptable Catholic. Supposedly, I just have to keep bringing her to church. After all, that’s how she’ll learn.
•••
For me to receive the message that I am unwelcome is one thing (a difficult thing, to be sure). But for my daughter to learn about God through these interactions breaks my heart. Also heartbreaking is the realization as a parent that my daughter will know God better if I keep her away from certain parish communities until she is old enough to distinguish between a parish and its God.
And yet, at that same parish, someone I didn’t know at all volunteered to sit with me and my daughter every week in case we needed any help. That weekly act of radical love and inclusion made a world of difference to me in calling that parish my home. There was someone waiting for me, me with my slow body, waiting for my daughter, with her young body. What a beautiful message to teach a little one. What a witness.
Even smaller acts of radical inclusion can make a significant difference—a parishioner holding the door open for us, the person in front of us who picks up our dropped missalette, the stranger when we visit a new church who goes on a hunt with us to find the accessible entrance. And even when these actions aren’t aimed at us, I see them and appreciate them: the usher who makes space for the stimming teenager, the council working on incorporating captions into worship, and the parish’s joyfully featuring art that depicts Jesus in a variety of skin tones. “You belong here,” these decisions communicate. “Your body belongs here. Let us come together and worship.”
When a child speaks or moves, or when a disabled adult exists, it is our reaction to that as a parish community that teaches that person about God. Our anger about the un-Godly lessons we sometimes learn can go to good use in reshaping those messages. Let’s flip tables in the temple and either climb all over them, as toddlers are wont to do, or turn them into ramps.
