Exhausted, I placed my hands on my thighs, futilely attempting to catch my breath and steady my shaking heart. Gasping, I ran my hand along the front of my knee, feeling but not seeing the long coil indented upon my skin, forever marking my body as changed, broken, and made new again. Yet new doesn’t always mean whole, and as I shifted my weight the sudden pain came rushing back, like the surgery was only two days as opposed to two lifetimes ago, like my life hadn’t carried on since that fateful August night. As I mourned this lost innocence, I heard a well-meaning, honeyed voice say, “I thought you said you had a bad knee; that sprint says otherwise.” But they couldn’t see the price I paid for that moment of joy. They couldn’t count the sharp movements I was trying to conceal, nor the contusions on my face as I fought the flinches. In essence, they couldn’t see my disability because all they saw was the achievement, not the effort the achievement took.
Have you ever felt that? That downplaying of your words as weightless as you open up and share with others your comfortability and your needs? The dismissal of your pain just because you’re not falling down dead when you climb up a flight of stairs? The denial of your trauma as you are told to take it like a man, to not be so sensitive, or that we all have different burdens, so just deal with it? Maybe for those who are temporarily abled-bodied folks – the ones who have sprained an ankle here or there or have had short Covid once or twice – see long-term disability as another hurdle in life, an obstacle to overcome and post about your strength and tenacity on TikTok. But for those of us who have lived this life, we know that it is not that easy. The onus is put on us to pay insanely expensive medical bills, to spend hours a day rehabbing on top of our jobs, school, and social lives, to be ever so grateful when accommodations are met instead of expecting them to be met, because that is the first establishment of equality. There can be no conversation if we are not able to enter an inaccessible door.
However, I find time and time again that we, as a society, conflate disability of the mind and body with disability of the soul, like if we are somehow morally deficient or undeserving of respect and human decency, since our bodies and minds do not move at the pace of the world. This has been especially hurtful for me as I have been judged on numerous occasions for not returning to play competitively the sport I loved more than life, told I never “recovered” or “overcame” because I was too weak-willed to return to the game and risk another devastating injury. When I feel up to wearing heels, I’m accused of faking my injury, asked if I could wear wedges then why couldn’t I wear cleats. But when I need to ice and rest instead of going out, I hear the question, “I thought it was normal again?” like a dagger to my heart, as if healing has ever been linear or rational. While I believe some of these comments are intended to try and understand my experience in order to show my spirit empathy, they all undermine my authority of my own body and make me feel ashamed of all the ways my body counters the social model of mobility. As wounding as these societal expectations are, what wounds me the most is not the physical implications – the no elevator, the tiny desks, and the cobblestone roads – but rather the spiritual implications – the denial that my body and mind are made in the image of God.
Although I love the notion of imago dei from Genesis 1: “God created humankind in God’s own image, in the image of God, God created them; male and female God created” (Gen 1:27), there has been several interpretations of this verse that have been weaponized against oppressed peoples for centuries. As a woman, I’ve used, as have many feminist theologians, this passage to justify theologically women’s equality with men and men’s bodies, though this does reinforce the gender binary. More pointedly to this discussion, according to Biblical theologian Dr. Joel Muddamalle, the imago dei, by the Church, has been associated with certain mental capacities, such as speech fluidity and academic intelligence, and even the Protestant father Martin Luther advocated for the drowning of a “feebleminded” twelve-year-old child because Luther claimed that the child’s mental capacity revealed a corruption in the soul (Muddamalle 2). The tragic truth of the image dei however is that the term itself was never intended to shame those with different bodies and brains. In the Ancient Near East, the term imago dei was reserved for the elite (mostly male) ruling classes, such as the Egyptian pharaoh. Here, the term is applied to all peoples, both Israelites and non-Israelites, of all genders, races, ages, and abilities. Thus, it is a radical democratization of the term and a standout among both the worlds then and today. In the hustle and bustle of Protestant productivity, where we are expected to do more, see more, and be more, we forget that we are enough in the image of God just as we are, from the moment we are born to the moment we are sharing right now. But this life cuts deep, and sometimes hearing it isn’t the same as believing it. So for those of us who have our disability from trauma, I’d like to invite you to one of my favorite books and passages of all time.
Rabbi and Professor Dr. Julia Watts Belser’s “Loving Our Own Bones” has hands down changed my life, and if anyone is feeling shame around their body and mind and has thoughts of inadequacy in calling your body made in the image of God, please go put this in your shopping cart this very instance. Her words are soothing to the soul and are guiding me to a healthier and more Godly perspective of myself and my scars. She confronts the stigma of the image dei by referencing a Christian disability theologian looking at the foundation of Christian thought. In this theologian’s words, “the Disabled God is the very center of the Christian story in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus… in recogniz(ing) the brutality that Jesus faced at Roman hands, the violence that wounded and scarred his flesh. But that violence is not the end of the story. Jesus was not the suffering servant for whom the last and most important word was tragedy and sin, but the disabled God who embodied both impaired hands and feet and pierced side and the image dei” (Belser 230). If imago dei equaled a perfect body by societal standards, unscarred and unmarred by the world, Jesus could not have been God, for His body would not have been imago dei. The fact that Jesus still is Christ with hands that could not hold water or feet that would have been so sensitive and prone to infection means that this perfect ideal of how our bodies should look and function is false, a cultural construct that diminishes people whose bodies have disabilities and ultimately blasphemies God. In fact, disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thompson argues, disability is “the transformation of flesh as it encounters (the) world” (Belser 36). Thus, if Jesus is disabled, and we are called to be in the world, I would argue folks with disabilities actually reflect just as much of God’s image, if not more so, and reflect more of Jesus’ experience, our Savior’s time, on Earth.
At this point in the story, I knew all of this information in my head, but I’m sure, as some of you are asking, what about mental disabilities? Are those with cognitive impairments made any less in the image of God? I don’t believe so, and here’s why: abuse is a type of trauma, and Jesus faced an intense and horrific amount of abuse, not just before the crucifixion but also throughout his lifetime. He and his parents were refugees in a foreign land, hiding from a paranoid king looking to take an innocent infant’s life to protect his own power. He had numerous attempts on His life before the arrest on the Mount of Olives, and He had demons and dark spirits call out to him alone, in the company of others, and through individuals He met throughout his lifetime. At the site of the crucifixion, He was surrounded by a group of colonizing guards who took pleasure in the pain of His people, taking turns striking Him until He fell on his knees, penetrating His head with a device of torture as a mockery to His God-given identity, and taunting Him, blindfolding Him and commanding Him to prophesize for them, unconsensual spiritual intimacy.
When Mary Magdalene goes to greet Jesus following the resurrection, He commanded her not to touch him. While scholars have debated what Jesus meant by this, since Jesus’ ministry was largely touch-based and women had constantly been permitted to touch him, I wish to offer my own interpretation. Touch can be an incredibly powerful tool, as Jesus showed throughout His lifetime, but it can also be a weapon against another, a means of torture and trauma so terrible that one cannot fathom ever being touched again in a loving way. Later on, Jesus invited the disciplines to put their hands in the mars permanently left on His body by His abusers, but here He’s not ready. Why? Because Jesus had what we would call today post-traumatic stress disorder, more commonly known as P.T.S.D. The brutal assault, the violation of His personhood, and the relentless agony led Him to cry out, “My God, why have You forsaken me?” because the trauma was so black and blue where He couldn’t find Elohim, all indications that His brain couldn’t fathom nor comprehend the weight of this world. Consequently, since Jesus is still God with a mental disability, those with mental disabilities are no less made in the image of God as those without. And again, perhaps those who live with such disabilities more clearly reflect Jesus’ image and Jesus more closely reflects them and their experiences on this Earth. Perhaps we, as a community, should begin honoring their disabilities not as broken afterthoughts or tragic lacks of faith but rather another element of the ever mysterious God whose love conquers death and who has been bloodied and bruised by this world in order to save its people.
I’m sitting on the floor icing my knee; she’s fading to a strawberry pink hue and is still rather melon-like compared to my other quote good knee. There are times when I wish I didn’t have this disability: times where I wish to run without hurt, play without horror, and could throw my fears out the window. And I have no desire to trade all of the lessons, the light, and the love I have found because of this life, all of the roads otherwise forsaken, forgotten, and fallen, every mile that wouldn’t have gotten me to the life I never dared to dream for and now the life that comes as naturally as the air I breathe. I’m glad I don’t have to make that choice, because Jesus loves every piece and part of me, even the ones I’ve hated for years. Better yet, Jesus loves those parts especially because they are the parts that most look like Him. For as Nichole Nordeman sings, “Only when we’re broken are we whole.”
Whatever scars you carry, whatever wheelchair or cane, companion or pill you may rely on to move, you move at Jesus’ pace. Whatever triggers haunt your waking hours or whatever nightmares keep you up after midnight, you feel the brokenness of the world the way Jesus does. You are fully made in the image of God. No part of you disqualifies you from God’s love. You are whole, just as you are.
Works Cited
Belser, Julia Watts. Loving Our Own Bones: Rethinking Disability in an Ableist World. Hodder & Stoughton, 2023.
Muddamalle, Joel. “I Still Have Questions About the Value of Women: A Deeper Look At What The Bible Says About Women and the Image of God.” Therapy and Theology Podcast. Proverbs 31 Ministries, 2022.
Nordeman, Nichole. “The Unmaking.” The Unmaking – EP, Sparrow Records, 2015.
Last Love 